The attacks on the Anglican Diocese of Sydney will probably never go away. It is almost certainly right that they don’t. We are far from perfect and our mistakes will always leave us open to criticism. Yet I’m convinced there’s much more to rejoice in than to criticise.
What is more, often the most virulent attacks come from the most predictable places. Men and women whose hopes and/or ambitions were somehow never realised in the Diocese of Sydney have waged war on the diocese and charged it with all manner of heinous crime. Sometimes they leave and hurl their grenades from other places. At other times they stay within, yet they characteristically speak of the diocese in the third person and are almost always harsher in their criticism of their own family than in their criticism of those fundamentally opposed to it.
Nevertheless, it is worth engaging with the criticism rather than dismissing it out of hand. To put a little bit of a spin on the apostle Paul’s words, it doesn’t matter what the motive, or from which direction it comes, it is always worth examining criticism carefully in order to see if there is indeed something to learn from it.
In a book to be released later this year, Sydney Anglicanism is once again attacked, this time as a group of renegades who represent one of the single most serious threats to the worldwide Anglican Communion. The publishers promotional blurb goes like this....
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