'Ministering pastorally'

If you don't want to go to the land where you must wear asbestos, go to this page on the Diocese of Vermont's website and you can read the statement by the Rt Rev'd Michael Ingham of the Anglican Church of Canada. Here are two of his four critiques of the Windsor Continuation Group's report. They follow in the same vein as those of Bishop Martín Barahona.

1. The Windsor Report is just that — a report. It is not yet an agreed policy within the Communion. It is not yet a doctrine. Some of our Provinces have responded to it, some have not, and many of the responses raise critical questions that have not so far been addressed. And yet the Windsor Report is being introduced today as an agreed benchmark from which it is assumed we can move forward. This is not so.

2. The document we have today is punitive in tone, setting out penalties and the like, instead of inviting us into deeper communion with one another through mutual understanding in the Body of Christ. Furthermore, it entrenches the principle of outside interventions. The suggestion of a Pastoral Forum in fact institutionalizes external incursions into the life of our churches.

And if you are hunting around for the piece that the bishops about ministering pastorally but isn't in the Windsor Continuation Group, here it is, thanks to the same website.

Addendum to Windsor Continuation Group document
The following is reported to have been at the end of Part III of the printed document given to bishops, but it is not included on the Lambeth Web site link or the pdf file:

Ministering “pastorally and sensitively to all”.

The WCG note that the Resolution 1.10 of Lambeth 1998 included a call for “all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn irrational fear of homosexuals, violence within marriage and any trivialisation and commercialisation of sex”.

We further note that in Dromantine in January 2005, the primates stated that “the victimisation or diminshment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us. We assure homosexual people that they are children of God, loved and valued by him, and deserving of the best we can give of pastoral care and friendship”.

We believe that the time is ripe for the bishops of the Lambeth Conference to reaffirm the commitments expressed in these statements, and to invite them to be committed to challenging such attitudes where they may exist in the societies, churches and governments of the nations in which they proclaim the Gospel as good news for all without exception.