As the Church marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, creeds are once again in the news.
Australian churches of many denominations have contributed to the Australian Creed for Sexual Integrity, endorsed by about 6,000 signatories. It’s a short statement, just over 200 words, endorsing sexual relations only within traditional marriage, chastity beyond, and affirming that God has created male and female, and any attempt to “deny or change this distorts God’s good design.”
One of the final editors of the creed is the former Archbishop of Sydney, Bishop Glenn Davies. Now head of a breakaway conservative Anglican church, the Diocese of the Southern Cross, he spoke to TLC about why Christians felt the need to make such a statement to 21st-century Australia.
First, Bishop Davies said, it was written by and for Australians, and “it’s what we believe; that’s what a creed is.”
And just as the Council of Nicaea addressed a crisis in the ancient church—the unity of the godhead and the equality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the Australian creed “galvanizes Christian truth in the face of what we might call heresy, or in the face of teaching which is not in accordance with the Bible,” he said.
“We believe that the brokenness in Australian society is … a crisis; you’ve only got to look at the level of family breakdown, domestic abuse, all these things need to be addressed. Sexual integrity, we thought, ought to be a credal statement.”
He said early drafters wanted to include issues like euthanasia or abortion, but the focus was limited to sexual behavior.
And it does not, he emphasized, replace the Nicene or Apostles’ creeds, nor has it been devised as a test for church volunteers or workers. It simply clarifies a particular topic.
Bishop Davies said the creed is a biblical response to sexual mores in Western society.
“This is what we believe, notwithstanding the government has legislated for same-sex marriage and there is a whole undercurrent in our society of what we could call sexual immorality, and it has even affected some of the churches in our country, which is all very sad. We wanted to make a stand for biblical truth,” he said.
Several signatories are from other countries, but Bishop Davies said the global community was not the target.
“We’re not promoting it and saying ‘Please sign.’ We’re just saying we’re presenting this to you like the Nashville Statement [2017],” he said.
And while a statement about private sexual behavior is one thing, Australian Christians of all denominations have been condemned for their institutions’ denial and lack of redress for sexual abuse of vulnerable people, particularly children, committed under their aegis in the recent past.
Bishop Davies acknowledged that was a fair question, but said the church was not a society of perfect people.
“The Church is a society of people who love the Lord Jesus and want to follow in his ways, but because the church has been a safe place, sadly, sexual deviants and perpetrators of sexual abuse have entered that safe space and therefore muddied the reputation of the Church,” he said.
“It is also true that leaders of the Church in the past have not handled the matters as well as they should have.”
Bishop Davies said safeguards for ministry have improved, along with government requirements to prevent such abuse from occurring again.
And he reviewed the long record of God’s people failing, throughout the Bible.
“The history of Israel wasn’t always that pretty; there was unbelief and immorality and ungodliness, and yet God continued to use the line of Judah and the line of David to bring forth Jesus,” he said.
Bishop Davies said like the other authors of the creed, he wanted to remind and reassure people that “this is the truth that God wants us to know, despite what society’s pressures are around us.
Robyn Douglass grew up in Sydney and Melbourne, completing a journalism cadetship at the Anglican newspaper in Victoria. In South Australia, she has worked for church, local, and national media.
