After decades of arguing over human sexuality, the Church of England has come up with Prayers of Love and Faith to bless same-sex couples, but this is a harmful compromise that will only sow spiritual and moral confusion, while accelerating the Church's decline and condemning countless people to the very sin the Church should be saving them from.
Heterosexual marriage is not a tragic punishment that God unjustly imposed on mankind to make it suffer, but a beautiful gift that He blessed and gave out of His goodness and love as the foundation for fruitful lives and the perfect picture of His redemptive and salvific love for His people.
The Church should be celebrating this from the rafters, not seeking to undermine and tear it apart. Instead, Church leaders seem more concerned with apologising for the Word of God, than teaching the glorious hope and liberation from sin and spiritual bondage contained within its pages from start to finish.
Some of the most powerful testimonies of that hope come from the ex-LGBT community who, despite being routinely ignored, even by those in the Church, continue to boldly and unashamedly share their experiences of being wonderfully transformed by the love of God. Why is the Church not sharing that hope-giving message?
The Church needs to be brave but not brave in abandoning God's tried and tested Word handed down through millennia. Instead, brave in teaching, explaining and defending it in a hostile culture that increasingly treats it with disdain. It is tragic that this job so often falls to a minority of faithful Anglicans who get little thanks for their efforts and at worst, are left to fend for themselves when that hostile culture comes to get them.
If the Church of England abandons its historic moorings, it's hard to see things getting better and many will be asking themselves what future they have in it.
