Area Cleric Confused About Why She Can't Be Polyamorous
In Which I Implore You to Pray for All Christians, but especially the ACNA as it chooses a new Archbishop
As many of you know, in the next few days my denomination—the ACNA—will choose a new Archbishop. The bishops will meet in conclave and choose from amongst themselves one to lead us through the next tumultuous and perilous years. It’s not a job, I imagine, that any of them will really enjoy, but they won’t be allowed out until they have made a choice.
So, to spur everyone on to love and good works—the chief of which is prayer—someone sent me something pretty amazing. The Episcopal Church found some sexual deviancy even they couldn’t tolerate. The piece, on the Substack In the Flesh by Kerlin Richter, is called “I used to be an Episcopal Priest.” It starts out like this:
When I was a priest I would pray. I prayed alone in whispers to Love. I prayed in public from a book of prayers we held in common. I prayed in gasps of awe and wonder at Love’s creation. I prayed with people in living rooms and at hospital beds. I wrote prayers and posted them. Every year I would write a prayer for Mother's Day and Father’s Day, I would change them up and add new things, but they were pretty much the same- year after year.
When I started this newsletter about two years ago I had just received a grant from the Episcopal Church Foundation to help heal some of the hurt caused by a church that proclaims welcome yet lives in fear and disgust of actual human sexuality. My dream was to help the church that I loved live into its stated dreams of inclusivity. I was the rector of a sweet congregation that proclaimed God’s love for everyone.
On the whole, I feel a great deal of sympathy for Richter. She, like everyone, is wandering around in the imagination of her own heart. She is the sort of person in that big crowd who came running into the wilderness to find out what the big deal was, who, when Jesus looked out at her, felt moved in his bowels with compassion for she was like a “sheep without a shepherd.” She is trying to be good and “authentic.” She has been catechized in the way of self-acceptance and inclusivity. What did anyone think would happen?
And that is what is so terrible about the downfall of TEC. Because church—all of them in every place and time—is supposed to be about the care of errant, confused, and perishing sheep. The sheep can’t save themselves. They can’t just figure it out by themselves. They have to be fed the Word. They have to be protected from wolves. They have to be nurtured by godly, truthful shepherds who will deliver up their souls to God. So the church, besides caring for the sheep, has to be about raising up and training shepherds who will be able to guide the confused into the way of truth. No one should have ever thought it was ok to pray to “Love.” There should never have been any grants available for people to become sex educators (as she says below), never mind “stated dreams of inclusivity.” For one can’t help saying it again and again for those in the back, this sort of talk is not Christian. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Christian gospel.
Anyway, setting aside the fact that this particular clergyperson was in no wise a Christian, and would therefore, of course, be inexorably confused about what happened next, she thought a long time and decided to be polyamorous—or, in more Christian parlance, sexually immoral:
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