Flip-flopping to obscurity

I had to chuckle when I read this in today's Telegraph.

The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, accused the Church of failing in its duty to "welcome people of other faiths" ahead of a motion at July's General Synod in York urging a strategy for evangelising Muslims.

However, his comments were condemned by senior figures within the Church. The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, the former Bishop of Hulme and the newly appointed Bishop of Urban Life and Faith, said: "Both the Bishop of Rochester's reported comments and the synod private members' motion show no sensitivity to the need for good inter-faith relations. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are learning to respect one another's paths to God and to live in harmony. This demand for the evangelisation of people of other faiths contributes nothing to our communities."

A Church of England spokesman added: "We have a mission-focused Christian presence in every community, including those where there are a large number of Muslims. That engagement is based on the provisions of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for freedom of thought, conscience and religion."

Unless you happen to be an Asian born CofE Bishop in which case your thoughts and conscience are not free - or at least sharing them isn't. I'm not evangelical, but it IS the mission of the CofE to be. Islam is very active in recruiting more and more British citizens to it's ideology - why shouldn't Anglicanism be just as aggressive in it's evangelising?

Oddly enough - or perhaps not in these post-feminist times - women seem particularly keen to convert to Islam, but far less attracted to Christianity. Probably because Islam remains unequivocal as a faith while Anglicanism seems increasingly wishy-washy.

And it's likely to stay that way as long as people like Nazir Ali remain sidelined and marginalised by the flip-flopping liberals that dominate the upper echelons of the CofE.