Is this Bishop John Ball of Chelmsford the one listed in Crockford as a retired former bishop in Tanzania who now has a license to officiate as an assistant bishop in Chelmsford diocese? If so, should he not now be deprived of this license?

And, looking at the CANA consecrations order of service, am I the only one to wince at seeing Mrs Minns present bibles to the new bishops' wives as part of the liturgy of consecration?

A listing of the various splinter groups from 1979 would be appreciated.

Including their purportedly Anglican patrons.

How many congregants do the CANA parishes claim to have? What's the bishop to parish or bishop to lay ratio now? The former appears to be close to one to one.

Do I understand correctly from the links that Duncan actually laid hands as part of the ceremony?

The program for the ordination does not note the names of presenters nor does it note the names of other bishops who may have laid hands upon the new ordinands. It does note "guest" bishops apparently in the procession. It would be good to know at what level, exactly, +Duncan and +Ball "participated". +Duncan was, of course very visible and a speaker at San Joaquin's convention. If +Ball is engaging in such extra-provincial activities uninvited, the problem of incursions has clearly reached England's fair shore.

The program and oaths taken are an interesting read. One wonders if the American congregations who have joined CANA fully understand to what, and to whom, their CANA leaders have sworn.

An aside, I couldn't find in the program, (maybe it was there and I missed it?) any indication that the music used was used with permission of its authors or copyright holders, but, I guess such trifles wouldn't pose a problem for this group?

Interesting to compare the vows and oaths with the American rite of consecration. The CANA bishops make no vows to 'guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church' nor do the vow to be '. . . show compassion to the poor and strangers . . .'

Nor do the bishops promise to 'share with your fellow bishops in teh government of the whole Church . . . .sustain your fellow presbyters and take counsel with them . . ." etc.

This is probably because absolute loyalty and obedience is pledged to the Primate of Nigeria. No need to share, take counsel, or support. It's all about giving and following orders.
"I, [Roger/David/Amos/Nathan], do swear by Almighty God that I will pay true and canonical obedience to the Primate of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) and his successors in all things lawful and honest."

The examination begins with an outright lie, so far as I understand it (though I might be wrong):"the people have chosen you and have affirmed their trust in you by ac-
claiming your election." Which people? Did any laity who, in TEC, these bishops would vow to encourage and support in their own ministries, have any say in this matter?

One may not need to get to heaven through Canterbury, but apparently Abuja is the only rest stop on the way . . .

Comments on Baby Blue show an interesting disagreement between AMiA and CANA about these consecrations. Both were on American soil, this one though has serving Episcopal bishops and, of course, an Honorary Bishop from England.

A Mrs. Proudie streak in Mrs. Minns, perhaps?

ps. A poster on T19 informs that the rite of consecration for the new CANA bishops included the exhortation “Take this staff. Be a shepherd and not a wolf to the flock of Christ, feed them and do not devour them”.

Also looking at the order of service I see The Hymnal 1982 seems to be good enough for CANA - can't help but wonder how many "apostates" were on that hymnal committee. And what about the New International Version of the Bible? Is that generally accepted as a scholarly translation any longer?

From Anglican Scotist blog: ...The separated have bigger plans then mere unity among themselves; they want to be in the AC as a province, and to kick TEC out of the AC as a province. They have not given up these plans--separation is merely stage one. Performing the Provincial Two-Step will take years--even decades--of well-funded, high-decibel bitterness at an international level. The funding and the shouting will be there in good supply.

It takes two to bicker. Is there a creative way for Loyalists to unilaterally stop bickering? What would that look like on the national, diocesan, and congregational levels? What should it look like?

See Hypotheses On The Schism, November 27, by scrolling down the page.

At: http://anglicanscotist.blogspot.com/

Has anyone done a comparison of the bishop-to-communicant ratio of various provinces and these new splinter groups? Surely the real winners in this whole mess are the crook and miter suppliers.

Just in, a reply from the Anglican Communion Office, denying the large, loud story that Canterbury approved the Southern Cone's generous adoption of San Joaquin, from afar.

See: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/archbishop_of_canterbury/abc_did_not_endorse_actions_of.html#more

Also note Lionel Diemel's post immediately following.

One can only hope that the CofE will depose Bishop Ball for this breach, but, whatever the CofE does, the PB of TEC should immediately act to depose Bishop Duncan for this flagrant violation of his vows. She should declare the see of Pittsburgh vacant, and reconstitute this Diocese of the Episcopal Church, and get on with the mission of the Church in the United States.

Let the Global South and codependent poachers do what they will, but in some non-TEC property, whether the church of another denomination or some auditorium.

Finally, the ABC should now make it clear that all boundary-crossers, acting without consent of the Province in question, do this outside the bounds of the AC.

EPFitz: Bishop John Ball is shown in the video on the BabyBlue blog giving a speech during the service, in which he also says that Bishop Wallace Benn, the Bishop of Lewes, a suffragan of Chichester, sends his "150%" support of the consecration. Should not these two men be disciplined by their diocesans? Or is it only liberals who ever get brought to heel?

EPfizh: An aside, I couldn't find in the program, (maybe it was there and I missed it?) any indication that the music used was used with permission of its authors or copyright holders, but, I guess such trifles wouldn't pose a problem for this group?

Reprint license appears on page 8.

I think it was a great order of service, and a momentous occasion in what looks to have been a decisive weekend for TEC. How can people that support the consecration of someone living in a sinful relationship, and who reject the apostolic authority of both scripture and the counsel of anglican bishops, justify being picky about how orthodox Christians consecrate their Bishops?

"If +Ball is engaging in such extra-provincial activities uninvited, the problem of incursions has clearly reached England's fair shore."

From many, many conversations on schism, it seems to me that - for Irish and British Anglicans - this is the most chilling of all possibilities.

Fr Mark wrote: "Is this Bishop John Ball of Chelmsford the one listed in Crockford as a retired former bishop in Tanzania who now has a license to officiate as an assistant bishop in Chelmsford diocese? If so, should he not now be deprived of this license?"

It is and he should (and given the reputation of +John Chelmsford, I think it quite likely that he will be).

"How can people that support the consecration of someone living in a sinful relationship, and who reject the apostolic authority of both scripture and the counsel of anglican bishops, justify being picky about how orthodox Christians consecrate their Bishops?"

First, no-one is debating how Orthodox Christians consecrate their bishops. We are discussing Anglican bishops. Second, how can people who support the consecration of men, not necessarily on this instance, who spread lies about gay people, support the jailing even of those who are nice to gay people, and who revile their opponents oppose the consecration of a man who was honest about his sexuality from the early days of his marriage and who worked with his wife for an amicable separation that minimised the hurt to the children when the marriage ended? How many of these Fauxrthodox bishops are divorced, and how many of them conducted themselves during the course of their divorces with the dignity and respect of Gene Robinson and his wife? Sorry, but while I see wrong on both sides, the "Christianity" of the behaviour of the Right in this has been anything but Christian. In its rejection of Christian love, its adoption of a false myth of persecution, its manifest dishoensty, its hypocrisy in painting itself out as the great defender of Christian truth while casting at others accusations of sins of which it is at least as guilty, the Right is guilty of far more than the Left in this. I say this because, while I am gay, I have always had misgivings about the theology and approach of the Left, and the debatably precipitate action of TEC in consecrating Gene Robinson. So, I am left with "By their fruits shall ye know them." I do not see the fruits of the Gospel in the actions of the Right. I am thus constrained to side with the Left. How you can claim +VGR is somehow unsuited to the episcopate because he is gay but have no issue with someone who is clearly guilty of the things I have spoken of is beyond me.

David Wh opines "I think it was a great order of service".

Including the anointing?

Oh, Gee DWH, I don't know ... maybe because these new extraordinary conservative realignment bishops are perceiving the rest of us so harshly as nothing but heretics? And because we do see them looking so ravenously at the rest of us as hungry real wolves eye the sheep who are their prey in the wild? Because they think nothing of rending the fabrics of our communion in order to save believers they perceive as conservatives, at the expense of believers whom they perceive as non-conservatives?

Because it is not all that difficult to see just how these new bishops lay in predatory wait - calling their predations, good news - hoping to fasten their sharpened doctrinal teeth upon anybody they can cower into intellectual (or worse, spiritual?) vulnerability, not to mention their profound hunger for thefts of money and property from the province in which they took their sacred vows, not that long ago in our own lifetimes? And all because they have long since ceased to value agreeing to disagree in good conscience while you leave the money and the buildings alone as your legacy to later generations, all as a genuine fruit of the Holy Spirit, as a historic space of real Anglican leeway?

If Minns and company see me as anything more than hot button issue fodder for their conservative campaigning, it has yet to be clearly preached to me with any sort of equality and intellectual respect, let alone with any compassion for my conscientious differences with the realignment's obvious self-regard? Even that the rest of us could tolerate, but they go much further, openly hungering for the naked institutional power and the means to one-sidedly judge the rest of us, and then to enforce their punishments regardless?

As usual, your remarks conflate and thus obscure the innate complexities - definitional, categorical, presuppositional according to the most vigorous conservative realignment rubrics? - of their newly being consecrated - i.e, being FOR their special and newly exclusive conservative version of Anglican beliefs and fellowships means being categorically AGAINST the rest of us because we so little subscribe to their new conservatisms, let alone agree with their special high view of themselves when it comes to a narrow and specific set of current hot button believer discernment questions.

Can you preach nothing but our alleged outsider status, clamor for our extinction, and us not notice?

The bishop in the Diocese of Chelmsford (my home town) who should be deposed is not John Ball but John Gladwin, the diocesan. For it is Bishop Gladwin who is openly campaigning against the agreed position of the bishops of the Anglican Communion by his patronage of Changing Attitude. Bishop Ball should be congratulated for upholding the historic faith of the Church of England.

Did NP go out and recruit a whole bunch of buddies to replace him here? There are suddenly a lot of people using the same code phrases that we've never heard from before.

RG is her usual suspect self. She is as reliable in her own spin as USA's Ann Coulter is in her way. Then I get to the last few sentences, and I think she is now playing both ends against the Anglican mixed middles, just in case the realignment with which her journalistic sympathies so often seem to lie does not pan out. After all.

Talk about unlikely?

Who wudda eva thought that RG would leave the doors open and the night lights on, in praise of the most traditional sort of Anglican indifference to life outside the tunnel vision eyesight of a local parish that hasn't gotten around to noticing that two mommies or two daddies are now sending the little ones to day school. Isn't there supposed to be an Orthodox Home Invasion in progress, tilting us all distinctly to the right?

Again, one simply suspects that RG doesn't know any modern queer citizens who lead anything like a modern life in her own chosen democratic nation?

Her hint of a turn around merits great wonder, a player in the same contest as Lord Carey's much vaunted and suddenly public support for queer folks having human rights and equal citizenship after all. But never forget: Outside the Anglican churches only. Inside church we simply must by doctrinal fiat continue to tell lies about queer folks as dangerous incompetents, and especially condemn them for not being straight at every public opportunity.

I likely caught a virus that is temporarily making me read the conservative realignment in recent events as a lost chapter of Alice in Wonderland. Or is it, Through The Looking Glass?

I think St. Bette Davis and the fasten yr seat belts line is somewhere in our near Canterbury-looped near future, repeating and repeating and repeating.

"Bishop Ball should be congratulated." PK

Oh goody, goody...let's all now follow the case of the foul Ball!

Bishop John Ball is one route that the fissure/ division can follow into England, especially given the goings on in the Diocese of Chelmsford previously when a minister turned against the authority of his diocesan bishop.

I read Martyn Minns's address, and found it fascinating that he should talk about diversity. Why? Because he obviously feels that the alternative institution is now up and running, and he is both addressing the divisions within this camp (Anglican tolerance!) and, probably, trying to appear to be regularly Anglican to outsiders. He is obviously confident.

It is increasingly institutionalised events that will drive this - and now a bishop from England. The whole point about Luther, of course, is that he increasingly saw institutional expression, and all the ideas in the world are of nothing unless they come with institutions that are both a defence and a promotion.

In a way this is why leaders should now act. New institutions have to be undermined by removing the legitimacy that they keep announcing, and existing institutions protect and regather themelves so that they are not bled for replacement. As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, you can justify doing little when ideas and threats are heard; however, when the juggernauts are loaded, walking from the middle of the road into the one going one way, and then walking into the one going the other way, does get increasingly messy. He needs now to clarify, because, whilst Anglicanism doesn't have a pope, that one person who decides the in and out of it is him.

I don't think he is looking to stagger to Lambeth 2008 for then a quiet time. I think rather he believes that events will drive themselves, and historically schisms happen as driven by deeper forces. I said to a local small group tonight that in ten years time I reckon he will/ will have applied to join the Roman Catholic Church, as the logic of his reasoning points that way, and the Anglican institution as an international body must strike him as nothing but chaotic. It is not the Communion he obviously discusses according to his Catholic principles. It must be one hell of an exhausting job, mentally.

Don't forget Bishop Wallace Benn.His name has been on all these letters. A Good Protestant Irishman and he is perhaps the last Bishop in the Church of England to refuse to wear a mitre.

One of the patrons for the proposed third Province...surely he has now sunk any hope of that.

By the way Bishop Wallace works in a diocese where Mary is venerated, the eucharistic species worshipped and the Holy Communion service interpolated as the Mass...yet a blind eye is turned to this "idolatry."

It's a good job he doesn't wear a mitre, for if he held his head in shame it would fall off!

Peter Kirk: Why should John Gladwin not be a patron of Changing Attitude? The Church of England does have more than one view on the subject of gay people, you know. I am not against some churchpeople stating a Neanderthal view about gay people, but they (you?) must realise that that is an extreme and unusual view in contemporary Britain, and not one that you can expect the whole of a broad organisation like the C of E to adhere to. You can't actually shut us up, you know - we do exist, we are Christians, and we are not members of the Church merely by your gracious permission, but with as much right to be there as you are.

Oh, no! - not another one (Peter Kirk) who believes that a 2:1 majority equals agreement.

"... the dis-agreed position of the bishops of the Anglican Communion..."

(some of them)

The bad judgement of putting this on the Agenda being the source of all the fuss. Surely!

Ford Elms wrote: First, no-one is debating how Orthodox Christians consecrate their bishops.

I was talking about orthodox (small o) Christians versus Liberals, whose beliefs and behaviours have more to do with the philosophy of this world than with the teachings of Christ and the apostles.

If you want to follow Christ you have to learn to obey everything he has commanded you via the apostles (or at least that is what the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying). TEC and many liberal contributors seem to think that isolating verses out of scripture and putting them into their own philosophical framework makes them Christian. It does not. It's just decorating sinful human autonomy.

In the US there may be wrong on both sides, but look at the fruits - what is actually happening on the ground. If the right were so nasty, you'd expect that it would be liberal churches and clergy that were loosing out(threatened with inhibition, requisition of the buildings and symbols, their Orders, their livelihoods and pensions etc).

drdanfee wrote: "Can you preach nothing but our alleged outsider status, clamor for our extinction, and us not notice?"

You are a Christian insider or outsider based on whether you believe in, trust, and seek to obey Jesus Christ. But I mean the real one - who is recorded in Scripture as dying for our sins to save us from ourselves - not some 1960s psychedelic hippy-Jesus proclaiming "make love not war".

Pat O'Neill wrote "Did NP go out and recruit a whole bunch of buddies to replace him here? There are suddenly a lot of people using the same code phrases that we've never heard from before."

RPNewark wrote: "Oh, no! - not another one (Peter Kirk) who believes that a 2:1 majority equals agreement."

OOoohh, can we all use ad-hominem attacks, or only liberals?

RPNewark wrote: "Oh, no! - not another one (Peter Kirk) who believes that a 2:1 majority equals agreement."

I think you will find that Lambeth 98 1.10, that reaffirmed what the Church has always affirmed (the sinfulness of homosexuality) was approved by a ratio of about 10:1.

David Wh
526 in favor and 70 against, with 45 abstentions and about 100 who were just absent.

David Wh: I object to being labelled unorthodox. I am a very orthodox traditional Anglo-Catholic priest who just happens to believe that it is better and more honest for us to be able to articulate our sexuality in a way appropriate in modern European society, rather than collude in an ecclesiastical culture of deceit, dishonesty, hypocrisy and injustice. As far as you are concerned, that seems to give you the right to judge me as being less Christian than you, which is both ridiculous and unpleasant.

"If you want to follow Christ you have to learn to obey everything he has commanded you via the apostles (or at least that is what the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying)."

I've been away for a while. We had a poster here who I gather has been banned, after a full year of attempts by everyone else, to make him post with more respect. You sound uncannily like him. Some might say you are a sock puppet for him. I think maybe you attend the same parish, or at least listen to the same fear mongers. You, like him, ignore everything I said about the hypocrisy of the Right, focussing solely on what appears to be an understanding iof sin as lawbreaking and repentence as sorrow for past crime. Now, I understand this is a common, if utterly misguided, understanding, especially in the Evangelical wing of Christianity, but the similarity is notable. You see, sin is not breaking the law, faith is not obedience, justification is not through purity of living, obedience is not an attempt to buy one's way onto the Kingdom, just because people don't agree with you doesn't mean they have no faith, and the vast majority of conservative Anglicans, especially conservative Evangelicals, are in no way orthodox. I make no comment ion the truth of their beliefs, but they follow a tradition that is no more than 500 years old, that is radically different from anything that we have received from the early Church, and, in its day was far mor radical and innovative than anything TEC is trying to do now.

Fr Mark : Bishop Wallace Park Benn is a suffragan to the Bishop of Chichester. That man, Bishop John Hind, is equally likely to support these happenings. Wasn't he one of the signatories of the open letter against Dr. Jeffrey John's appointment as suffragan bishop of Reading? Both Bishop Hind and Bishop Benn were raised to the episcopate by the fiat of Dr Eric Kemp, the last Bishop of Chichester. There was no consultation or open selection process as happened with Dr. John. Dr Kemp merely wished to promote his own closed view of what constitutes orthodox christianity. He appointed Bishop Benn to give Evangelicals opposed the ordination of women episcopal representation. The fact that Bishop Benn holds a theology of Church, Ministry, and Sacraments at variance with his own in everything BUT the admission of women to Holy Order did not seem to matter.

Bishop Hind is of the same stock. He holds a high view of the episcopate and of the Diocesan Bishop in particular. But he is prepared to let Bishop Benn speak his Calvinistic Reform theology without sensure. He hasn't the courage or the ability to discipline the Bishop of Lewes. He didn't even have the personal courage to cancel a previous engagement and be present at the House of Bishops meeting that followed the publication of the open letter. His co-conspirators had to face their fellow bishops, whilst Bishop Hind was abroad.

The words of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels can be subject to the techniques of biblical criticism, nor do we have to take the words of Paul or whoever wrote in his name as the last word in relationships. Some of the Churches and their teachings may have simply got it wrong, or been incomplete, as regards the diversity of reciprocal, consenting, positive and worthwhile human relationships.

The new arrivals make me miss NP, who is a genius by comparison.

So let me get this straight. Some people here are bitter about these ordinations by Biblical fundamentalists. But I guess you can only object if you are an ecclesiological fundamentalist. Which set of 'rules' rule?

As for ration of Bishops to people, we need to look long and hard much closer to home. Over the past 100 years or less, the number of Bishops has rocketed whilst number of clergy and layity plumit.

Defending 1 Bishop of being a patron of a divisive group while attacking another for going to a service in N America doesn't strike me as "thinking".

The critical bit of Lambeth 1.10 - the bit "rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with scripture" - passed by 389 votes to 190, which I think is where the 2:1 proportion comes from.

Commentator: what you say is accurate, and it's weird, because Eric Kemp was one of the great colluders in the underworld of ecclesiastical closet high-camp culture during his very long reign over one of the gayest dioceses in the C of E.

The lead story in Sunday's "Observer" was Tracy McVeigh's "Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt". In McVeigh's words, "..... preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush." Elsewhere she explains "Although old tribal beliefs in witch doctors are not so deeply buried in people's memories ....... it is American and Scottish Pentecostal and evangelical missionaries of the past 50 years who have shaped these fanatical beliefs."

What right have Akinola, his handlers and his minions, to meddle in the affairs of the Episcopal Church, cloaked in the pretense - for pretense is what is it - of that Church's "homosexual corruption", while passing by these vilely abused children on the other side? Hypocrisy - mote and beam time with a vengeance! Not to mention the role of some prelates of the Rwandan Anglican Church, also joyfully interfering in North America, in the recent massacre of up to 1,000,000 of their fellow countrymen.

By what process dare these people settle upon homosexuality, rather than child murder and mass extermination, as a practice "incompatible with scripture"?

In light of the matter of the Nigerian child "witches" it is impossible to contemplate calmly the barefaced hypocrisy of those who dare to tell US how WE should live in a Christian fashion. I will not rehash the bit about millstones around necks - we all know it.

McVeigh's story, with appalling accompanying video - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2224553,00.html

Yet Bishop Benn and his diocesan bishop will pretend that they represent " Biblically Orthodox Anglicanism "....yet they believe two different Gospels.

One believes he goes to the altar to offer the Holy Sacrifice,...whilst the other believes there is no altar and no sacrifice except Calvary.

One will remember the dead in prayer...the other one believes that there is no need to pray for people ...they are either in Heaven or Hell.

Commentator: what you say is accurate, and it's weird, because Eric Kemp was one of the great colluders in the underworld of ecclesiastical closet high-camp culture during his very long reign over one of the gayest dioceses in the C of E.

Posted by: Fr Mark on Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 6:57pm GMT

This is true. I was there.

Did anybody look at ALL the Bishops in the order of service? Three pages worth!!!!

Or are all those the child witches that are getting burned at the stake?

Ford Elms wrote: "You, like him, ignore everything I said about the hypocrisy of the Right"

The substantive issue is not which 'side' is most pure, but whether TEC is legitimately following Christ or just their own ideas - which I think sound more like "make love not war" than "deny self".

Anyway, hypocrisy seems to be in the eye of the beholder. I see TEC rejecting Scripture and the counsel of the Communion and then trying to pretend that people who object and won't accept it are the one's causing the problems!

TEC should be honest and just resign from a Communion they see as oppressing people by violating their rights to freely live out who they are.

Fr Mark, Just being truthful is not enough if same-sex sex is wrong. The church seems to be suffering now because of the hypocrisy of previous generations who paid lip service whilest turning a blind eye to sin.

David Wh: the Church of England was more realistic about sex until very recently. It is currently taking a dive into Puritanism which will have no happy outcome for anyone. There has long (since the mid-19th c?) been a sad side to British culture which is hypocrisy, priggishness and prudery about sex. We are famous for it throughout Europe. The rest of society, fortunately, has now realised this, and moved on. It's time churchpeople were open and honest enough about human nature to do the same.

#i notice that trouble is brewing in CANA over the (non) ordination of women -- a schism a minute !

"TEC should be honest and just resign from a Communion they see as oppressing people by violating their rights to freely live out who they are."

You know, I don't think TEC's actions are all that pure either. I think they acted precipitatously. I respect their decision, but I wish they hadn't done it. Yet I am still flabbergasted that you can call for the expulsion/voluntary departure of TEC and not call for the same for the Church in Nigeria or Zimbabwe. Why is it a worse sin to be gay than to do what the Church is doing there? Why is oppression OK, why are the actions of people like Kunonga OK? I am ashamed of the actions of the AC in Zimbabwe, I believe the Church has betrayed the Gospel, I do not understand why you think such things are tolerable while a man who forgives his enemies, even those who made it necessary for him to be consecrated in a bullet proof vest, for God's sake, is a communion breaking issue. Do you not see how bad this is? We can betray the Gospel in innumerable ways, be obvious in our betrayal, claim that we HAVEN'T actually betrayed the Gospel, just as long as we make sure the evil gays are kept out. How is this in any way credible? If you want to kick out TEC, fine, but why do you not kick out those members of the Communion whose betrayals of the Gospel are as bad or worse than anything TEC has done? Why do you not decry all the ways the Church has betrayed the Gospel in the past? Why are you not calling for the expulsion of those dioceses who make money from interest, or who remarry divorcees, or who support capital punishment or war? Why are non-sexual sins NOT communion breaking issues?

"If you want to kick out TEC, fine, but why do you not kick out those members of the Communion whose betrayals of the Gospel are as bad or worse than anything TEC has done?"

TEC at least has made an effort at producing theology that supports what it's doing. You may not agree with the theology and you may not agree with the process employed.

I don't suppose anyone can show me how the church in Zimbabwe has made similar efforts to justify what they're doing. That is a pure and simple betrayal of the gospel.

And once we get to that we're on really dangerous ground. Which betrayal of the gospel is ok and which isn't? It is about what whole churches do, what bishops do, what priests do, what ordinary Christians do? Or is it also about what we think? And about what we don't do?
Where do we draw the line? Who judges?

Best not to, really. There's a good reason why we have been told not to judge.

"Which betrayal of the gospel is ok and which isn't?"

Exactly! The problem is, of course, that conservatives don't perceive that they are betraying the Gospel. Remember NP's constant justifications for judging others, and the famous "False teachers are not my neighbours." Look at how usury is dismissed every time it is brought up. Not one of these so called faithful Christians can even admit that usuryt was once a sin. I sometimes think they have no sense of irony. How can a divorced, remarried bishop have the nerve to stand in public and condemn others for disobedience to Scripture? How can someone who, one assumes, is relatively intelligent and educated, not make the link between his remarriage and what Scripture says about that? I'm not opposing divorce here, but really, how can someone not be a better shepherd of his own credibility? Is it merely that fact that it is more attractive and easier to consider one'sself a martyr in the Great Cause than it is to see that one is an object of scorn because people see the disconnect between what one professes to believe and what one actually does, and, like me, they find it a source of ridicule?