Gay marriage clash cracks Anglican unity

Gay wedding blessing ceremonies will be banned under a bid to have Anglican Church leaders vote that marriage can only be ­between a man and woman.

Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Kanishka Raffel. Picture: Russell Powell

Gay wedding blessing ceremonies will be banned under a bid to have Anglican Church leaders vote that marriage can only be ­between a man and woman, in a long-delayed reckoning over same-sex unions on Wednesday.

The measured tone of debate at the Anglican General Synod – the first since gay marriage was legalised in 2017 by parliament – belied the intensity of feeling on an issue that has polarised Australia’s second largest church.

Conservatives led by Archbishop of Sydney Kanishka Raffel are pushing the assembly to ­affirm the orthodox church ­position that marriage is exclusive to a man and woman, and the ­solemnisation of the civil union of a same-sex couple was contrary to the teaching of Christ.

In an early test of their ­numbers at General Synod, the conservatives easily defeated an attempt by progressive Brisbane bishop Jonathan Holland to amend the proposed statement due to go to a vote on Wednesday of the 249 eligible delegates.

The motion was lost 152-91 late Tuesday.

The rector of Canberra’s St John the Baptist Church, David McLennan, warned the Anglican compact in Australia could rupture if the statement on marriage and a related declaration enforcing chastity rules for priests did not pass.

“The failure to make the statements before us is, in my view, something that is going to break the bonds of fellowship or at least strain them to breaking point,” he told the usually triennial conference, postponed in 2020 and again last year because of Covid-19.

“There is certainly going to be … without action from this synod, a second denomination in this country claiming the title of ­Anglican. That is toothpaste that won’t go back into the tube very easily.”

Rejecting the conservatives’ contention that Jesus had stipulated marriage was between a man and woman, Bishop Holland said the “ruling principle” of the Gospels was Christ’s love of all people.

“When we see two people in love, whether that’s a man and woman as is most commonly the case, or two men and two women, that love is reciprocal, it’s intimate and nurturing, the context is permanency and exclusiveness as in marriage … who are we to say that they are not fulfilling the teaching of Jesus and his ruling principle of love?” he said.

But Archbishop Raffel, whose Diocese of Sydney is the seat of the church’s thriving evangelical arm and dominates through its wealth and numbers, said to bless a same-sex marriage was “inconsistent with God’s purpose for marriage” and “desperately misleads and imperils” those following the church’s lead.

“Christians must continue to say that God has designed human sexuality to be expressed in the context of marriage between a man and a woman who have committed themselves to each other exclusively and permanently,” he told the General Synod.

“Whenever the Bible addresses sexual expression outside of marriage, whether that is heterosexual or homosexual expression, its assessment is negative.”

The thorny issue was brought to a head when the progressive Wangaratta Diocese in Victoria conducted two ceremonies to bless same-sex weddings after the successful 2017 plebiscite and legal recognition of gay marriage at the civil level, and Newcastle moved to lay the liturgical groundwork to follow suit.

Church conservatives were dismayed when the Appellate Tribunal, the church’s supreme disputes resolution body, ruled in 2020 that such blessings were legal under the Anglican constitution, but the theological and doctrinal questions were a matter for General Synod.

Time has only deepened the internal divisions amid claims by the progressives that the Sydney Diocese has stacked the numbers.

Seconding Archbishop Raffel’s statement on same-sex marriage, Melbourne assistant minister ­Natalie Rosner said the church had to be clear and consistent about where it stood if it wasto continue to be exempted from some provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act and Marriage Act.

“My heart aches with the difficulty of these issues,” Reverend Rosner told the synod. “I have the faces of people I love in my mind, people for whom these questions of Christian faith and human sexuality are very personal, for whom the outcomes of these questions are a daily reality.”