If we Westerners are the ‘strong’, and the South are the ‘weak’, we ought to ‘bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.’ That we bear with them is the only possible sign that we are indeed the mature and the strong.
Even if we sophisticated modern Protestant Westerners are more mature in the faith than all the poor backwards Christians of the Third World, with their patriarchal views of gender and sexuality, they are the gift of God to us (and we to them). God has generously bound them to us. We are, as it were, married – the ‘sophisticated’ to the ‘backward’, the liberal to the fundamentalist.
We cannot decide to make changes in our corner of the Church, because our corner does not belong to us only, but to the whole Church. Unilateral decisions show not only indifference, but antagonism to them. Our salvation consists in our being joined to them in Christ, so separation from them tugs against our salvation.
Do those who want to ‘go forward’ into new, ostensibly more inclusive, forms of church life, really don’t mind if they leave others, traditionalists, Africans and Asians, behind? They want to go a little more quickly, but do they want to leave others behind? But in the wilderness if we do not go at the pace of the very slowest, we will be abandoning the slowest and weakest, so the body will break up and never arrive. The whole point of our time in the wilderness is not to arrive anywhere in particular, but to learn to serve and hold on to one another, the strong serving the weak and waiting for them. Fast finishers don’t get earlier admission, for admission to the land promised to us is only for the whole Church, the strong bound to the weak.
Of course if these other churches are wrong about who may be ordained, we have to tell them so, and if there are churches who belive we are wrong about this, we have to listen to them and examine ourselves. We have to talk to them, and either be corrected by them and return to them, or to correct them and beg them to come back to us. We have to serve them in this way, or be served by them. Our readiness to do is the proper demonstration of our maturity. Any division in the Church makes it hard to pray, but our present acts that widened our separation from the rest of the Church, mean that we must pray and lament.
