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Anglican Archbishop of Sydney calls on Worldwide Communion to Declare Homosexuality a Sin

SYDNEY, February 6, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Peter Jensen, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Australia, has called upon the Worldwide Anglican Communion unequivocally to condemn homosexual behavior as sinful. Jensen warned of a slippery slope toward acceptance of homosexual practice among Anglicans. 

To bless homosexuality, said Jensen to the Sydney Morning Herald on February 3, “would be to call holy what God calls sin to be repented on.”

Jensen’s call comes at a time in the Anglican Communion that concessions are being made not only to civil laws legitimizing homosexual partnerings but in which the official US and Canadian Anglican churches are blessing homosexuality and same-sex partnerships as an acceptable lifestyle for Christians.
 
Jensen is a signatory to a letter with 18 Anglican leaders supporting comments by the bishop of Rochester that gay unions were inconsistent with “traditional teachings” on marriage. Jensen told a group of British evangelists that homosexuality is a “life and death” matter for the Anglican Church.

Responding to the frequent accusation that Christian leaders are “obsessed” with sex, Jensen said, “Our culture is obsessed with sex so we should not be embarrassed with engaging with this issue. If we did not engage we would be divorced from our culture. Scripture declares this to be a matter of life and death.”

Jensen’s comments appeared on the website of the Anglican Mainstream, a group “committed to promote, teach and maintain the Scriptural truths on which the Anglican Church was founded.”

The Worldwide Anglican Communion has been in a state of crisis, with a formal schism imminent, after the 2004 consecration of an open and unrepentant homosexual, Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire. Anglican leaders in Africa have begun to offer sanctuary to North American Anglicans who wish to retain the Christian teaching on sexuality and marriage, setting up alternate episcopal structures for individual congregations.

In England, the House of Bishops, the governing body of the Church of England, agreed to allow the civil unions of its openly homosexual clergy on the proviso that the clergyman gives his bishop a written promise that the relationship will be chaste. This decision followed the legalisation of homosexual partnerships in England, Northern Ireland and Wales and was condemned by traditional Christians around the world as a transparent and cynical capitulation to militant secularism.

Read the website of the Anglican Mainstream:
http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Christian Leaders do not Speak for Christian Public says Prime Minister
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/aug/05080807.html

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