Paul Gibson at The Anglican Church of Canada

In our own Canadian Province some Anglicans have withdrawn from communion with the mainline church and attached themselves to a more congenial Province elsewhere. But still many of our leaders seem to warn that certain actions in the Canadian and American provinces will cause disunity, as if one could cause something that has already happened. In any case, would unity be worth the price?

If the price of unity is the continued treatment of homosexual people as second-class human beings (if that) and second-class Christians for one more year, one more month, one more week, one more day, would unity be worth it? Do the biblical virtues of justice, compassion, and recognition of the image of God in all of humanity have the higher claim?

I am not afraid of schism. I am afraid of a church in which some leaders voted to commit themselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptized, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ (from the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1998, Resolution I.10.c), but show little evidence of having acted on that promise.

I am afraid of a church in which righteousness is understood to be the enforcement of a small number of prejudicially selected biblical texts to the exclusion of many others, some of greater clarity, forgetting that in the bible righteousness is realized in the practice of justice. There are at the most seven references to homosexuality in the bible (some of them are disputed and all require contextual interpretation) but the word “justice” (or its negative “injustice”) appears 194 times.

Perhaps the most notable example is Micah 6.8 where it is linked with kindness and humility, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Justice is not merely the even-handed imposition of law; it is that which builds peace, harmony and prosperity for all in the community, including homosexual people who want to ask for a divine blessing on their mutual commitment. This is more important than unity.