Churchly Quality Control XII: Liberal Church Leaders

The venerable Os Guiness has written a perceptive piece on the seriousness of the current state of the U. S. Episcopal Church. Towards the beginning of it, he wonderfully sums up the absurdity of liberal pseudo-Christians being in church leadership:

…What would we think of a nation that installed a pothead as its drug czar? Or an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter that appointed an unreformed boozer to lead its meetings? Or an army that was led by a convinced pacifist as its general? Yet a routine spectacle of our age is the agile contortions of religious leaders openly denying what their faiths once believed, celebrating what their faiths once castigated, and advancing views once closer to their foes than their founders—and still staying on as leaders of those faiths, as if it were all in a day’s work.

It’s not only absurd, it’s an outrage. If a priest or bishop can no longer uphold the faith, then he should do the honorable thing and step aside. If he won’t do the honorable thing, he should be fired. (No, I don’t mean burnt at the stake although the idea is tempting….)

Again, you don’t tolerate liberals or other apostates and heretics in leadership. You love them. You correct them as best you can. But you don’t let them lead in the church.

That churches in the past didn’t have the guts and sanity to cast out such from leadership is a big reason we Anglicans, among others, are in the mess we are in today.

This is a sore subject for me, in case you haven’t noticed. I became a Christian in a conservative church in a mainline denomination (Presbyterian). And almost from the beginning, I was struck by the obscene absurdity of pseudo-Christians leading in the church. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? Heck, until shortly before I came to faith, I had no interest in even attending church, much less leading one. And why would a church want to put up with it?

It’s indeed just as absurd and self-destructive as Guiness describes it.