News From Earlier This Year: Church of Ireland Passes Re-Affirmation on Biblical Sexual Expression

I see that SF never noted this rather surprising move in May of this year from the Church of Ireland.

Briefly, there were a number of parliamentary maneuvers, which ended up with a re-statement of an orthodox and Biblical worldview on the context for sexual expression which is that of Christian marriage.  Two out of 12 bishops voted against this basic Christian belief, which is pretty darn good, frankly!

Here’s the text to the motion.

Here’s the T19 thread on the event.

There are some excellent comments over at Peter Ould’s site on this [ignore the belated whining of the revisionist activist about his notions of Christian behavior, and skip to the substantive content]. Peter also quotes from another source, the Belfast Newsletter, about the politics behind the Synod acts, some of which I’m quoting below:

But between Thursday night and Friday morning, conservative members of the church succeeded in bundling all three motions together and re-introducing them for discussion on Saturday morning under Standing Order 31 (d) in what could be a bitter debate.

Tomorrow’s motions will allow for the church to publicly discuss homosexuality for the first time since the News Letter revealed last September that Dean Tom Gordon had become the first serving Church of Ireland cleric to enter a civil partnership.

The three original motions had been presented by the liberal Archbishop of Dublin, Michael Jackson, and the evangelical bishop of Down and Dromore, Harold Miller in a public show of unity.

But on Thursday as the first motion came to be debated the liberal Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, Michael Burrows, raised a point of order about his fellow bishops’ motion which led to Archbishop Alan Harper ruling that it could not be discussed.

Bishop Burrows, who was aware of Dean Gordon’s civil partnership before it took place, was openly jeered by large sections of the synod in Dublin’s Christchurch Cathedral but applauded loudly by others in a public sign of the considerable strain within the church.

I’ll just note how helpful it is when conservatives actually know how to work within the rules of the body in which they are attempting to act.