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Church shuts its doors on couples who want to wed
• IF Lillian Ladele [the Islington registrar who refuses to conduct gay ‘weddings’] read the article about the behaviour of Dr Andrew Pakula, of Newington Green Unitarian Church, her reactions may have been the same as mine, and that of other Christian friends and supporters, namely, one of initial disgust, followed by a sense of glee (The church where you can’t marry, April 4).
Disgust that any minister in a pastorate should treat people in such a deplorable manner, and glee that one of her leading critics should make such a public blunder.
What should we make of a professing Christian pastor who not only refuses a traditional marriage ceremony to heterosexual couples, but does so because he is so concerned about the alleged “marriage rights” of homosexuals?
When we turn to the Gospels, we find Our Blessed Lord, during one of his confrontations with the hypocritical Pharisees, not only upholding the Genesis narrative of the Divine creation of man and woman, and the institution of marriage between the two sexes, but also emphasising that marriage is to be only between a man and a woman, and that its sacred ties are not to be lightly broken (see Matthew 19:5,6).
How strange, too, that Dr Pakula, who is so ready to lament the way, in his opinion, homosexuals are being treated as “second-class citizens”, is now confessedly ready to treat innocent heterosexual couples in an equally cheap way.
And one has to ask Dr Pakula’s coadjutor, the Rev Richard Kirker, now applauding his Unitarian friend from the touchline, and who is so ready to label other Christians who refuse to countenance homosexuality as “homophobes”, just what name we should all now apply to those, who, like Dr Pakula and his flock, shut their church doors to heterosexual couples whose only “crime” has been to request a perfectly legal wedding ceremony?
The chairman of the self-styled Gay and Lesbian Christian Movement has certainly found a strange bedfellow on Newington Green.
A final and friendly word of advice to any couple contemplating a full church wedding, and who may come up against the likes of Dr Pakula and his people. Do not hesitate to press ahead with your plans to marry in the house of God, seek God’s blessing on your union, and invite your friends and relatives to join you.
There are Bible-believing ministers out there who will be only too glad to help you celebrate your special day by giving you a full Christian wedding ceremony, and send you happily on your new life together after first giving you some sound Christian counsel about married life from that infallible guide for “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works”
(2 Timothy 3:16, 17).
Rev PD Johnson
Yerbury Road, N19
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