Chicago Consultation: "Gay agenda is gospel agenda"

Anglicans from around the world met near Chicago December 5-7 to build international coalitions and develop a strategy for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians in the life of the church.

Meeting at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, the 50-member group known as the Chicago Consultation urged leaders of the Episcopal Church to permit the blessing of same-gender relationships and to remove barriers that keep gay candidates from being elected as bishops, according to a news release from the group.

"Some people call it the gay agenda, but we call it the Gospel Agenda," the Rev. Bonnie Perry, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Chicago, co-convener of the Consultation, said in the release. "We are asking our church and our communion to see what God has created and know that it is good."

The Consultation also called upon Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to invite New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson as a full participant to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Robinson, a member of the Consultation, is the only diocesan bishop in the Anglican Communion living openly in a same-gender relationship.

"We wanted to affirm Gene," said Diocese of Washington Bishop John Bryson Chane in the release, "but we also wanted to affirm all of the anonymous gay and lesbian Christians who have graced the church with their God-given gifts -- even when the church has been unwilling to receive them."

Participants from Africa, England and New Zealand joined Anglicans from Central, North and South America in "pledging to work against schismatic leaders who have sought to gain power in the Communion by turning marginalized groups against one another," the release said.

"Homophobia is a sin whose end time is now," said the Rev. Canon Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford University, in a paper opening the Consultation.

Human institutions are riddled with systemic evils, she said. "Our calling is to discern which ones are ripe for uprooting and to take the lead in eradicating them, beginning in the garden behind our own house." Read more
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