The paper recently issued by Reform and first published here is at last available on Reform’s own website. You can read it here.
The press release is also available here.
The reports and editorial comment on all this in the Church Times generated a whole clutch of letters in the CT issue of 6 August, which can now be read at
Is Reform defending the faith, or getting above itself?
I particularly liked Fr Kevin Scully’s criticism of the media for using “conservative” to describe the positions taken by Reform. He said:
Posted by Simon Sarmiento on Sunday, 15 August 2004 at 10:21 PM GMT | TrackBackThe agenda here seems as conservative as placing Oliver Cromwell in charge of church statuary. Perhaps a more judicious use of language by newsmongers, if not by those who admit their own divisive agendas, would help us all.
Dr Tom Selmes’s letter in the Church Times 6.8.04 (see link to ‘Is Reform defending the faith or getting above itself?’) makes the point that Reform’s three criteria for orthodoxy all concern sex. No member of Reform, if asked to make a statement of what the Good News is, would (as he possibly implies) make sex anything like this central. Its centrality in questions of orthodoxy at the present time is dictated by the fact that it is in the area of sex that people are currrently most inclined to move the goalposts. If and when they move the goalposts re any other matter, that matter will become the one regarding which tests of orthodoxy are carried out.
Posted by: DR CHRISTOPHER SHELL at August 25, 2004 06:45 PM