Bad Moon Rising.

As usual MadPriest has beaten me to the story in today's Sydney Morning Herald. It features +Jensen giving the standard line "this isn't really about homosexuality, it's about the authority of the Scriptures". Yeah, right. That's why women not keeping their heads covered in church features equally prominently on the agenda.

With bullshit like this from those at the top is it any wonder +Jensen's mission to get 10% of Sydney's population attending "Bible-believing churches" is a failure? You may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, but with spin this transparent fooling 10% of them one day a week is simply not going to happen.

As MadPriest correctly predicted two years ago, the Matthians are hoping to come out of the shake-up with significant territorial gains. Then again, so did Germany at the start of the First World War, and look how successful that proved. Yet none of this is new - over 15 years ago the same sort of rhetorical dreams were flying around at Moore College: the only thing different now is that the Jensens' disciples no longer whisper their dreams to each other quietly, these days they're feeling confident enough to stand shouting on the rooftops.

Yet even though the volume's changed, the naivety is still the same - if not worse. Just as few people outside of Sydney have any comprehension of just how Puritan these wingnuts from the far side of the world really are, neither do most Sydney Anglicans realise that our new best friends are by local standards very, very high church. Reading the local Matthian blogs one can be easily forgiven for thinking Schofield is "one of us" - a Calvinist-Baptist clad in a medium-priced business suit and being persecuted for his commitment to reformed liturgy. Yesterday I had a lengthy discussion with a relative moderate who accused me of "slandering" Fr Kennedy of "Limp Willies" notoriety by claiming his wife is also an ordained minister, who preaches regularly. To say he was shocked when shown evidence proving I wasn't making anything up, and that Hostillium is indeed guilty of the afore mentioned, is an understatement. He really had no idea that his heroes of the international war on liberalism (my apologies if I've stolen that expression from GAFCON) sit on a very different side of the church to Sydney's.

All of which is my way of saying whatever happens next in the rapidly developing farce which is the Anglican schism, one thing is certain; Sydney may be one of the wealthiest dioceses in the world (so will somebody please explain why we can't afford youth workers and clergy throughout about a quarter of the city - while some parishes have more than 20 staff?) but all that money is never going to buy the power to force men like +Duncan & +Iker to stop worshipping in a manner that is (as I've heard both Jensens describe Anglo-Catholicism)"sub-Christian".

What's more here's going to be some angry young Matthians when they eventually realise that the reason they're stuck in under-funded parishes failing to "win the world for the Gospel" is because those resources have been spent getting up close and personal with the same "sub-Christians" they grew up being told were Evangelicalism's greatest enemies.

For some reason I just can't get the this song's title out of my head...