The Daily Telegraph: Gays must change, says archbishop

Here are some salient points:

The archbishop of Canterbury has told homosexuals that they need to change their behaviour if they are to be welcomed into the church, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Rowan Williams has distanced himself from his one-time liberal support of gay relationships and stressed that the tradition and teaching of the Church has in no way been altered by the Anglican Communion’s consecration of its first openly homosexual bishop.

The declaration by the archbishop – rebutting the idea that homosexuals should be included in the church unconditionally – marks a significant development in the church’s crisis over homosexuals. According to liberal and homosexual campaigners, it confirmed their fears that the archbishop has become increasingly conservative – and sparked accusations that he has performed an “astonishing” U-turn over the homosexual issue.

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The revelations came in a newspaper interview last week in which the archbishop denied that it was time for the church to accept homosexual relationships, suggesting that it should be welcoming rather than inclusive. “I don’t believe inclusion is a value in itself. Welcome is. We don’t say ‘Come in and we ask no questions’. I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviours, ideas, emotions,” he told a Dutch journalist.

“Ethics is not a matter of a set of abstract rules, it is a matter of living the mind of Christ. That applies to sexual ethics.”

At the same time he tried to distance himself from a controversial essay he wrote 20 years ago, in which he defended same-sex love. “That was when I was a professor, to stimulate debate,” he claimed. “It did not generate much support and a lot of criticism – quite fairly on a number of points.”The archbishop said that he was determined to preserve the unity of the church from being destroyed by the warring factions in the gay crisis. He said he has backed a resolution which says that homosexual practice is incompatible with the Bible.

OK… my reason for posting this is not to talk about the gay issue or to debate whether or not homosexual relationships are a sin or not. (Hint: Comment-bombing me or flaming me regarding the subject will cause me to I.P. ban you and will put me in a foul mood, so I don’t recommend doing it.) If you want to know where I stand, feel free to surf my archives.

My reason for posting this is to point out what the archbishop said about conversion:

I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviours, ideas, [and] emotions.

I muchly believe that this applies to every one of us regardless of gender, race, orientation, creed, whatever.
When we accept Christ (inasmuch as we can do so), we accept that our old life and our old lifestyle is dead and we determine that we are going to live our lives by God’s rules and not the rules of the world. I’m not saying that it’s easy — I’m saying that it’s what we are commanded to do. After all, if we live our new life in Christ while caught up in our old ruts of sin, what’s the point? It’s like injecting ourselves with the same disease again. We need to live as if we have been redeemed, casting off that which was tying us down before.

This doesn’t necessarily just apply to sexual sins — it applies to drug use, alcoholism, jealousy, anger, pride, lust, gluttony, gossip, and other sins which cause us to put something in place of God in our lives or cause us to destroy the lives of others. Sin is something that separates us from God and ALL of us are sinners.
(For those who want to snark and say that I’m saying this as one sitting comfortably in a pew, I’ll point out that I didn’t grow up in the church and am a convert. So… I do actually know the subject about which I speak.)

On the issue of welcome, EVERYONE should be welcome in the church. Christ died to save all of us, not just those sitting in the pews every Sunday and I think we as Christians need to keep that in mind. We are no better than anyone else — we just know where to go for help with our sin problem. It’s one of those things that I think we as the people of God around the world need to address and work on before we try to evangelize the world.