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What is your perspective on the crisis within the U.S. Episcopal Church?

All of us would regard this as immensely tragic. Legal proceedings are being taken between Christians. Bishops are being threatened. The irony of this situation is that those who are wanting to leave [the Episcopal Church] are the very people who up to now have been true Anglicans and who have not changed. They are not the innovators. They are simply Anglicans who are adhering to the Anglican faith as they've always understood it and have not moved an inch.

What's at stake for evangelicals worldwide in this struggle within Anglicanism?

Evangelicals find themselves in all sorts of different denominations. The convulsions which are striking [Anglicans], if they have not reached your mainstream denomination, will do so without a doubt. Evangelicals will then have to decide whether their denomination comes first or whether their adherence to the gospel comes first.

So first of all, it's a question of how deep your evangelicalism goes, which is really another way of saying, How deeply do you adhere to the Scriptures and how deeply do you adhere to the truthful and transforming gospel? Now this great struggle is occurring within the denominations because of very powerful secularizing tendencies throughout the western world. Even though people may live in largely evangelical denominations or even in independent churches, they will find that there's no place to hide.

There is simply no place to hide. Your children will feel this more sharply than you will. The movement within GAFCON is a tremendously important effort to defend the gospel and to promote true biblical teaching. This is an absolutely essential effort for us, for every evangelical no matter how pure a denomination they may think they occupy.

What is the optimal biblical and Christian response to someone struggling with homosexuality?

Evangelicals have been caught intellectually flat-footed in the whole area of human sexuality and indeed of human relations. I think we need to trace this back further to the rise of feminists and to relatively inadequate responses of evangelicals in this area.

Now let me temper that by saying I think that evangelicals in the United States have done far better than we have in Australia and perhaps in the rest of the English-speaking world. I'm very grateful for some tremendous material from the United States, but even so across the border I think we've been caught flat-footed on this.

Our problems are not so much to do with homosexuality; they're to do with human nature, human relationships, and the call of the gospel to sacrifice. We have a different view of human nature than that of the world around us. We have a different view as to what constitutes the good life. It's in those areas that the battle needed to be fought first before we ever got to the human sexuality battle.

Now we've reached the point where Christians seem to be saying: "Sorry, what we Christians say as normal, the rest of the world thinks is absolutely impossible and extraordinary."

Hence, when we say we call upon people whether homosexual or heterosexual, to live a life of self-discipline outside marriage, people around us, the world around us, thinks this is some of the most extraordinary stuff they've ever heard.

Well, it's only what all Christians used to believe, and it's what the Bible teaches.

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GAFCON.org has live and recorded video from the conference and more information about the meeting.

SydneyAnglicans.net has commentary on GAFCON, material from Jensen, and much more material.

The Anglican blogs, such as Stand Firm, TitusOneNine, and Episcopal Cafe, will have quite a bit of rolling commentary.

More on the widening division in the Anglican Communion is available in our full coverage area.

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June (Web-Only) 2008, Vol. 52