Thank you... and a rebuke.

In my haste to announce the Glorious Global Schism’s urgent need for my return I must admit I forgot to thank the guest bloggers who pathetically tried to cover for my absence.

Special thanks has to go to Torquemada, Ernest Hemingway, and George Herbert: crossing over isn’t easy at the best of times (which is probably why John Edward can only ever seem to get in touch with people who’s name starts with “M” and who seem to be saying they may have been born in a month with “a” or “e” in its name – the more lucid deceased know it just isn’t worth the effort), and I really do appreciate the time they took.

On that basis I suppose little Dean Phillip Jensen also deserves a special mention: while not exactly “over there” he certainly hasn’t been on this planet for years either, and so checking in with reality from wherever it is he does inhabit can’t have been easy.

Having said that, I must also apologise for the standard of one of my locum tenens, who clearly upset a few of you. I believe the criticism made was that he was “nasty”, and, to be perfectly honest I must agree.

I’m speaking, of course, of little Bishop Tom Wright, whom I’d anticipated would simply give us a brief advertisement for whatever book he’s currently hawking, followed by an honest-to-goodness rebuke of homosexuals, same-sex-marriage, replete with the juicy threats he’s made against any clergy in his diocese prepared to bless those whom God has already obviously blessed. Perhaps if we were lucky, I’d thought, we might even get a subtle-but-unmistakable condemnation of the apostate TEC for having dared to permit the believers of New Hampshire to follow the Spirit’s call (and, more importantly, their Diocesan canons) to install Bishop Robinson – thereby tearing the fabric of the Communion so irreparably that the future’s only hope is to make dear +Durham the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yet instead of all this juicy rhetoric all we got was a series of incomprehensible phrases cut and pasted from essays of his already freely available online. Granted, a few of them had been juxtaposed in a refreshingly post-modern fashion, but I know for a fact whole lines – sentences even – had been lifted with no attempt at originality.

Google it yourself should you be wicked enough to doubt me, and then please accept my apologies for the nastiness of Bishop Wright’s words. As I’ll be telling him when the next form-letter arrives asking me to bus my faithful to bolster the numbers at nearby book-signing: the people who visit this blog deserve more that just a little esoterically-expressed neo-orthodoxy. They want condemnation, shunnings, and brutal buttock-slapping rebukes. Anything less just isn’t the GAFCON way. Just ask our brothers facing the very real danger posed by child witches in Africa.

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.