Gay trolling in the Herald.

The person who wrote this implies that the church is inevitably progressing down a route to allowing gay marriage in the church.

This is (um) wrong. The most recent synod had a resolution banning gay marriage. It go 59% of the vote: to change the book of order requires 60%.

Churches agonise over whether to marry same-sex couples as law changes

The head of New Zealand’s third-largest church has asked its ministers to consider a temporary ban on gay marriages to preserve the church’s “peace and unity”.

The call from Presbyterian Church Moderator Ray Coster comes as all the country’s biggest Protestant churches remain divided over how to respond to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, which comes into force on Monday.

Several ministers, including lesbian Presbyterian minister Margaret Mayman at Wellington’s St Andrew’s on the Terrace, are already taking bookings for same-sex weddings and plan a “progressive Christian” website listing ministers of all denominations willing to conduct such marriages.

But the conservative Presbyterian Affirm movement is challenging a legal opinion by a church advisory committee that ministers can choose whether to perform a same-sex marriage.

Most Presbyterian congregations are conservative. In most towns there is one or at most two liberal congregations: examples include Knox in Dunedin and St Andrew’s in Wellington. The rest of us struggle with our sexual desires — for the word states that that activity should occur within the bounds of marriage. and we have to deal with the straights living together and the far too high divorce rate that is a consequence of sexual license.

Back to the article.

An 75 per cent majority at the last Presbyterian General Assembly in October also voted to uphold marriage as “the loving, faithful union of a man and a woman”, but the assembly did not pass another resolution that would have prohibited ministers from marrying same-sex couples.

That motion failed by one vote to get the 60 per cent majority required to become church law.

The church’s Book of Order advisory committee ruled last month that same-sex marriage therefore remained subject to each minister’s “liberty of conscience and right of private judgment” unless a future assembly changed that.

Presbyterian Affirm spokesman Dr Stuart Lange said the committee was wrong. “Such ‘liberty’ of private opinion has never been about freedom of action.”

On August 7, Mr Coster wrote to all churches saying he had received more than 50 letters from people expressing “deep concern” about the opinion and urging him to declare a moratorium on same-sex marriages until the next assembly, in October next year.

He wrote that the moderator did not have authority to declare a moratorium, but added: “However, ministers could decide that for a period of time that we will not marry same-sex couples. This would be respecting the decision of the General Assembly and recognising that this is a contentious and potentially divisive issue.”

Yesterday he said Presbyterian ministers still had a right to marry same-sex couples but that they might wish to “hold the peace and unity of the Church”.

Dr Mayman said she had agreed to marry a same-sex couple in St Andrew’s in October.

“It didn’t cross my mind for a moment that the peace and unity of the church was more important than supporting those two people within our congregation who love each other,” she said.

The church opinion also ruled that any church that makes its buildings available for hire by the public cannot refuse to hire them out for a same-sex marriage because that would be discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, prohibited under the Human Rights Act.

Auckland University human rights law expert Professor Paul Rishworth said yesterday that whether a particular church building was generally available to the public “will be a question of fact to be resolved on the basis of the specific facts of any contested case”.

This is typical trolling (Ms Mayham, I am talking to you as you leave to go to Sydney). The moderator is asking for charity. This is a contentious issue. We have to look at what we are teaching for the 90 — 95% of the population who do not have attraction to the same sex, and how to be caring and supportive for those who are called to holy singleness by inclination, or by circumstances. And we should respect delays, not just blindly go ahead.

Perhaps Ms Mayham is blindly going ahead because she is about to go to a country where same sex marriages are illegal. Perhaps it is because she herself is gay.

Don’t care. I care about the unity of the church. And that we remain faithful to the gospel. On this issue, the Mayhams of this world are neither promoting unity nor being faithful. If they had a conscience, they would follow it to the unitarians.

For there will be a pushback. And in that, those who are choosing to live a life of celibacy in fidelity to the gospel, those who take the teaching of the church seriously, are the ones who these liberal blots our our feasts will drag out of their privacy and sacrifice in the hope the church will become apostate.