Wednesday 17 February 2016

Together, Asunder

This week, the General Synod of the Church of England has been debating the deal that it has struck with the Church of Scotland without having informed the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Like the United Reformed Church, the Scottish Episcopal Church is signed up to same-sex marriage.

So the Church of Scotland now prefers the Church of England instead, and the Church of England now prefers the Church of Scotland instead.

Little things like bishops or elders are neither here nor there, these days. What matters is something else.

They are both just catching up with the Queen, anyway. She has never been an Episcopalian in Scotland, any more than she has ever been a member of the URC in England.

3 comments:

  1. And to think that some people in the C of E complained when Pope Benedict did a deal with some leading Anglicans in setting up the Ordinariate. The C of E can't even bother to consult its own church in Scotland.

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    1. It has never been "its own church". The relationship is a long and very, very complicated one. Episcopalianism is a form of Nonconformity with Jacobite roots and barely any Evangelical wing (although there is a very small one). That is a long way from the Church of England, and it always has been.

      The number of C of E people worshipping regularly in the Kirk has always dwarfed the total membership of the, in any case often hard-to-find, Episcopal Church, which most people in the Church of England would not know existed.

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    2. There are no "leading" Anglicans in the Ordinariate, but let's not go there.

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