Dusting Off the Compass

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8591

[VirtueOnline] 10 Jul 2008--"Take away the Gospel from a Church and that Church is not worth preserving," wrote the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool J.C. Ryle in 1890. "A well without water, a scabbard without a sword, a steam-engine without a fire, a ship without compass and rudder, a watch without a mainspring, a stuffed carcass without life, – all these are useless things. But there is nothing so useless as a Church without the Gospel."

Every generation of Christians must take up Bishop Ryle's implicit challenge: Will the Church in our day embrace the Good News of God's mercy in Jesus Christ? Will the Church transform the world by the power of the Gospel? Or will the Church conform to the world, abandoning its Gospel mission and identity in the process?

Many parts of the Church today find these questions uncomfortable, and shrink from these challenges. Anglicans who love the Gospel particularly know this painful reality, as they see portions of their part of the Church, particularly in North America and the West, not rising to – and even hostile toward – Bishop Ryle's challenge. Assertions by leaders of the Episcopal Church (TEC) – that Jesus is not the only way to God, or that the Bible’s teachings on moral and ethical behavior are too narrow for a modern, progressive church – and TEC’s actions regarding these issues, done in the face of warnings and protests from home and abroad, revealed and exacerbated a crisis within the Anglican Communion. Parts of the Communion were fast becoming a "well without water" and a "ship without compass and rudder."

But in God's mercy, events of these last weeks have made it clearer than ever that He is not yet ready to allow the Anglican Communion – the world’s third largest Christian church – to become "useless" to Him.