July 20, 2017 Show with Matt Kennedy on “The Liberal Episcopalian War Against Biblical Anglicans (& How a Historic 19th Century Anglican Church Became a Mosque)”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

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Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you a happy Thursday on this 20th day of July 2017 and I think we're gonna have a fascinating program today with a first -time guest.

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His name is Matt Kennedy and he is the rector of the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, and he is going to be addressing the theme,

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The Liberal Episcopalian War Against Biblical Anglicans and How a

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Historic 19th Century Anglican Church Became a Mosque, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time,

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Matt Kennedy. Thank you, it's an honor to be here. I've listened to you for about a year, maybe longer, and I really admire the work you've done.

02:01

Thank you for having me on. Yeah, thank you for coming on and I owe your being a guest in part to a listener of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, somebody who's listened to my program,

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I think going all the way back to its very beginnings in New York in 2005 or 2006.

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Ted from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, some of you have heard me read questions from Ted from time to time and I can recall that he, perhaps a year or two ago, strongly recommended that I interview you and I did contact you and for some reason things slipped through the cracks,

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I can't remember why, but we just thank God that the opportunity finally arose and you're here now on the program live.

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So thank you very much for fitting us into your schedule today. My pleasure, thank you.

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And in the studio with me is my co -host the Reverend Buzz Taylor who actually has, at least in a part of his youth, a connection to the

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Episcopalian Church and it's great to have you in the studio again, Buzz Taylor.

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Yeah, I trust this is gonna be informative about my past. Yeah, in fact I just want you to briefly summarize,

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Buzz, how you are, how long as a youth you were raised in Episcopalianism.

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Well, I was baptized in the Episcopal Church and that was in 56 and it was somewhere around, we were going there till about 1962 and then we stopped going to church altogether for like nine years and we never returned to the

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Episcopal Church, but I remember it, my father was the organist, he died in 1960, but he was the organist at St.

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Andrews where I went in Buffalo, New York. And there was some guest we had on recently who went to the same congregation, right?

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Yes. I can't remember well perhaps we'll remember later on.

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But before we go into the controversy surrounding the

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Episcopal Diocese of New York or at least of the

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Binghamton area in New York, if you could let our listeners know something about the

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Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton because of the fact that as you are fully aware there are all kinds of churches that go under the name

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Anglican or Episcopal and perhaps you could be very specific about this specific congregation that you, where you serve as the rector.

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Sure. Good Shepherd was originally just called the Church of the Good Shepherd, not

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Anglican, because it was part of the Episcopal Church originally. It was founded in 1873,

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I believe, and it for many, many years was the premier or one of the premier

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Anglo -Catholic parishes in the Episcopal Church. I could explain what that means later if you want me to, but not holding to a very reformed way of thinking about Anglicanism or Christianity in general.

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That would be like the Oxford movement, correct? Yes, precisely, precisely. I remember when

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I was called to Good Shepherd, I was looking through some old paperwork and I found a liturgy for the

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Adoration, the Blessed Sacrament, and I was kind of surprised. But that goes back to that history.

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And for many years it was the Diocese of Central New York was a faithful diocese, generally speaking, and only with the onset of,

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I guess, the wider liberal movement within mainline Protestantism did that begin to change. Early 20th century, later on, things kept getting worse.

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I think we had a bishop 20 or 30 years before my coming to the diocese who had an affair with one of his pastor's wives and ended up marrying her after causing the divorce.

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It was a big scandal, but everyone kind of got over it. And the diocese, by the time

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I arrived in 2002, was very far left -leaning theologically and politically in every other way you can imagine.

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Very few people, there were some, out of a diocese of maybe almost a hundred congregations,

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I think there were probably seven or eight that were, you might consider, Orthodox. Interestingly, Good Shepherd was not among them.

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By that time, my parish had become really kind of milquetoast, no real...

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it wasn't Anglo -Catholic anymore. It had become what Anglicans might think of as broad church, and the idea is you just kind of go to church on Sunday mornings, you have relatively nice liturgy and music, you have a 10 -minute terminet, and then you go home, and that's about it.

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And the main draw, I guess, to a congregation like that is the community and the relationships you have there.

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But that's essentially what I found when I got to Good Shepherd. And there was still an interesting...

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and this is what you'll find in a lot of Episcopal churches, a great deal of respect for authority, clerical authority, that is.

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So there was a sense that being a faithful Christian meant going to church every

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Sunday, which I would agree with, and obeying the bishop, which in general I would agree with, but when you lose the doctrinal foundation for that, then you're open to being led astray, and that's what had happened at my church.

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You lose the biblical grounding, and you are ultimately open to all kinds of false teaching.

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And so anyway, when I got there, we started at the ground level. We put

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Bibles in the pews, which caused a big ruckus. There weren't any before that. Isn't that amazing, that putting

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Bibles in the pews would cause a ruckus? Well, it is. They didn't want to be like the

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Baptists, they said. Wow. Yeah. So we put them in there. Well, at least we have a good reputation as Baptists.

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I happen to be a Baptist. Yes, yes. So we started preaching expositionally.

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I remember when I was interviewed for the church, one of the junior wardens asked, how long do you preach?

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And I had been trained, and Episcopal seminaries were great at this, I'd been trained to preach a 12 -minute sermon.

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So I answered very carefully, and I said, well, I can preach 12 minutes. I didn't say

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I would. And so anyway, we started preaching expositionally, we started a whole bunch of Bible studies and things.

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Spirits began turning around and perish from that point. However, that was 2002, and in 2003 is when the greatest controversy, anyway, to that point broke loose, when

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Gene Robinson, who was a partnered homosexual man, was elected or confirmed as bishop by the

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National Church. And we'll get to that as a part of our primary focus today, but to describe your church today, or I shouldn't say your church,

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I have an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor friend that always rebukes me if I use words like my church.

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He'll say, it's not your church, it's the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. I have to keep remembering it. The church where you serve as a rector,

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I know that it is a Thirty -Nine Articles Church, it's a traditionalist

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Protestant Anglican Church, correct? Yes. And I say that because there is controversy as to, there are some

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Anglicans who defiantly refuse to identify themselves as Protestant, and in fact, some of them would be correct that they're not really historically

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Protestant in their doctrinal makeup, but as I was saying earlier, there are different branches of the

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Anglican Church or Episcopal Church that go to all of the extremes and everything in between.

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You have, most people today, when they hear Episcopal or Anglican, they immediately associate that with liberalism and even apostasy, people who are in favor of same -sex marriage, people who are in favor of the ordination of homosexuals, people who are pro -abortion, and you can go on and on.

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And then on the other extreme, you also have a lot of people who may assume automatically, oh they're just like Catholics without a

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Pope. Very high church Oxford movement, Romish, Anglicans.

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My father's mother's side of the family were

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Episcopalians and Anglicans, and I could tell my grandmother, having many conversations with her before she went home to heaven,

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I could tell that she was from more of a low church Protestant Episcopalian background, but her priest, when she moved in with my family, was a very high church

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Oxford movement priest who went by the name of Father, who prayed the

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Hail Mary, who believed in transubstantiation, and you know many other things, who would teach or who would inform my grandmother, if you ever go on vacation anywhere and there is not an

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Episcopal Church available to you, go to the Roman Catholic Church, you would actually tell her to do that.

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But then you have folks like you who are more closely aligned with historic

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Anglicanism as far as Archbishop Thomas Cramner, the 39 articles and etc.

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If you could explain that. Well yes, if you study the formularies of the

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Anglican Church coming out of the Reformation, and by those I mean the foundational documents that are the basis for Anglican belief, you study the 39 articles, the prayer book 1662, the homilies, what you'll find is a thoroughly

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Reformed foundation, theologically speaking. Now there is there's some room within that foundation for some minor disagreements between people who might lean more toward Lutheran ways of thinking about things and people who might lean more toward Augustinian Calvinist way of thinking of things, but it's thoroughly

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Reformed. And I think what happened is, I think a while back you properly identified one of the major turning points, which was in the 19th century and the

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Tractarian movement, which interestingly, they weren't at first trying to overturn the articles, they were trying to reinterpret the articles in a less

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Reformed way, kind of a revisionist movement, I would argue, of the articles.

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And it was successful in a popular sense, and unsuccessful, I think, in an objective sense.

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I don't think they made their arguments well at all. But that did begin this kind of bifurcation within Anglicanism, between those who are on the more

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Reformed side and those who are on the more Anglo -Catholic side. One thing you don't want to do, though, and this is a common mistake people make, is that they can look at the liturgy externally and make judgments about theology internally.

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So you can have, and there were even up until the beginning of the Anglo -Catholic movement, there were high

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Church Anglicans who had very Reformed commitments. So you would find some of the investments in some of the liturgy, not of course the more idolatrous forms, but some aspects of high liturgy that looked

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Roman Catholic. But you would find men who had very strong and firm

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Reformed credentials, and who were not afraid of preaching it. Right, that's even true amongst some

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Presbyterian congregations. Yes, yes, that's a great analogy.

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So you would have, you already had a kind of distinction in liturgy even before the Anglo -Catholic movement began.

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But when the Anglo -Catholic movement began, many of, not many, but some of the high Church people moved over, not just with regard to their liturgy, but with regard to their theology as well, and some of the non -negotiables before, adherence to the

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Five Solas, for example, became non -negotiable, things that people openly rejected.

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And you know, once you have a Church, I think, where, once you have a communion where the foundational standards are no longer required to be upheld, then that's going to leave you open to all kinds of different movements.

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So whereas those who identified themselves as Anglo -Catholic would hold Orthodox views on Christology and on the

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Scriptures and on the Trinitarian nature of God, that space opened up room for less

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Orthodox movements in the future. And by that, I mean, of course, the influx of liberalism in the late 19th, early 20th century, and then in the mid -20th century, the

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Charismatic movement, which I wouldn't say, I don't mean to say that all my Charismatic friends are not Orthodox or believers, I don't mean that at all, but you did have some of the excesses with the

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Charismatic movement outside the Episcopal Church, entering into the Episcopal Church in the 50s and 60s.

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Do you know what surprised me, getting to know some

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Charismatic Episcopals, there is even the denomination, as you know, the Charismatic Episcopal Church, it surprised me getting to know not only congregants within those fellowships, but even the clergy amongst them.

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I was surprised that they were not more discernibly Protestant.

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They actually tend, the folks that I have met, tend to lean a lot more closely toward Anglo -Catholic belief and practice in the

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Charismatic movement amongst the Episcopalians. That is interesting. Some people like to talk about Anglicanism in the modern day, and by Anglicanism, I mean

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Orthodox Anglicanism, as being a three -streamed entity.

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So you have the Anglo -Catholics on one side, you have the Evangelicals slash Reformed on the other, and you have the

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Charismatics. But in practice, it doesn't work out that way, because the Charismatic group kind of bleeds into both.

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Some are Evangelical, identify themselves as Evangelical, others identify themselves more along the high church,

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Anglo -Catholic side of things. And there are some who kind of see the Charismatic movement as a way of blending all three streams together, and having one church with all three different, with aspects of all three different streams.

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I don't see how that works, but there are some who move for that.

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But yeah, it's not a, the Charismatic movement in Anglicanism is not merely an

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Evangelical thing, it's an Anglo -Catholic thing as well. And as far, going back to the

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Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, are you more toward the

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Calvinistic side, or the Lutheran side? I know that you would be more traditionally

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Protestant than Anglo -Catholic, but if you could tell us more specifically about your theology. We, I am,

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I'm Calvinist. I'm thoroughly Reformed in my viewpoint, and you know, because I was the first rector of Good Shepherd with that mentality and that worldview,

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I didn't, my first move wasn't to move the furniture around. I just kind of kept the liturgy as it was, which was fairly high, and if you were to come to Good Shepherd on a

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Sunday morning, you'd probably be shocked to know that I was a Calvinist. But I didn't want to, I thought the most important thing was to preach the

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Gospel, and to get people into the scriptures, and so I felt like if I moved the furniture around while trying to do that, it wouldn't work.

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So we maintained the liturgy that we had, and it's a pretty high liturgy still, but we are,

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I think the people who come to Good Shepherd, although they might not know they're

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Calvinist, would identify with Calvinist and Reformed teaching.

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And before we go to your actual testimony, because I even want to get back to your childhood and so forth, for a summary of your journey to the place where you are now, theologically and ecclesiologically and so on, even the conservative

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Anglican movement has disagreements over the ordination of women and so on.

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Where would your church stand on that? That's been a, it kind of blends back with my own personal journey coming out of seminary.

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My wife, when I was in seminary, I was much more liberal than I am today. And my wife is ordained, she was as well, because she was coming out of that kind of a seminary we were going to.

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It would be, I guess, characterized as more liberal evangelical, if those two words can go together.

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You seem to be going together a lot more than I care for these days. Exactly. So actually, the dispute over Gene Robinson and the homosexuality question served to push both me and my wife into a much more traditionalist mindset with regard to that.

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Complementarian? Yes, we're very complementarian, yes, I would definitely say that. And just how that works out in practice has been a journey.

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We came to complementarianism, I would say, about five or six years ago, and that changed a lot about how we play things out in the church.

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So I noticed that your wife specifically has passed oral duties over women and children in the church.

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Yes, absolutely. That's how we describe her role at this point. And I'm assuming one of the reasons why the liberalism caused you to leave an egalitarian view of the gender roles is because the hermeneutics used by the liberals to basically arrive at their liberal and often apostate conclusions are very often the same hermeneutics used to justify female clergy, even naively by professedly conservative

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Christians at times. That does seem to happen. I do think there's a group within the

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ACNA, which is the Anglican break -off from the Episcopal Church, who

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I do think try to make the argument for egalitarianism from a biblical standpoint.

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I don't think they succeeded that, but from my perspective, when I had to rethink a lot of things because of the debate over homosexuality and just go back to the

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Scriptures again and again, and that for me anyway is what made me come to the point of saying

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I can't be an egalitarian any longer. And I think that some people are going to come to that place ultimately.

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Now I'd like to know a bit about your youth, your upbringing, what kind of religion you were raised in, if any, and how you eventually became not only a

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Protestant Anglican, but also a Calvinist and an adherent of the

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Thirty -Nine Articles of Religion and so on. What was the journey that took place from your cradle to where you are now?

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I was born in Mississippi and I was raised in Texas, and I went to All Saints Episcopal Church from the time that I was about,

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I think, three years old. My mom was not a Christian at the time, neither was my father, and one day a

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Methodist who lived right next door to my parents when I was about three, or maybe older than that, maybe about two years old, knocked on my mom's door, our door, with a big black

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Bible in her hand and sat down at our coffee table and shared the gospel with my mom.

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And that day my mom committed her life to Christ, and my dad didn't, my mom did, and my mom, knowing that I had already been going to the

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Episcopal day school, I was again two or three, so she decided to just go to the church that had sponsored the day school, which is

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All Saints Episcopal. And so I was raised there from the time I was three all the way through high school, and it was a, at that time, it was very, it was a kind of run -of -the -mill, prostanty, low church,

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Episcopal Church, not, it wasn't liberal yet. Now they have pictures of, in the chapel they built, they have pictures of Buddha and Shiva and Vishnu, and Muhammad.

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At that point it wasn't crazy, it was fairly run -of -the -mill. I was raised an

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Episcopalian, and I was raised by a Christian mother, not a Christian father. I was not a Christian, though. I liked the church, and I enjoyed the time that I spent there, and I liked my pastor, but I didn't,

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I didn't, I wasn't really interested in anything they were saying. And if I heard the gospel,

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I didn't hear it. And so I spent most of my time, especially in my teenage years, kind of drifting off during church.

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And I went to college, and I had already been kind of living the kind of party lifestyle in high school, and in college, that got worse.

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And along with that, I went on a kind of intellectual journey where, kind of a classic thing when you're a freshman in college, you just question everything.

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So I thought I was an atheist for a while, and I thought I was an agnostic for a while, and I thought

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I was a theist for a while. And by the time I got out of college, I was still pretty confused.

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My mom was sending me books, though, throughout the time that I was there, and she knew I liked to read.

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She knew I was intellectually interested, and so she'd send me things by C .S. Lewis and different apologetics works.

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And of course, I know she was praying for me during that time. And it was about a year, I guess, after I graduated that I actually heard a sermon.

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I was on the way to graduate school for history. I didn't ever get the degree, but I was in Houston taking some classes.

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I happened to hear a sermon by R .C. Sproul, and it was a radio show.

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And it was the first time I'd actually heard the gospel explained. And before that time, I had believed that the gospel was,

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Jesus came to show us how to be good people, you know, be a good person like Jesus. And then, you know, then you go to heaven, right?

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But this is the first time I heard, no, no one's good. You're not good. You can't be good enough to go to heaven, and that's why

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God sent His Son to do what you couldn't do. And you need Him. You need to repent and turn to Him. And that struck me like a lightning bolt.

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I didn't do anything about it yet, but that really started turning over my mind and my heart. And I would think about a month later, after a big crisis, my girlfriend left me for a

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French guy, which, if you're from Texas, that doesn't work. Anyway, there was a big crisis in my life, and so I woke up one morning and I got on my knees and turned my life over to Christ and asked

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His forgiveness, and my life hadn't been the same since. Praise God. Well, we're gonna go to a break right now.

27:26

If anybody would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

27:35

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the USA. And please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter.

27:44

I could easily see how a subject like this might lend to someone wanting to remain anonymous because of their own personal experiences in and out of Episcopalianism and Anglicanism.

27:57

So we will honor your request if you want to remain anonymous, but otherwise, if it's just a general question, please identify yourself with at least first name, city and state, and country.

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We are going to be right back, God willing, right after these messages, so don't go away.

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32:37

This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is

32:44

Matt Kennedy, Rector of the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, and we are addressing the subject,

32:52

The Liberal Episcopalian War Against Biblical Anglicans and How a Historic 19th

32:58

Century Church Became a Mosque. In studio with me is my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor, and if you have questions you can join us on the air with a question of your own at ChrisArnson at gmail .com

33:11

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Well Matt, I know that you at one time, you and the congregation of the

33:23

Church of the Good Shepherd gathered for worship on Conklin Avenue at the historic structure that had been there since 1879 and eventually, astonishingly, the

33:40

Diocese of Central New York, Episcopal Diocese of Central New York rather than have it remain in your hands, had the building, the structure, sold to a group of Muslims and specifically

33:57

Imam Muhammad Afifi and the building is now the

34:03

Islamic Awareness Center and the thing that's also astonishing is that the building, from what

34:09

I understand, was sold for a mere $50 ,000 even though the the building and property were assessed at $386 ,400.

34:22

Now this is quite astonishing. Tell us about what were the steps along the way that actually basically wound up in this shocking result.

34:36

It was a long process. We, when the, after the 2003

34:42

Convention, when Gene Robinson again, the partner to homosexual men, was confirmed as bishop, we along with other

34:50

Orthodox churches bound together in what was called the Anglican Communion Network. At that time we were still wanting to stay in the

34:59

Episcopal Church and we were hoping that pressure from outside the Episcopal Church, from the worldwide

35:05

Anglican Communion, might bring about a kind of national repentance on the part of the leaders and our bishops and the leaders of our of our denomination.

35:14

But there was a three -year break between each convention and so in those three years, in 2003 and in 2006, we kind of held tight.

35:24

We, I told, Vetri and I told our bishop we would prefer for him not to come and preach at our church or to celebrate

35:32

Communion. He was one of those who voted in favor of Gene Robinson's confirmation.

35:40

Interesting, I think I've mentioned in my email to you a conversation with him. I asked him how he could possibly vote the way he did and he said, well, you know,

35:48

I prayed about it and I just really felt the Holy Spirit leading me to do that. And I said, well, you know the texts

35:55

I'm going to show you, you know, Romans 1, 1st Corinthians 6, 9, and he said, yes,

36:01

I know those texts but the Jesus I know in my heart wouldn't wouldn't have inspired those to be written.

36:08

Wow. So the Jesus that the church globally has known for 2 ,000 years was a different Jesus than the one in his heart, obviously, but he would rather listen to the one in his heart than the one that has been guiding the church and saving souls for 2 ,000 years.

36:25

Right. And actually saving souls ever since there were souls to be saved. Right. Well, I mean, the mentality among most bishops in the

36:34

Episcopal Church at that time, and most especially now, was the Bible represents

36:39

God's Word to people in the past and we are God's people in the present, and so that's just their understanding of him, and we have our own understanding of him, and the

36:49

Spirit's going to lead us in new ways. This is one of those new ways that he's leading us in.

36:56

So, anyway, after that meeting, you know, we really definitely made some distinction, wanted to make a division or distinction between the diocese and ourselves, so he did graciously agree not to preach and not to celebrate communion at our church.

37:10

He had been required by canon to visit every three years. He kind of held off on too much of that, and we waited until 2006, and in 2006, the

37:21

Episcopal Church doubled down. They elected Kevin Jeffords Shorey as presiding bishop, who is one of the most liberal members of the

37:30

Church, or of the House of Bishops, to be the presiding bishop. That's the head mucky -muck of the

37:37

Episcopal Church, and they also passed a few resolutions that confirmed the earlier position of being in favor of civil partnerships and of partnered clergy.

37:52

And after that convention, we met with the bestery. We said, you know, we can't go forward any longer in the past if the

38:02

Episcopal Church is going. Our relationship with the bishop, interesting, was still cordial.

38:08

He respected us, we felt, and we respected him as a person, so we wanted to try and make it as peaceful as possible.

38:19

And so while we wanted, we definitely wanted out, we wanted to get out in a way that would honor him for his graciousness toward us.

38:30

There is, in the Episcopal Church, something called the Dennis Canon. It was passed in 1979, which, by a single vote, effectively said all parish property is held in trust for the diocese.

38:44

There wasn't a lot of debate when it was passed. I don't think people understood their implications, but essentially that canon gave the diocese ownership of everybody's churches.

38:55

It had only been challenged once, and some people within the

39:02

Episcopal Church on the conservative side were pretty confident that it could be challenged in court and overturned.

39:09

But we didn't want to go that route yet. We wanted to see if we could negotiate a way out, so he made an offer. We began this process of negotiation.

39:17

The bishop was on board with this process. He knew we were planning to leave.

39:23

We even gave him the date that we were going to leave, and we hoped to have a kind of framework for an agreement by that date.

39:30

We made, um, we tried to make an offer before our departure, which is in 2007. He stopped us and said, no, you can't make an offer to buy the property yet because, or to, what he would say, purchase the property, we would say, let us go, because you're still part of the

39:47

Episcopal Church. You have to wait until you leave the Episcopal Church, then you can make the offer. I was a little bit worried about that because, you know, once you leave, then they, legally, they're not, then, if they want to apply the denis canon, they're not bound to make any agreement with us.

40:06

They could just take the property if they, if they want to just apply the denis canon, but he kind of assured us that our leaving was going to be the beginning of negotiating over, over money.

40:17

So we left, and just as I feared, immediately the tone changed with the bishop in the office in Central New York, which is in Syracuse.

40:28

We made our offer. It was rejected flatly. The first offer was $150 for just the church building.

40:35

He said it was appraised at $386, but that was including my parsonage, my directory. So, but just the building itself,

40:43

I think, was appraised at close to $200, $250. We made it, we made it an offer of $150 with, saying we could pay more as time went on.

40:54

This is what we can give you right now, and then if you give us some time, we can pay more. We just got a flat no.

41:01

Okay, well, we kind of, we asked for a counter offer. They wouldn't give one. We made another offer, which is more generous and more just trying to do anything we could to please, and we got another flat no.

41:19

We didn't understand what had happened, so we asked for a meeting with the bishop, and we'd met with him before in his office, and it had been very cordial.

41:29

It took a while to get the meeting arranged. They wouldn't agree to it at first, but then finally they said, okay. So I went up to Syracuse with two of my two wardens, and instead of, as usual, being ushered into the bishop's office and sitting in his couch next to his nice window and fireplace, we were ushered into the library where he was sitting with his chancellor, the diocesan chancellor, and a local attorney, and we were given essentially six weeks to vacate, and there's no negotiation about it.

42:03

Wow. Yeah, yeah. So we had no choice.

42:08

We couldn't. We had no resources at that time to leave with, because they were just claiming the property.

42:15

They were also claiming the assets. That's all that you have in the bank, all your endowments, everything that you have belongs to them, basically.

42:24

So if we were to take the six week offer, we would have nowhere to go and nothing in our pockets at all.

42:31

Wow. And yeah, so we decided to defend ourselves. We didn't think that we were violating 1

42:39

Corinthians 6 because we didn't think we were being sued by brothers and sisters at that point.

42:46

They did, in keeping with their word, file a lawsuit six weeks later.

42:53

We were able to maintain ourselves during that time because fortunately our insurance covered our legal costs, which is a huge blessing.

43:00

I mean, we couldn't have done it without that. And so we were basically able to function as normal throughout the time of the lawsuit, which is about two years.

43:11

And meanwhile, while the lawsuit was going on, our parishioners saved money in a nonprofit account, unconnected to the church, and they stopped tithing to the church so that in the case that we lost the lawsuit, the money they had saved wouldn't be turned over to the

43:33

Episcopal Church or the diocese. It would be ours. But since they started removing their tithe, we had to use up the remaining resources to pay my salary and pay other bills around the church.

43:48

So for two years, we were doing that. We were surviving, maintaining ourselves. In 2009, after a pretty extensive, long, embroiled mass, the court ruled against us in pretty strong terms.

44:05

The reading of the judgment was such that if the

44:13

Episcopal Church had wanted to come that day and evict me and my family from the house we were living in and lock the doors of the church, they could.

44:23

They didn't, graciously. And so we had some time to pack up our house and pack up the things that belonged to us anyway in the church.

44:34

But we still didn't know where we were going. We had no... We did have that money that we'd saved up in the two years, but we didn't know where we'd go, not just for the church, but also for my family.

44:45

We thought maybe we'd be living in an apartment for a while. We didn't know. But about the second day of packing, a

44:52

Roman Catholic priest in the area, Monsignor Mehar, called.

44:58

He'd read the newspaper, and they had just merged two Catholic churches in the area, and the one that they had left behind,

45:09

St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church, was vacant, and it had a rectory or a parsonage on property, a very large building, a school building, a parking lot, and Father Mehar said, look, why don't you and your family move into the house this week?

45:26

Don't worry about anything, we can talk about utilities or whatever later on, but you won't have to pay any rent. Just move on in.

45:34

And we were so thankful. It was such a

45:41

They had just left the month before we moved in, so it was just an amazing timing.

45:47

Yeah. Yeah, and the first week out we worshipped in a gym at Cochran Avenue Baptist Church, also very gracious.

45:56

They called us right away to see what they could do. Well I'm glad some Baptists were also gracious, and it wasn't just the

46:01

Catholics. Or by then, no one had a problem with Baptists anymore.

46:15

So yeah, we worshipped at the former Roman Catholic Church the next Sunday, and that was eventually the church that we purchased, and that's where we are today.

46:25

Praise God. Yeah. And this is really astonishing.

46:32

I want to know what, if anything, they were giving to you as reasons for this hostility and for this obvious plan that they had, this orchestrated plot to not allow you even to purchase the building and property.

46:54

They wanted you out of there. They didn't want to have any connection between you and that historic building.

47:03

What were the reasons they were actually giving you? It's interesting. I mean, Catherine de

47:08

Verschoy, the presiding bishop, had a seemingly very different philosophy about these things than her predecessor did.

47:15

She was much more forceful, and she, in a sense, ordered bishops in the

47:23

Episcopal Church not to allow any church to depart. And her reasoning was, well, we've got to protect the brand, that's one.

47:30

We are the Anglican Church in North America, and we can't allow these pretenders, these counterfeits, to take churches that our ancestors bought and paid for and use them for nefarious purposes like orthodoxy or the gospel.

47:51

We've got to keep them from taking it. So their argument was a branding issue, but also an appeal to tradition.

48:02

Well, our forefathers were faithful Episcopalians who would have stuck with the

48:07

Episcopal Church through thick and thin, and these upstarts are betraying the heritage of our fathers.

48:15

Wow, who is really betraying the heritage of their fathers? Right, well, you would think that that argument would not fly with too many people, but if you consider the state of theological education in the pews in the

48:31

Episcopal Church at the time, I would say that the biblical depth and training of the average

48:40

Episcopalian parishioner was, I mean, it's embarrassing. It was just so bad.

48:47

Very few people knew what was between Genesis and Revelation, I can tell you. So arguments like that have an appeal.

48:54

If all you have is tradition and liturgy and and bishops and fancy robes, then yeah, the

49:05

Episcopal Church has made a decision to love more people and invite more people in and include more people, and here these rebels are trying to exclude people and use our ancestors' money to do it.

49:16

Yeah, and let's instead sell the building to those folks that are known for being so liberal in their inclusion of homosexuals and people with other leftist ideas.

49:29

Oh yes, like the Muslims. Doesn't make any sense at all.

49:35

It's obvious this is disingenuous, and this was just an act of vengeance. Oh, I do think there was some, maybe some malice here too, because at the time

49:45

I was writing for a blog called Stand Firm, which is one of, it's right now, it's on hiatus, but for a long time it was one of the premier, if not the premier,

49:56

Anglican Orthodox blogs, and I'd been there in 2006 and I had live -blogged some committee meetings that they didn't want live -blogged, and so I think there were, at the

50:09

General Convention that year, so I think there was some animosity toward me personally that sadly my parish had to pay for, and it would serve it would serve them well to have me upended in that way.

50:24

But I don't know, I can't, I don't want to judge motives, but the malice was evident, and the question is where, what was the source of it, not that it was there.

50:35

Now did they ever try to explain their logic in the fact that Islam is known to be even more strict, in many cases, in their opposition to all things liberal, and the fact that they viewed you and your congregation as imposters, this is the ongoing oxymoronic thing that we see in the news every day, where the liberals will come to the defense of folks adhering to a religion that if Sharia law were ever to win the day here in the

51:27

United States, all of these liberals would lose every one of their rights to speak freely and behave freely according to their liberal ideology.

51:35

It makes absolutely no sense. Oh I agree, I agree, but there was no attempt to reconcile it, because I think, one, this is 2007 -2008, and I don't think that too many people were really thinking that Islam could ever be that much of a problem within the

51:53

United States. I think there's more awareness of it now. But even taking that aside, do they think you were going to take over the

52:01

United States? I mean, what's, well, that's not even a logical...

52:07

Right, okay, so from, I think, from the Episcopal Church perspective, the most important thing is for their brand to be seen as tolerant, and to be seen as open and affirming.

52:20

And just setting aside, I know it's illogical to do so, but setting aside what Islam actually teaches, that openness has to be universal.

52:30

You have to receive the person who identifies as homosexual as you receive the person who identifies as Muslim, and all are equal, equally open, or equally, we should be open to all and everything.

52:49

And so, and I think it's important to be seen, from the Episcopal perspective, to be seen that way.

52:55

So for them, I think selling a church to a mosque is a selling point.

53:02

Look, look how inclusive we are, look how multicultural we are. Whereas for the person who's thinking reasonably, it just seems, like you said, optimistic.

53:14

Right. Well, we have to go to a break right now, and a number of people have already emailed questions, and they are waiting for their questions to be asked and answered by you.

53:25

And if any more of you listening would like to join them with questions of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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01:02:03

This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with about an hour to go, is

01:02:08

Matt Kennedy, rector of the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York.

01:02:14

We are discussing the liberal Episcopalian war against biblical Anglicans and how a historic 19th century church became a mosque.

01:02:23

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

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Please always give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the

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USA, and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter that you are asking about.

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And before we return to the subject at hand, I have some important announcements to make for our sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio regarding upcoming events.

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The Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York is pleased to announce that the Word of Truth Bible Institute will be offering two free classes this summer, the

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Book of Romans and Old Testament Survey. The final Romans class will meet on July 26th from 7 to 9 p .m.

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and the Old Testament Survey classes that remain will meet from July 20th through the 21st, that's starting tonight at 7 p .m.

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and will continue through 9 p .m. The Word of Truth Church is located at 1055

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I actually miss my travels there. And registration is required by Pastor Bruce Bennett by calling

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that's W -O -T, which stands for Word of Truth, church .com, wotchurch .com.

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And then coming up in August, just around the corner, from August 3rd through the 5th, in Reverend Buzz Taylor's old stomping grounds in Maine, the

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Fellowship Conference New England is being held at the Deering Center Community Church on Brentwood Street in Portland, Maine.

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And the speakers at that event include Pastor Don Curran, who is the

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Eastern European Coordinator with HeartCry Missionary Society, which is the organization founded by Paul Washer, my dear friend

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Pastor Mack Tomlinson, who is an author and pastor of Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas, Pastor Jesse Barrington, who has also been on this program, a pastor of Grace Life Church in Dallas, Texas, the sister church of Grace Life Church in Lake City, Florida, who has a radio station airing

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio every day in a pre -recorded form, Pastor Nate Pickowitz, who is an author, he wrote the book

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Reviving New England, and also his new book is Why We're Protestant, and he is also the pastor of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmanton Ironworks, New Hampshire.

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If you would like to register for this conference, go to fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, fellowshipconferencenewengland .com.

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And then coming up in November from the 17th through the 18th in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, the

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Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology on the theme,

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For Still Our Ancient Foe, a reference to Satan from Martin Luther's classic hymn,

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A Mighty Fortress. Speakers include Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant.

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This will be held, as I said, November 17th through the 18th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

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If you'd like to register, go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org, click on events, then click on Quakertown Conference on Reformed Theology.

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Then coming up in January from the 17th through the 20th, the

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G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia. I will be having, God willing, an exhibitor's booth there as well to represent

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Iron Sherpa and Zion. The first day, the 17th of January, is specifically and exclusively a

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Spanish -speaking conference. And then from the 18th through the 20th, the conference will be conducted exclusively in English.

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The theme is Knowing God, a Biblical Understanding of Discipleship. And the speakers include

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Stephen Lawson, Votie Balcom, Phil Johnson, Keith Getty, H .B. Charles Jr.,

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Tim Challies, Josh Bice, James R. White, Tom Askell, Anthony Mathenia, Michael Krueger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, and Martha Peace.

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If you'd like to register for the G3 Conference, go to g3conference .com, g3conference .com.

01:07:12

And now I am here to beg money from you, as my advertisers who are currently keeping this program on the air have urged me to do.

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01:09:18

And now we are back to our guest, Matt Kennedy, rector of the

01:09:24

Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York. And we are continuing to continuing our discussion on the liberal

01:09:32

Episcopalian war against biblical Anglicans and how a historic 19th century church became a mosque.

01:09:40

If you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com chrisarnsen at gmail .com

01:09:46

and we have a number of listeners who have questions. We have a first -time questioner on Ironsharpensirenradio.

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We have Michael from Amityville, Long Island, New York, the the town of my birth and the town where I lived most of my life before relocating to Pennsylvania.

01:10:08

Michael in Amityville has three questions. His first is, what denomination is this church now?

01:10:14

I believe this is a continuing Anglican church, not an ECUSA church.

01:10:22

That's correct, it's not an ECUSA, it's not the Episcopal Church. We left the Episcopal Church in 2007 and we joined what's called the

01:10:31

Anglican Church in North America, which is a new Anglican province. It's not part of what some people call the continuum, which is a group of churches that left in the 70s, mostly the 70s, over women's ordination.

01:10:46

The ACNA is a different thing, but it is not part of the Episcopal Church. The second question is, what liturgy are you using, the 1662 or 1928?

01:10:57

Well, the ACNA, which is our province we belong to now, has a doctrinal standard and that is that the 1662 are all prayer books that must be measured by and consistent with the 1662 prayer book.

01:11:13

And so the ACNA is now putting out a modern language version of an

01:11:19

Anglican liturgy that's consistent with that, and we're using that consistent liturgy, consistent with the 1662.

01:11:27

There are some churches in the ACNA who use the 1928, because that's also considered a book that's consistent with the 1662.

01:11:36

The 79 book, the newest prayer book the Episcopal Church still uses, is one that is being moved out, so that's no longer in use in many places.

01:11:47

And his third question, Michael's third question is, do you celebrate Holy Communion once a month or weekly?

01:11:55

We do it weekly. There are churches that do it monthly, but more and more more churches do it weekly than monthly.

01:12:05

Well, thank you very much, Michael, and since you are a first -time questioner, if you give me your full mailing address in Amityville, Long Island, you will receive a new

01:12:14

New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the NASB, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

01:12:25

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com, who will be shipping that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, so please give us your full mailing address and you should receive that new

01:12:38

NAS Bible in about a week or so. Thank you, and we hope you keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion and spreading the word about the program in Amityville, Long Island, and beyond.

01:12:49

We have Daniel from San Jose, California, and I'm going blind so I have to enlarge

01:12:58

Daniel's font here, and Daniel in San Jose, California, says,

01:13:04

Hello, brother, what would be some of the core differences and similarities between the

01:13:10

Reformed Anglican Church and the Reformed Baptist or Presbyterian churches? I think one of the big things

01:13:18

I might point to is the question of the regulative versus the normative principle of Scripture. This is what, you know, the normative principle says that the church is free to exercise its judgment with regard to polity and liturgy so long as that judgment doesn't conflict with the

01:13:43

Scriptures, whereas I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that most Presbyterian churches and Reformed Baptist churches would be regulative, is that correct?

01:13:54

Um, I don't know if most would in the 21st century. I mean, a lot of the more conservative ones would be, but there are also very conservative

01:14:04

Reformed Baptists that do not adhere to the regulative principle, so it's hard to say for me.

01:14:09

I'm not an expert on that. I would say that it's pretty uniform as far as Reformed Anglicans go, that we're not regulative, we're normative, and that's been the case historically.

01:14:21

In fact, for our listeners who are unfamiliar with that term, basically, the regulative principle, and of course there are even different interpretations of it by different Christians and different denominations, but it's basically that if it is not specifically and implicitly there in the

01:14:39

Scripture that an act of worship is a part of the

01:14:45

God -breathed words in the very Bible that we have, a person who adheres to the regulative principle said that it should not be included in the worship service.

01:14:58

It doesn't mean that it should never be participated in certain things, but it's just not a part of the corporate -gathered people of God during worship services, and then you have some who even disagree over what that means, because you have some who take that to mean that we should not have musical instruments, in the gathered worship, because there are no musical instruments mentioned in the

01:15:20

New Testament other than those referring to heaven, and then you have those that even go further and say that we should only be singing the

01:15:26

Psalms, and some are also both strictly or exclusive Psalm singers and acapella adherents, so you have all different people in that.

01:15:38

Hello? Yes, I'm still here. I'm still here. No. Let's see, we have, oh, well, thank you,

01:15:49

Daniel, in San Jose, California, and keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, and keep spreading the word in California and beyond, and we have

01:15:58

Joe in Slovenia, who says, Dear Brother Chris, my knowledge of Episcopal polity is poor to non -existent.

01:16:07

Please ask Brother Kennedy to explain to us whether or not, and if so, in what ways, are decisions made by majorities of apostate

01:16:16

Anglican bishops binding on Orthodox Anglican bishops and churches?

01:16:24

We would say they're not. So, for example, the ACNA, we don't believe we have any apostate bishops in our province, and were they to become apostate, because we now have kind of returned to our formularies and our classic understanding of discipline, they would be excommunicated, and so they wouldn't hold authority.

01:16:46

Under the Episcopal Church, when Orthodox congregations were still there, and there are some still in the

01:16:53

Episcopal Church, some Orthodox congregations holding out, that's where the question becomes very dicey.

01:17:00

In some places, if you were under a bishop who is heretical, you wouldn't want to recognize his spiritual authority, but he still has a kind of legal authority over you, so how do you negotiate that?

01:17:15

And many churches have just done what we did, which is ask their bishop not to come, not to preach, not to celebrate communion, and kind of holding out until the next bishop comes and hoping for better.

01:17:26

But really, the problem is, if you're in that authority structure where the bishop is at the top, if the bishop goes bad, then you're in a lot of trouble.

01:17:36

You've got to find a way to distinguish, or to make a distinction between you and him or her, as the case may be.

01:17:43

So it's a real difficult question. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons we left, is because if I were to get run over by a bus, the bishop would have primary authority over determining whether or not my church, who my church could call, or I'm sorry, not my church, who the church, the congregation, calls my place, right?

01:18:04

Yeah, going back to that old rebuke by my Orthodox Presbyterian friend.

01:18:10

Right, right. Well, thank you, Joe, in Slovenia.

01:18:15

Keep spreading the word about Iron Trap and Zion Radio in Slovenia and beyond. And now we have a question from the individual

01:18:23

I mentioned earlier, Matt. I'm sorry, not Matt. You're Matt. Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who urged me to interview you over a year ago.

01:18:34

And I think he's making fun of me because he knows I'm going blind. And I'm not,

01:18:40

I don't mean that literally. I'm just getting older, and I'm having a hard, hard time seeing tiny emails.

01:18:46

And so he has given me, just like Bibles come in regular print and large print editions, he's given me two emails.

01:18:55

And his last one is a large print edition. So I could read it. He says, this is

01:19:01

Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, says, Matt, I met you and your wife Anne in 2007 at a conference in Charleston, South Carolina, at which time you were both wearing clericals.

01:19:14

I have inferred that at some point in the last 10 years, your wife renounced her ordination in accordance with 1

01:19:23

Timothy 2 .12. If I am correct about this, can you talk a bit about what that process was like for each of you?

01:19:33

We haven't, she hasn't renounced her ordination. She's still considered ordained.

01:19:38

She has stepped back from acting into function, or she hasn't, she doesn't function as a presbyter anymore. So part of the reason is we're not quite sure what to do about that yet.

01:19:47

But she doesn't function in that capacity. And that was a decision, you said 2007.

01:19:53

And we really came to a, I guess, a complimentary position,

01:19:59

I would say around 2009, 2010. And so, yeah, no,

01:20:05

I don't doubt that you saw that time with her collars on. Did you have big funny hats?

01:20:15

He didn't wear the funny hat. He just had the collars, right? Yeah, I've been learning a lot from your friend and colleague in ministry,

01:20:25

Richard LePage, about all the questions that he informed me about, the answers to many of my questions that I did not know for years, until just like a week ago when

01:20:39

Richard LePage was a really giving me an education about Episcopalianism and Anglicanism.

01:20:48

He's a great guy. And he's very, very informed about the history of reformed thought and Anglicanism.

01:20:55

He's a great guy to talk to. One thing that really surprised me that I this really blew me out of the water, is that the reason why

01:21:02

Roman Catholic priests and clergy wear clerical collars, is that they actually adopted the practice by imitating

01:21:11

Protestant clergy wearing collars. And that if you go back in time, centuries ago,

01:21:19

Roman Catholic clergy did not wear those collars. Is that right? Yeah. Well, you know,

01:21:25

I just wanted to ask, too, though, because I know that there's a lot of Christian bookstores that have closed down and stuff like that.

01:21:33

And I've never seen those collars for sale anywhere. Where do you get those? You got to go online, get an order.

01:21:41

Oh, okay. Well, I've seen, I've seen stores. I've never seen them in stores. I've seen stores that are like choir robe and clerical garment store.

01:21:52

And all kinds of things that Richard, in fact, God willing, I would love to have. And in fact,

01:21:58

Richard would love eventually as well to have you, him and Henry Jansma on all simultaneously on the same program here on Iron Sharpens Iron.

01:22:09

That would be great. Henry Jansma also is just a thoroughly knowledgeable guy, brilliant when it comes to Anglicanism and theology in general.

01:22:21

So that would be a great show. Yeah. And I understand that you three started a podcast, which is on hold right now, but you intend to continue a podcast?

01:22:32

Yes, we do. We intend to continue at some point. Technical difficulty has gotten away, but we want to keep doing that.

01:22:39

And the idea behind the podcast is just to help inform Anglicans about the reformed heritage within Anglicanism. A lot of people who are not familiar with it.

01:22:47

Well, if anybody, I mean, I'll be repeating this God willing later, but if anybody wants to keep up to date on this podcast and any other information, you can go to Good Shepherd Bigamton .org.

01:23:05

That's Good Shepherd, B -I -N -G -H -A -M -T -O -N .org.

01:23:11

That's the website for the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, where our guest is the rector.

01:23:17

Yeah. And we have C .J. from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who wants to know,

01:23:26

I know that the history of Puritanism in the Church of England was not free from very serious conflict.

01:23:36

What are modern Anglicans who are trying to be historic, what are they teaching about Puritanism and the actual doctrines of the

01:23:45

Puritans? Do you uphold them as great sources of information and great teachers of the past, or do you have a similar disdain that your forefathers in the

01:23:57

Church of England held? I wouldn't say disdain. I think it's kind of a strong word there.

01:24:03

I would in fact point to a book by J .I. Packer that deals with the writings of the

01:24:11

Puritans. He loved the Puritans' writings, and he brought them back into vogue a little bit in Reform circles and Anglicanism.

01:24:18

You might also pick up something by Lee Gatiss. He's a historian in England. He also writes about the

01:24:25

Puritan controversy. There was a time in the Church of England, after the settlement, when the

01:24:34

Puritans were told to conform their worship to the

01:24:40

Church of England, and many of them refused and were kicked out of the Church. That's seen by many

01:24:45

Anglicans as a tragedy, not as a good thing. Maybe not many on the

01:24:51

Anglo -Catholic side, probably none on the Anglo -Catholic side, but many on the Reform side do see that as a real tragedy and not a question that should have been forced to the point that it was.

01:25:04

So I think the Puritans were wonderful. I think that the difference might be, again, going back to that question of normative versus regulative.

01:25:13

Many of the Puritans did hold firmly to a regulative view of Scripture, whereas most

01:25:20

Anglicans nowadays do not, and so that's one area of difference that I wouldn't personally want to follow them down that road.

01:25:29

At the same time, the riches and the depth of Puritan thought are invaluable, and we shouldn't ever jettison it.

01:25:38

I'm going to go to our final break right now, and if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

01:25:46

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

01:25:55

U .S .A., and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter that you are asking about, and please don't go away because,

01:26:07

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01:31:46

And welcome back to the program. We are continuing our discussion with about 25 minutes to go with our guest, who is the pastor of the

01:31:58

Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, and he is discussing something that is quite a shocking development that occurred not long ago.

01:32:10

The guest we are discussing this event with is Matt Kennedy, rector of the

01:32:17

Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, and the theme of our program has been the liberal Episcopalian war against biblical

01:32:24

Anglicans and how a historic 19th century church became a mosque.

01:32:29

If you'd like to join us on the air before we run out of time, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:32:36

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And we have a question from our friend in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

01:32:48

His name is Gordy, and he asks, would your church fall into the category of Sydney Anglicanism?

01:32:59

He's referring to Sydney, Australia, of course. I think theologically, yes.

01:33:06

Liturgically, no. My friend David Old, who I think has been on this show before. Yes, he has. He came to visit us, and I believe his congregation, he doesn't vest.

01:33:17

He doesn't put on any vestments at all. He is wearing clothing, though, correct? Yes, he does wear clothing.

01:33:25

He was shocked by the vestments and the liturgy that we had.

01:33:35

So we don't have the same kind of worship style, but the theology is indistinguishable,

01:33:41

I think. I'm surprised that he was shocked by it, because even though he doesn't participate that way,

01:33:47

I would think that he would assume that that would be the norm of most

01:33:52

Anglican churches. We're not in Sydney. In Sydney, the norm is you don't vest.

01:33:58

You could walk in and think you're walking into a Baptist church. That's always a good thing.

01:34:07

I'm just assuming that he knew that they were unique, though, as far as that is concerned, as far as the

01:34:14

Sydney Anglicans. I do think that, but I think for people, for Reform people in England, Reform Anglicans in England and Australia and New Zealand, the word

01:34:23

Reform tends to me to be associated strongly with very low liturgy.

01:34:29

So he knew, leaving college, he knew I was Reform. He knew that I had a quote -unquote high church, but I don't think he understood what that meant.

01:34:38

I think that's what's surprising to him. Yeah, I remember years ago in the 1980s when

01:34:44

I was a new believer and I went to the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology, which became an annual treat for me.

01:34:53

I remember one year they had a Sydney, Australia, Anglican preacher there, and I think it was either

01:35:02

St. Matthias or Matthew. I can't remember exactly right now, but he actually, in his message, he was wearing a business suit, and he was actually being very strongly critical of wearing clerical garments.

01:35:16

It was kind of an eye -opener for me. I never even knew that there would be an Anglican that would do that. Right, there are ducks over there in Australia.

01:35:29

Matt, I'm sorry, I keep calling him Matt. You're Matt. Gordy in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, has a second question.

01:35:37

What role and authority, if any, does the Book of Common Prayer play in your church? We had

01:35:42

Michael in Amityville asking about the Book of Common Prayer, as far as which edition you use, but this is a specific question about the authority that it plays, if any.

01:35:53

Well, for Anglicans, theology is not only something that we affirm in a confessional way, through the

01:36:00

Articles, our doctrine, but our doctrine is also taught in what we pray. So we want to pray things that are consistent with Scripture, and consistent with our understanding of what

01:36:12

Scripture says is articulated in our confessions. So that makes the prayer book central to our doctrinal belief.

01:36:22

We don't want to gather together and just kind of spontaneously say whatever comes into our heads. We would rather come together and pray

01:36:31

God's words back to Him in keeping with our understanding of them. So the prayer book is,

01:36:37

I would say, an indispensable part of true Anglican worship.

01:36:43

A faithful prayer book, that is. Well, thank you, Gordy, and continue listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, and spreading the word about the program in Mechanicsburg and beyond, and keep listening, keep sending in those great questions.

01:36:56

BB in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, wants to know, why is it that you are determined to remain connected with Anglicanism when there is so much negative baggage in the minds of the populace regarding that term, whether it be apostasy and liberalism on the left, or Romish idolatry and heresy on the right?

01:37:21

Well, I've not experienced too many people who have a negative understanding of Anglicanism yet, although that could change depending on what happens in the

01:37:31

Church of England. Well, what's already happened in the Church of England has been pretty bad. I have met a lot of people who have a negative understanding of what the

01:37:39

Episcopal Church stands for, and so that's why we made the concerted effort to identify ourselves as Anglican rather than Episcopalian.

01:37:47

You know, Chris, I think along the lines of the question there, we could say pretty much the same thing.

01:37:56

You know, why would I want to be considered a Presbyterian when there's, you know, all these liberal

01:38:02

Presbyterian denominations, and you as a Baptist, of course, there's all these liberal Baptist denominations and things.

01:38:08

So we're pretty much all in the same boat. The difference, I think, would be, though, that the imagery that is conjured up with the term

01:38:18

Baptist doesn't usually, especially if you're talking about your average unbeliever or average person who's not a

01:38:26

Protestant, or even some of the folks that are mainline Protestants, they would typically think of fundamentalists, really, rather than liberals.

01:38:36

But, and of course, the question that you just posed is very, or the statement that you made is very interesting, because I ask that sometimes of my friends who are biblically sound and conservative pastors in the

01:38:59

PCUSA, the Presbyterian Church, United States of America. They're a small remnant, but there is such a horrifying left -wing ideology being taught there that it makes, you know, makes me very squeamish.

01:39:12

Now let me ask you, Matt, in regard to that, you, although are the rector of an

01:39:21

Anglican church, it's not just any Anglican church, it's not associated with the ECUSA, the liberal dominant denomination of Episcopalians in the

01:39:30

United States. Do you think that a shepherd of God's people in good standing with God and in his right mind and in being faithful to the scriptures could be linked with a denomination like that, where he is actually associated with and under the authority of people who are adherents of homosexuality, people who are applauding and celebrating women's rights to murder their babies, and people who are even questioning, if not denying, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the virgin birth of Christ, and you could go on and on.

01:40:19

Whether the stories we have in the scriptures even ever happened, all these kinds of things that we are confronted with very often listening to Episcopal and Anglican clergy, and of course the most infamous example that immediately pops in my head is

01:40:37

Bishop John Shelby Spong, who's retired from his active duty as a bishop, but is still...

01:40:44

Old charlatan, yes. Yes. So what do you think about that? Is it either or?

01:40:51

Must a person who is a member of a clergy in any of these denominations that have really apostatized in many ways?

01:41:02

For me, in all good conscience, I couldn't stay, and there's no way I could keep my particular aspirin online, but the flock to which

01:41:11

I've been given care in that situation, I couldn't do it. However, that being said,

01:41:17

I don't think we can make a blanket statement about every single congregation and every single diocese.

01:41:23

There are some dioceses that are maintaining a faithful stanza. The Diocese of Albany, which is down the road from us, has an

01:41:33

Orthodox bishop who is actively protecting his diocese from the incursions of revisionists.

01:41:40

For a while, South Carolina was doing that. Dallas still does that to some extent. So there are some pockets where you can maintain a vibrant Orthodox stance without compromising and without hurting your flock.

01:41:56

Now, everything depends on who your bishop is. If you're under a revisionist bishop, that gets more and more difficult, and then

01:42:03

I think it would depend on how gracious your bishop is at the moment, and how long you think you're going to be there.

01:42:11

Because if you're going to leave anytime soon, and this is Bresley Dicey, your bishop then has final say over who your congregation calls to replace you.

01:42:23

And the succession question means that you could, even though you're a faithful pastor preaching the gospel, meeting your people in the right way, and your bishop agrees not to intervene in any way and kind of leave you alone, the minute you get run over by a bus or get shipped off to some other parish, that congregation is open to subversion.

01:42:45

And so that was ultimately the calculation that led me to leave. I couldn't stay knowing that.

01:42:54

And that having been said again, I do know some faithful Orthodox guys with whom

01:43:00

I disagree with them about their decision to stay, but I don't doubt their integrity.

01:43:07

And what can you tell us about the denomination known as the Reformed Episcopal Church?

01:43:14

I know it had noble beginnings, and I know some brothers who are in the pastorate in that denomination that are very biblically sound and faithful to the scriptures and faithful to the heritage of the

01:43:29

Reformation. But I have had also some unpleasant interaction with others in that denomination that really surprised the living daylights out of me, who were very

01:43:42

Romish. And I thought that that was one of the very reasons that the denomination was founded in the 19th century, to escape the

01:43:52

Oxford movement's clutches of the Episcopal Church. There are...the

01:43:58

REC is part of the ACNA, which is our denomination. They joined a few years back, and so all of their bishops are now part of the

01:44:06

College of Bishops in our denomination. You're right, though, that the Reformed, part of the

01:44:12

Reformed Episcopal Church certainly represents many, if not most, of the clergy there.

01:44:19

However, there are some movements, some worrisome movements within the

01:44:24

REC. There are some who are traveling either toward the

01:44:29

Bosphorus or toward the Tiber, depending on their orthodoxy, or toward Rome.

01:44:37

And yes, it's very worrying. There are some like that. I wouldn't characterize the entire group like that, though.

01:44:47

Yeah, that's why I made the clarification that I know some men that are outstanding.

01:44:54

I had an unfortunate experience years ago when my uncle, who is now deceased, but my uncle, who was a lifelong

01:45:06

Episcopalian but conservative. I don't know really how much he understood about the gospel itself, but he was a conservative person.

01:45:18

He found the liberal and leftist de -evolution of the

01:45:26

Episcopal Church very horrifying, and when he was considering converting to Catholicism, which unfortunately he ultimately did before he passed on,

01:45:38

I was trying to find an Anglican church in his area in the state of Washington that would be biblically faithful so that he would, instead of apostatizing and going into Rome, would be entering into a communion of believers that had his

01:45:56

Anglican traditions intact, but also were biblically faithful. And I called a

01:46:02

Reformed Episcopal pastor who identified himself as a as father, and when

01:46:10

I told him about my concerns about my uncle entering into apostasy in the

01:46:18

Church of Rome, he called me an idiot. And he said to me that he has more in common with his

01:46:24

Catholic brothers and sisters than morons like me who are Baptists. Oh my goodness, wow.

01:46:30

And I was shocked by that. It's not only theologically obtuse, it's pastorally...

01:46:37

This is ridiculous to say to somebody this morning, oh my goodness. Yeah, I know. I mean, I just didn't know that that existed in the

01:46:43

Reformed Episcopal Church until that moment. You got one of the bad eggs, I think. I know you didn't mean to do that at all, and I was the first thing you did, but that does not,

01:46:52

I think, characterize the vast majority of clergy you'll find in the REC. Yeah, I didn't think it did. It does represent some, sadly.

01:46:59

In fact, I said to him, well, you know, it seems to me that I'm more Episcopalian or Anglican than you are.

01:47:07

I said, I believe in the majority of the 39 articles of religion, and you seem to be clearly opposed to them because there is no way that somebody could be faithful to the 39 articles and be sympathetic to Romanism.

01:47:21

And he said to me, well, I am just thankful to God that that dusty old relic is barely held to by anyone in their right mind anymore.

01:47:34

Wow. Well, that goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of the show. First, the

01:47:40

Tractarians were trying to reinterpret the 39 articles to make them more amenable to Romanist understandings of things.

01:47:47

And now, later, as time went on, fewer people even made the attempt and just wanted to discard them.

01:47:55

And most in the latest Episcopal Church prayer book, the 79 one, the articles are in the back of the prayer book under a category called historical documents.

01:48:06

Not confessional documents, historical documents, as a vestige of the past that we no longer have to attend to.

01:48:14

Now, I have a question that comes up when I have conversations with folks that is problematic for me, and I would love to hear your answer to it.

01:48:26

I have folks, I know folks, I should say, and have met folks and have become acquainted with folks who are so in love with liturgy, so, who put so much of a priority on form rather than substance, that they, even though they have a private, privately held belief and agreement with biblically sound theology and doctrine, who have left churches like the

01:49:06

Reformed Baptist churches and the conservative Presbyterian churches, and have actually joined with liberal mainline

01:49:14

Episcopal churches just because they love the liturgy, and the whole form of the high church and all that.

01:49:21

Isn't there a danger of becoming enamored with fleshy, earthly smells and bells and all that kind of thing, where you are abandoning the actual gospel, or at least, even if you're not abandoning it, you're aligning with people who don't even believe in the gospel and are, in fact, very often hostile toward it and hostile to the very scriptures and the very

01:49:49

God who breathed them. Isn't this, really, when you boil it down to its essence, isn't it absurd?

01:49:58

It is, and I think that we have the same thing. You have mentioned people leaving less liturgical churches for more liturgical churches, but we have people passing through on that journey, coming from less liturgical churches to Anglican churches, and that's not enough to go to Orthodoxy or to Rome.

01:50:19

Absolutely. And I think, I do think the key problem there is the dearth of preaching, and at least the key problem within the

01:50:32

Anglican realm is the dearth of preaching. If you don't have good, solid, expositional preaching where the gospel is proclaimed every

01:50:39

Sunday, where people are being taught throughout the week the scriptures, then everything reduces down to the liturgy.

01:50:48

That's all you have. And so if that's all you have, why not become Roman Catholic?

01:50:53

Why not become Orthodoxy, or join the Orthodox groups? There's no substance to your faith.

01:51:02

It's all external. And so I think that the remedy for that, at least in the

01:51:09

Anglican world, is to return to solid, expositional preaching, not 10 minutes and goodbye, but 30 to 40 minutes, working through a text of scripture, working through books at a time, giving people a foundation of understanding for who

01:51:27

God is, what the gospel is, how to live out their faith. Then, when people go to maybe visit an

01:51:35

Orthodox church and see, no doubt, some beautiful aesthetics there, or a

01:51:41

Roman church and see aesthetics there, but they don't hear the gospel, they'll notice, okay, this might please my senses, but something's missing.

01:51:52

And I actually think this is where, if you don't mind me tooting the Anglican horn a little bit, this is where I think Anglicanism does its best work in blending and moving, bringing together solid gospel biblical preaching with a way of worship that involves the mind, the heart, and the body, the voice, the smell, the hearing, everything.

01:52:20

Everything that makes up a human being, human person, is involved in Anglican worship, and it makes it a holistic experience where you really are offering yourself as the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the

01:52:33

Lord every Sunday. Now, going back to the question, why do you still remain with a visible connection to the

01:52:44

Anglican church? I have to believe that some of you folks, in fact, especially those that are still in the

01:52:51

ECUSA, I would have to believe that that remnant of conservative and biblically orthodox clergy in the

01:52:59

ECUSA especially are very strong adherents to a post -millennial eschatology, because it seems like they're trying to rescue these denominations from the liberal clutches of heretics and apostates, and they think that this is actually going to occur at some point.

01:53:19

You know, I'm honestly, I don't know what their thought is. It may be more, look,

01:53:25

I've got this group of people. I can't get the majority of them to leave because they've been stuck here. I feel like I have an obligation to pastor them until my death.

01:53:32

So as long as I can keep giving them the gospel, I don't want to abandon them. If I leave,

01:53:38

I may take two or three with me. If I stay, I can still preach the gospel to 70 or 80 people every

01:53:44

Sunday. That may be what people are thinking. They're more than, hey, I can rescue the whole denomination.

01:53:51

But what is the unique essence of Anglicanism that you believe is a noble cause to remain attached to it?

01:54:02

To Anglicanism in general, and I'm not speaking specifically the Episcopal Church, because I don't think it's a noble cause. Personally, I don't think it's a noble cause to remain connected to the

01:54:10

Episcopal Church. But remaining within Anglicanism, I think, is, as I said a moment ago,

01:54:18

I think Anglicanism is the, from my perspective, purest expression of Christian worship.

01:54:24

And I think our connection to the Episcopal Church having been severed, and the fact that we're not in communion with the

01:54:32

Church of England right now, or the ACNA is not, we're separate from them as well, means that we don't have those associations with regard to authority that other

01:54:42

Anglicans have to worry about. So we're free within the ACNA to proclaim the fullness of the

01:54:49

Gospel, and to do so in a way that's historically Anglican, bringing together a word -centered liturgy with sacrament, of course, and of course, word -centered exposition and preaching in one place.

01:55:07

So I can't imagine there being a reason to leave Anglicanism so long as I don't have to have the connection of authority or communion with heretics.

01:55:20

And at this point, I don't. The ACNA has provided me a venue to be free of that.

01:55:26

And by the way, I love to give my biblically sound Anglican friends a little dig by saying that I can believe and do believe in the majority of the 39 articles, even on the issue of baptism, even though I'm a

01:55:44

Baptist, because the 39 articles doesn't specifically say that we should not prohibit infants from the baptismal font, but children, and Baptists baptize children if they profess and repent.

01:56:01

The Anglican Church does baptize infants. Going back to that question about the differences between the

01:56:08

Reformed Baptists and us, that's one of the differences. Reformed Anglicans would understand the baptism of infants in very much the same way that Orthodox Presbyterians would.

01:56:23

Baptism being the covenant sign, right? Right, yeah, my point was just that the 39 articles don't specifically mention infants in reference to baptism.

01:56:31

It says children. They just say they shouldn't be restricted from it, right, yes. It says that children shouldn't be restricted from it.

01:56:37

It doesn't use the term infants. Well, the way the term was used, they understood it to me.

01:56:45

I know that they obviously meant infants, because that's what they did and do, but...

01:56:50

Right. But anyway, I want to make sure that... I'm thinking like a Tractarian there. You could probably write an article for it.

01:57:00

Well, I want to make sure that our listeners have your website again. It is GoodShepherdBinghamton .org,

01:57:12

and Binghamton is spelled B -I -N -G -H -A -M -T -O -N .org.

01:57:21

Any other contact information that you care to share, either for activities and other things involving your congregation and yourself, but also the

01:57:31

Fellowship of Anglicans to which you belong? We do have... Mike Parrish has a

01:57:36

Facebook page. You can just search it on Facebook and find it. And the ACNA also has a

01:57:42

Facebook page as well, and that's easy to find, as is the website for the denomination.

01:57:47

So I would encourage anyone who's interested to look that up. I personally have a Facebook page.

01:57:52

You can friend me and ask me questions about Anglicanism if you're interested. I'd be happy to do what I can. And I'd like you to basically summarize now what you most want our listeners to have etched in their hearts and minds when they leave this program in about a minute and a half.

01:58:08

Well, despite what they may have heard about Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church, I would encourage the people who value the

01:58:15

Scriptures, value the Gospel, are interested in the history of the preaching of the

01:58:21

Gospel since the Reformation to take a second look at Anglicanism from a

01:58:28

Reform perspective, because I do think that when you wed together biblically sound words used in worship with biblical exposition, you have a combination that clearly and movingly preaches the

01:58:50

Gospel every Sunday. You're going to hear every Sunday that your sins have been forgiven. You're going to hear the call to repent.

01:58:56

You're going to hear that God forgives you. All those who sincerely repent are forgiven. You're going to receive spiritually anyway the

01:59:04

Body and Blood of Jesus. All of those things are there for you in Anglican worship and in Anglican theology.

01:59:10

So I would just encourage everyone to take a second look and not write us off because of what the wackos are doing in the

01:59:17

Episcopal Church. Well, thank you so much, brother, for being on the program, and I look forward to having you back, and perhaps if you could get a hold of Richard LaPage and Henry Jansma and have them pick a date where the three of you can be on simultaneously.

01:59:34

I would love to have that happen soon. I would be great. I would love it, and thank you so much for the time.

01:59:41

I greatly appreciate being on with you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. I want to thank the Reverend Buzz Taylor for being my co -host today.

01:59:47

My pleasure. And I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who wrote questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater