Setting aside for a moment my conviction that the Pastoral Forum will not have the teeth to make any difference to anyone anywhere, we have:
On the one hand an insistence that the moratorium on SSBs and the ordaining of actively homosexual bishops is upheld – now, in the future and retroactively.
And on the other, that ‘interventions’ from other provinces must stop and congregations that have left their geographical province be placed in a ‘holding bay’, whatever that is. It sounds like a hospital isolation ward where those with obscure contagious diseases are contained until a cure is found.
Both pronouncements appear to have been given equal weight and significance; if I were a real lifelong, died-in-the-wool Anglican, I would say that this is deeply troubling. As it is, though, I will call it a load of codswallop. The former is a matter of doctrine, the understanding of biblical truth and, according to James Packer a matter of salvation. The latter is a mundane squabble over how we are organised. The fact that the ABC and the Lambeth bishops can’t see this is – sad. And it means we are still adrift in a sea of nonsense and waffle.
The Ugly Vicar puts it like this – as much use as a chocolate ladder in a house fire. The ones who left go to sit on the naughty chair by themselves until they are ready to return to their revisionist parents.