ReformationUCC.org

Editor’s Note: You may read the three previous installments of this series here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Today’s excerpt reflects on what is required to move forward from this point in time. How will we move forward? In the United Church of Christ a search committee has been formed to determine the denomination’s next President. Evangelicals within the denomination do not recognize a group of people named to the search committee to verbalize Evangelical concerns, equal to our numbers in the UCC at large, even though as many as 80% of the congregants in UCC churches consider themselves “moderate to conservative”. To be sure, it may be that an ardent Evangelical on the committee has been overlooked. More likely though, members of the committee have been chosen without reference to Evangelical concerns despite the actions of the most recent General Synod.

Our Journey into the Future

From The Way, the Truth and the Life

Copyright The Latimer Trust

Over the past ten years the journey that we, as orthodox Anglicans, have taken together has confirmed what we feared: some Churches in the Anglican Communion are radically redefining the received faith, and abandoning fundamental parts of it. We recognize that many in these Churches believe that the challenges they are making are Spirit-led, and necessary in order to respond to the challenges that the Church faces today.

Our own experience has been different. We have upheld the received biblical faith. We have found it to be relevant and powerful in addressing contemporary challenges. And we bear testimony to the gospel’s transforming power, in our own lives and in our churches….

Over the last ten years we have journeyed together in the search for a definition of faithful, orthodox Anglican identity. GAFCON is no new or reactive phenomenon. It is the culmination of years of witness, discussion, listening, engagement and prayer. The setting up of GAFCON came to be seen as a necessity, ikn order that we might meet together, affirm our identity as orthodox Anglicans, and identify the challenges to that identity, both from within the Anglican Communion and from without. We meet together as a people under Biblical authority, as a people called to mission. We meet to maintain and to strengthen the unity of the Body of Christ….

As we, in our time, face this dividing of the ways, we will need to depend absolutely upon God’s guidance, discernment and judgment….

We recognize in humility that we are called to share our testimonies of how God’’s truth judges and transforms us. We also recognize that we must uphold God’s truth and act on it. Paul asks the Corinthians ‘not to judge before the appointed time’ (1 Cor. 4:5, but to wait till the Lord returns. However, this is not a call for inaction and endless process.

In the very next chapter, Paul does not hesitate to tell the Corinthian Church that he has already passed judgment on one of their members (1 Cor. 5:3). In prayer we seek God’s judgment on his Church, and seek to act on that judgment. What might this look like in practice?

Firstly, action must be taken by leaders. The Bishops of the Church are called to uphold her faith. In their relationship to the Spirit and the Holy Scriptures, they are a sign of the unity that God gives to the Church. So GAFCON is a meeting of bishops of the Church, with clergy and laity too, who seek God’s way forward in our day, on the firm basis of the truth he has revealed.

Secondly, action has to be taken in public. The heroes of the faith, mentioned in [the eleventh chapter of] Hebrews, are celebrated for their public actions, not their feelings. Even when filled with fear, they overcame their intellectual and spiritual doubt, they discerned God’s presence and will, and they acted on their faith. So GAFCON is, of necessity, a public gathering, because the issue at stake is the possibility of knowing the truth, and of obeying the truth in the public domain….

GAFCON is saying that there are Anglicans who are unwilling for the clarity of the Bible’s message to be clouded by confusion, by those who directly contradict its teaching….

Our journey is witness that the truth of God is accessible. We are convinced that God has made himself known, sufficiently for us to be able to respond to him, and make truly moral choices between obedience and disobedience. This is critically important for evangelism among the poor.

Our journey has been to challenge those who would exercise institutional power to suppress the truth. We make this challenge in the name of God’s love, and in order to honour the dignity and identity of the ordinary person, who does have access to God through the Scriptures.

Our journey is to seek our identity in relation primarily to that truth.

GAFCON identifies an area of public life today which is challenged to its heart by the gospel of the Lord Jesus. GAFCOM is a statement that the truth of God can be known; that it is the gateway to fulfilling and fruitful life for men and women, in marriage or celibacy, and that obedience and witness to that truth cannot be confined to the space or the form that is offered by the powerful.

GAFCONis seeking to give public and institutional expression to the truth of the gospel in the public ordering of the Church. Far from accepting unlimited diversity and disobedience to the truth, this will mean respecting the order that God has given for authority in his Church and wholesomeness in society.

[257] Bishops have responded to God’s call to action by holding a public gathering at GAFCON. As they gather, they will look again to God’s call for future action in faithful leadership of their Anglican Churches.