ELLIOTT: The Anglican Church slapped down its American branch last month, punishing it for authorizing same-sex marriages.

VOL: It did, and the Archbishop of Canterbury said there would be consequences if they did not back down. Three years from now we could see the end of the Anglican Communion as we know it if TEC does not rescind its stand on gay marriage, which we know it won't.

ELLIOTT: The church has been riven for decades over issues of female ordination, the ordination of gay clergy and, now, same-sex marriage. The issue is so incendiary that it threatened to tear the global church apart. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the church, is credited with preventing a complete implosion.

VOL: The Primates only backed down temporarily with a three-year window for change. The GAFCON and Global South Primates are still in impaired and or broken communion with TEC (nothing has changed) and possibly the ACoC, if the Canadian church goes ahead and passes gay marriage legislation. Nigerian Primate Nicholas Okoh said, post Canterbury, that "nothing has changed" and there will be an end...of that you can be sure.

ELLIOTT: Yet even in the seeming backlash to gay marriage, one of Canada's top Anglicans says he sees signs of progress.

VOL: What progress? If the ACoC goes down the same road as The Episcopal Church then it too will be ostracized by the vast majority of the Anglican Communion.

ELLIOTT: The crux is this: The worldwide Anglican Communion is like the Commonwealth of Nations, united by history and values, but each member largely independent. "There is not one structure for the whole Church," he says. "It's untidy."

VOL: Not true. The provinces are interdependent. They are held together by a common faith in the finality of Scripture, a Prayer Book, the 39 Articles of Religion and the Lambeth Quadrilateral. It is untidy because provinces like TEC and the ACoC have introduced strange and erroneous doctrines.

ELLIOTT: There is an agreement that individual churches can follow their own path, but not veer too far from official doctrine.

VOL: That's the problem. TEC and ACoC have departed from "official doctrine" They have veered so far off the track that the communion lies in tatters. Not even the Borgia Popes in all their evil denied the creed. Some TEC bishops have.

ELLIOTT: Those of us who are pro-GLBT rights in the church -- and I'm one of them, I'm openly gay and married to my partner -- our view is that this is a matter over which Christians can respectfully disagree. Other church leaders, especially some in Africa and Asia, where most of the world's Anglicans now reside, say no ... this is a fundamental issue of theology and a single approach must prevail. While some African and Asian churches may be strongly against same-sex marriage, there are also strains within the "Western" churches -- in Canada, the U.S., Australia and Europe -- that feel likewise. It is not strictly a Western versus Developing World divide.

VOL: There is no "respectful disagreement." Why, because Scripture regards sodomy as a salvific issue (I Cor. 6: 9-12) unlike the ordination of women. So if the fate of souls is in play, respect doesn't come into it. One can respectfully disagree and still go to Hell.

ELLIOTT: In the meeting of the 38 Anglican-aligned national churches worldwide at Canterbury Cathedral last month, the confab condemned the Episcopal Church -- as it is called in the States -- but also made explicit statements about respecting the rights of homosexuals worldwide.

VOL: What the primates condemned was homophobia, but they still maintained that sexual relations were only valid between a man and a woman, anything else was wrong and outside of Scripture. Lambeth Resolution 1:10 was affirmed and upheld as was the Dar es Salaam communique.

ELLIOTT: What we got actually was a classic Anglican compromise. Anglicans are good at that. There [are] very strong statements about the civil rights of homosexual people and I think there is a door opened now to say to, for example, Anglicans in Uganda: Listen, church support of government policies that criminalize homosexuality and make it punishable both by imprisonment and in some cases the death penalty, that's offside. Similarly, to the Episcopal Church, marrying same-sex couples, that's offside.

VOL: There was no compromise by GAFCON or Global South Primates in Canterbury. None. That is pure spin. They have given TEC and possibly ACoC a timeline of three years to make up their mind whether they want to stay in the communion or leave it.

ELLIOTT: Canadians need to understand that priorities for people in other places are very different and progress on gay rights has come with incredible speed to parts of the Western world.

VOL: So called "progress" is a Western notion. Speed proves nothing. LGBTQI Americans have the best PR and most well-funded political and public relations machine industry in the country which has found acceptance by a U.S. president. The Global South sees no "progress" in accepting pansexuality now or 1,000 years from now. Scripture will never be overruled, ignored or twisted to suit Mr. Elliott or any of the 12 homosexuals who met for a Queer Eucharist in Toronto recently. Mr. Elliott wants to twist the entire Anglican Communion into a sexual pretzel to satisfy the desires of less than one percent of Anglicans...that's PROGRESS!

ELLIOTT: I never imagined in my lifetime that gay people would be allowed to marry in Canada and it's now been over 10 years that we've been allowed to marry, nor that the church would be seriously talking about this. It's light years ahead.

VOL: The fact that the state allows gay marriage in no way suggests the Church should. We are in this world but not of this world. The Church is a counter culture. The church stands against the secular mainstream. The world does what it does and the church does what it does, but the Church never caves into the world's standards on sex or anything else.

ELLIOTT: In Canada, we've drawn a line in the sand over equal marriage as the measure of a progressive position toward LGBTQ people. In parts of Africa, public opinion and, in some cases, law are still positing that gay people should be killed. In this context, what looks like a slap down to an American church also comes with what is a pretty stark message to some of the most homophobic forces in the world.

VOL: It is the great lie that Africans are "killing gays". They have laws on their books that say gay behavior is against the law because it is against their culture. For the West to impose its cultural values on Africa is, at very minimum imperialistic, and to use money to bribe African nations (as Obama tried to do) to roll over on gay sex hasn't worked. Boko Haram has used the Western gay agenda to slaughter tens of thousands of Anglicans in Northern Nigeria in the name of Allah and Sharia Law. That is the truth about the intrusion of Western pansexuality in Africa.

Gay behavior has taken the lives of 650,000 mostly men since HIV/ADIS was declared a pandemic, and it still accounts for nearly 70% of all sexually transmitted diseases. Where is the win for homosexuals, pray tell.

One day, when the story is written on how Western Anglicanism was lost to pansexuality and pluriform thinking, TEC and the ACoC will be significant chapters in that story.

FOOTNOTE:Syphilis rates have reached a 30-year high in B.C. Vancouver Coastal Health is launching a formal outbreak response to deal with the situation, which predominantly affects gay men. Health officials in Vancouver say the number of syphilis cases more than doubled in 2015 compared with a decade ago, and are launching a formal outbreak response to deal with the situation.

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