The Apostate Church in the Last of the Last Days…
The individual above was born male in 1970 in England. After extensive searches online it it now impossible to find his real name, given at birth, as a male child. Every article, everything about this person sings out praise and worship for what they now are and what they now do. Even professed Christian websites, periodicals, and conservative news outlets speak and write of him as some great and godly person to be elevated, applauded, praised, and honored. All echoing approval of what he became and what he does. Which will be discovered after reading the preface to the articles below.
Photo caption provided by the administrator of A Crooked Path
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Isaiah 5:20
Perhaps the heading to this perked interest and you decided to open this to find out what it is all about. Then, upon discovering it is about an individual in England there appeared a sense of disappointment. Why should I care or spend my time reading and learning about some unholy transgender person who is now an archdeacon in the Church of England?
Because you should. As a true disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Because you should as a fence-sitting professed Christian.
Because you should if you profess to be Christ’s yet approve of such sin and abomination. Among the many and increasing number of make believers with their itching ears turned to false teachers and their unsound doctrine to make you feel good, to tell you what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear in order to walk right in the sight of God. As you are walking according to what is right to you and not God, not Jesus, not the Holy Spirit, and not according to the Holy Bible. No matter the effort extended to pervert, alter, deny, change, omit, or censor the Word of God to suit your sin.
Because you should if a non-believer that finds themselves here wondering about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Bible and what’s it all about in churches, what is right according to the Word of God, and what isn’t.
The Church of England is no longer a Christian entity. Oh, you may shudder and go tsk, tsk at my passing judgment and pull out Matthew 7:1 out of context for me, or also tell me to read I John 4:2 and that certainly many in the Church of England, and in Western nations that profess that Jesus came in the flesh is of God.
Keep in mind, always, that Satan himself saw, spoke with, tempted, and knew Jesus in the flesh on earth. Yet Satan surely is not of God. Oh, he was created by God, but in no way can be associated with God’s righteousness and truth as the fallen angel, the father of lies.
Confusing? Not at all. Why? Context, my fellow brothers, sisters, friends, and those doubting or following false teachers and their false teachings in these last of the last days;
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
1 John 4:1 —precedes verse 2.
The love written and spoken about by those who have entered in to destroy the Church, not teach sound doctrine, not teach the Word of God, not to spread the gospel which is Jesus Christ, which is there is a heaven, there is a hell, there is sin, there is accountability for our every thought, word, and action if we are the Lord’s — the love spoken, written, and believed by an ever-increasing number of those professing to be disciples of Jesus Christ, who are not by what they believe, preach, speak, think, and write about, their love is a carnal one. Of the flesh. Of the narrow human definition and even in that it is perverted. Corrupted when making the claim that any sexual immorality, any sexual perversion, any sexual deviancy, any sexual activity outside of marriage even — between only a man and a woman — is right in the sight of God. The Triune God consists of the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Jude 1:4
Unchangeable. Eternally unchangeable. Not adapting our times and lies, our delusions, and spiritually lost and sick culture as people demand God fit their image rather than repenting, humbling themselves, confessing sin, and living not only in faith but obedience to God. And what is required in that obedience is readily and easily found in His Word.
Without editing it. Only paying attention to verses deemed okay and acceptable.
We are to yield to God, our Creator, Who sacrificed Himself on the cross, shedding His precious and sinless blood for our sin.
And we have the gall, the audacity, the chutzpah, the lack of awe and reverence lowering God to demand our views, our lusts, our pleasures, our words matter more than He does or His Word does?
Seriously people?
Ever really read and believed the words within the Holy Bible? Understand where they truly came from? What they truly mean?
This is not about one individual in the Church of England. First, take time to consider and realize just how many people within the Church of England elevated and made this possible for this person to enter and rise as they have. He did not do it on his own. And he is a he. Not a she. He is a man. Not a woman. We are what we are at birth and there is only male and female. Nothing more. Nothing less. And when sex/gender/identity is determined in the womb it cannot be changed or altered no matter an individual’s desires, the ability of destructive medications or medical procedures in an attempt to force a change.
It takes more than an individual to rise to such a position. It takes many behind them supporting what has taken place.
England and Scotland once were the bedrock of the Christian faith and practices. England is the land where the Puritans came from to settle in the New World, America, and few if any are aware of the Mayflower Compact;
In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.:
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith, and the honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another; covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.
The land these Christians left now has, at the latest information from reliable polls and surveys, become a land where only 4% of the population attend church. And the church they attend, for the most part, is an apostate one. There are only a few sound doctrine, Bible-preaching, Bible-believing, Bible-teaching churches that remain in England, in Scotland. A place where Christianity blossomed and grew unlike any other except during the first century in Judea and lands and peoples surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
Is America any better?
Only by a slim margin.
Only 4% of the population in America presently live their lives with a Biblical worldview.
We are living in the last of the last days. The time is pressing, the time is quickly passing. The Lord Jesus Christ is going to return and as He asked the Pharisees whom He was addressing in verse 8;
Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart, saying: “There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man. Now there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying, ‘Get justice for me from my adversary.’ And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself, ‘Though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.’ ”
Then the Lord said, “Hear what the unjust judge said. And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?”
Luke 18:1-8
No, what has happened, what continues to happen in England, in Scotland is not something to ignore and say to ourselves, Oh well, that’s over there and isn’t impacting me or my life, it isn’t happening where I live, where I go to church.
Rubbish. Utter rubbish.
Wake up. Look. Hear. Inhale the stench of the lies, the Great Falling Away, the false teachers, and their unsound doctrines tickling all the itching ears.
What is addressed in the article below is now widespread and has infected every place a Christian, a church is established.
Do not be deceived.
Do not create your own faith or follow the faith and lying words, the cunning, deceptive words of men and women dripping with what appears to be honey and sweetness and rightness but is in truth the venom, the toxic and eternally deadly venom, and poison of Satan, he who has infiltrated with his legions of ministers appearing as he does, as a minister of light when in reality he is the bringer of lies, confusion, death, and eternal destruction.
There are many, very many within what is called “The Church” that suppress the truth. That live and practice sexual immorality. And this is now approved and becoming approved by more and more people daily. Beware. Know the signs of the times.
Either truly live for God, for Christ, with the Holy Spirit in residence within your heart and mind, truly transformed, truly born anew, truly as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ or don’t.
But stop pretending. Stop believing you can love and approve of what the world says, does, and offers and also belong to God, to be one of His people.
Stop deluding yourself. Stop being a make believer.
Be that true light unto the world, the salt of the earth flavoring your days with the true, whole Holy Word of God.
Forsaking the world.
Caring more about what Jesus did for us, caring more about eternity, than anything on this earth, and approving of what the lost, the liars, those captured by Satan though appearing otherwise have to say.
The Just Live by Faith
For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”
God’s Wrath on Unrighteousness
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.
Romans 1:16-32
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Isaiah 5:20
if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
2 Chronicles 7:14
Ken Pullen, Friday, January 19th, 2024
Church of England’s first transgender archdeacon: “I promised I’d not prioritise being a priest over love”
Friday, January 19, 2024
By Helen Brown
Reprinted from The Telegraph
VIDEO
“Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus tells his disciples in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. It’s a line that Rachel Mann quotes in her second poetry collection, Eleanor Among the Saints, before querying: “What, then, of the male who makes/ Of himself a woman?/ Premise: the penis does not yield to prayer./ Evidence: Lord knows, I tried”.
Although Mann winces at the idea of her questing, playful poetry being read as “merely confessional”, her story is woven into the text. Assigned male at birth in 1970, she began living as a woman in 1993. A former atheist – who stuck up a poster reading “F–K CHRISTIANS” on her wall while studying philosophy at university – she was surprised to find God on her journey between genders.
Born again in two senses, she underwent sex reassignment surgery in 2003 and was ordained into the Church of England in 2005, ministering in Salford and Bolton for 18 years before being appointed as the Church of England’s first transgender archdeacon last year. Over that time she has also produced 14 books of fiction, theology and poetry, gaining popularity as a religious broadcaster with her down-to-earth contributions to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day and Radio 2’s Pause for Thought.
Zooming cheerfully from her bright and modern book-lined office in Manchester, Mann tells me although her priestly goal is “to worship God like no one’s watching”, she believes that “minority visibility matters” when it comes to making everyone to feel included in her church. So despite getting “weekly emails denying my reality, telling me I’m going to hell,” she bravely continues to explore questions of faith and trans identity in her poetry.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is a fan, noting that: “All poetry has something to do with bodies being transformed – whether in violence and grief, or in hope, in embrace, in miracle,” and he praises the “exhilarating verbal energy and emotional subtlety” with which Mann addresses many forms of transition and transformation.
In her 2012 memoir, Dazzling Darkness, Mann is likeably direct about her history. She describes the pain of her early gender dysphoria, her struggle to maintain a socially acceptable “mask” of masculinity. As a man, she had married a woman and embarked on a career in academia, lecturing in philosophy. And she’s frank about the act of “violence” she committed on “perfectly normal, functioning male genitalia” during sex reassignment surgery in order to feel true reconciliation with her body and genuine “wholeness”.
She writes: “I do not think we should be afraid of the thought that there are circumstances in which reconciliation cannot avoid violence. There is a sense in which this idea lies near the heart of the Christian story. It is a kind of uncomfortable darkness. For Christ follows a path which does not turn away from violence; and that path leads to his destruction through violence. And it is only in death that Christ is raised to new life.”
Today Mann, who divorced her wife in the Nineties and is currently single, tells me that: “The idea for Eleanor Among the Saints came from a reading I did in London in 2016 with another trans poet. As trans elders, we were asked to what extent we felt we were making a contribution to a ‘trans archive’.” She tosses up both palms and admits she had never considered the question before, but went away wondering: “What archives are there? What is the history of trans identity? Then in 2018 I found myself in conversation with medievalist Dr Daisy Black who told me about ‘Queer Medieval Studies’ which have recovered fascinating figures like [14th-century Venetian trans sex worker, executed for sodomy] Rolandina Ronchaia and Eleanor ‘John’ Rykener…”
Eleanor Rykener, I learned from Mann’s book, was a 14th-century seamstress and sex worker who has been claimed by recent academics as an example of a trans person living in medieval England. The evidence we have of her existence comes from an interrogation by the Mayor of London following her arrest in Cheapside in late 1394 for having sex with a former chaplain. Under questioning, Eleanor described how she had sex for pleasure and for money with both priests and nuns, and how – having been born as a man called John – she had been taught to dress and act like a woman by other women.
“Was John/Eleanor Rykener trans in the modern sense? That feels like a stretch.” writes Mann. Yet she felt that Rykener’s “extraordinary resurrection” via trans studies “invites mythologising” and so the poems reincarnate her in many forms through history – inviting us to meet her at one point in the company of Saint Perpetua [an early church martyr who reputedly changed sex from female to male at the moment of her death in the Roman Arena] and later in the body of a “Sixteen Year Old Murdered Trans Girl”.
This girl is clearly based on Brianna Ghey, the trans schoolgirl from Warrington who was fatally stabbed by two other children at a park last February. Mann was anxious “not to transgress on real grief with a fabrication. I’m so conscious that Brianna was an actual, cherished, beloved human being and daughter.” It’s a poem which invites readers to see Ghey’s murder as a hate crime, as a type of human “killed multiple times”. But it’s also a deconstructed sonnet and Mann hopes her use of a form traditionally used to express love [for Brianna] means that there is “love embedded in it”.
Mann is often asked to read at corporate events marking the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) at which speakers normally read the names of trans people murdered over the course of the preceding year. Mann shakes her head, wearily. “I don’t mind admitting there are times when I have struggled to get through the list of names. You’ll often have around 350 names. When you think about what tiny a percent of an actual population are trans people, it’s terrifying and desperately sad.”
But Mann is also weary of being wheeled out by organisations “going through the motions”. In her new poem #TDOR she toys with the awkward language used by those inviting her to speak. “Will you, would you, would you please,” it begins, before assuring “it’s our privilege/ A way to show we care for your, our community,” and that they have “names from website, so many/ And we thought, what do you think, in batches of ten.”
“That’s a good example of a poem where I play with repetition,” Mann tells me. “I love stuttery repeated words or phrases because I’m interested in where language gets stuck. I hear this in conversations with friends who’ve experienced really bad sexual trauma. That can lead to a ‘stuckedness’. But we do all get stuck, often as we want to move on. There’s often risk, danger, a kind of violence that’s held in language at those times.”
Although in conversation – and in her memoir – Mann is chattily straightforward about her life and faith, she uses a whole chorus of voices in her poetry. After years of thinking she needed to find one true voice on the page, she’s found greater truths revealed by assuming different characters. Although she’s aware that her multiple reincarnations of Eleanor are “different versions of myself”. “I was an actor as a teenager and only came to poetry later,” she says, “so there’s an element of performance in my poems.”
She also suspects that “sincerity can kill poetry” which is why she believes that “so much religious verse fails as poetry. Because it is so committed to a particular ethical line. As a poet, I want to follow the language, to push at the edges. I want to test out what’s possible to say. I want to discover my love of form, structure, and wordplay. These inflections of joy, trauma, tragedy…”
Although, as a poet, Mann loves the fluidity of words, she admits that she sometimes feels like “a dinosaur” when it comes to modern queer linguistics. She’s been challenged for thinking about sex in more traditional binary terms. Although she notes that there may have been greater freedom for those who transitioned in the 1990s: “There weren’t role models, so there was a sense of inventiveness, you sort of got on with it and there was very little public attention. Now there is so much attention on trans people and so many narratives around transition, which can be helpful and unhelpful.”
I am Canon Rachel Mann. I am a priest, a writer and poet, and a broadcaster. I love Jesus. I am trans. I am tired of being seen as a culture war problem, but I am still full of hope for a peace where God’s glorious rejoicing in his world will be known. #TransDayOfVisibility pic.twitter.com/Muqvg8FxPf
— Dr Rachel Mann (@RevRachelMann) March 31, 2023
Visiting a local sixth form recently – a mixed group of Catholics, Methodists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, some conservative members of a local mosque – she was struck by “how these bright, capable kids all felt keen to tell me what I had to believe. They told me that to do my job I had to believe in six-day-creation, that I couldn’t believe that evolution is the best working hypothesis. They thought I should have very closed down views about sexuality and gender.” She smiles. “I came away reminded that at 16-17 I was probably as dogmatic as they were.”
I wonder if poetry also gives Mann a safe space to use the kind of language that might be less acceptable in church? “Not really,” she says, noting there are “different registers and permissions available in different kind of forms” although as we speak I do find it hard to imagine her using some of the coarser language that appears in her poetry. In-person she seems so thoroughly vicarish, with her gently amused exclamations of “Gosh!”, and her assertion that her idea of a hot date these days would be “taking the bank holiday off with a cup of tea and Pride & Prejudice on the telly.”
“You can probably tell that I’m a secret romantic,” she tells me and I nod. I bet she does a great wedding. “Oh, I LOVE a good wedding,” she swoons. “What greater joy is there than to witness two people saying they love each other in the sight of God? Watching the commitment to that lifelong faithfulness is always beautiful, extraordinary.”
But, as a gay woman, she would not be allowed to keep her job in the Church of England if she wanted to get married herself? She shakes her head. Then tells me that “I made an agreement with myself a few years ago that I would not prioritise my career over matters of the heart. So should I meet the right person, should we want to get married… Hmm. Then I wouldn’t say: we can’t possibly get married because I’m ordained.” She pauses. “I adore being a priest. It’s at the heart of my being. But love’s really rare, actually, so…” She says she’d be overjoyed “to be able to officiate at weddings for same-sex couples. But I don’t think that’s going to happen in my lifetime. That’s part of the deal. I know what the lines are and I walk within them.”
Her church’s refusal to validate the same-sex love Mann would like reminds me of the passage in her memoir where her friends tell her that a gay trans woman wanting to work in the culturally conservative Church of England seems like “a Jew wanting to join the Nazi party.”
But Mann has made peace with the contradictions. “I guess religious people – especially people like me who exercise some religious authority – are often accused of being a bunch of hypocrites. They think we say one thing in public and another in private. But if someone says to me: ‘Vicar, you’re a hypocrite, I’m never coming to church’. My response is; ‘Yes, I am a hypocrite and there’s always room for one more’.”
“Yes, the Church of England can be slow to move,” she says, “yet sometimes it’s incredibly radical.” They appointed Mann, after all. “So the Church remains for me the very best place for me to be who I am, with all my oddness and quirks,” she smiles. “It’s full of strange, quirky people. I cherish that.” And what of the people who tell Mann she doesn’t belong in their church? “Nobody likes to have mud slung at them,” she shrugs. “But I try to remember that those people who want to have a jab at me still remain beloved children of God. I want to leave open that state of grace for them, because that’s what I rely on myself.”
RELATED:
Rachel Mann becomes Church of England’s first transgender archdeacon (premierchristian.news)
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