by Joel V Webb | Nov 12, 2025 | Orthodoxy Matters
Over my lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift in how our culture engages with ideas we disagree with. Growing up, disagreement was an opportunity to talk — to debate, discuss, and think through differences, strategies, outcomes, and intentions.
Now, that kind of dialogue feels almost impossible.
One of the biggest reasons for this shift is that we’ve moved from debating to diagnosing.
Instead of hearing another person’s argument at face value and engaging with what they’re actually saying, we jump to labeling or diagnosing what’s wrong with them.
When that happens, conversation stops. What could have been an exchange of ideas turns into an exchange of accusations.
Because of this, many pastors — who truly want to love and care for people — have lost the ability or the desire to say hard truths. The threat of being labeled or “canceled” looms large, so the easier path is to soften the message and avoid anything that might offend.
Even more troubling is how our world has redefined love into something completely unbiblical.
The modern assumption goes like this: If you love someone, you’ll never say anything that might hurt or challenge them.
You’ll “meet them where they are” and never call them to repentance or transformation.
It sounds compassionate — but it isn’t the kind of love the Bible calls us to. As ambassadors of the Kingdom of God, we are called to be salt and light. And sometimes, the most loving thing we can do is say the hard thing.
This becomes especially clear in the conversations surrounding gender and sexuality. The Church often swings between two extremes: full affirmation, welcoming any behavior or lifestyle without question, or harsh rejection, coming across as angry or hateful.
But both miss the heart of biblical love. They are two sides of the same coin — a coin that has lost the image of what love truly is.
To love in the biblical sense is to will and intend the best for another person.
Real love is selfless. It doesn’t prioritize our comfort or another’s feelings above truth. It seeks what is actually best for the person being loved.
As a father, I understand this better than ever.
My one-year-old son doesn’t always like the things I have to do for his good. Sometimes he cries, but I do it anyway — not because I’m cruel, but because I love him. Love that only comforts but never corrects isn’t love at all.
Yet this is exactly what many of us in the Church have forgotten. We’ve mistaken love for acceptance — for making people feel good — rather than seeing it as the pursuit of what’s truly best for them.
That tension becomes painfully real when someone we care about — a friend, a child, a sibling — embraces an identity or lifestyle that contradicts God’s Word.
For some, that moment hardens them into hostility.
For others, it softens their convictions and pulls them toward affirmation.
But followers of Jesus are called to live in the tension.
We know that cultural ideas about gender and sexuality contradict God’s design in creation and Scripture.
And yet we also know that every single one of us is broken by sin and in need of the same redeeming and transforming grace of God.
The Gospel doesn’t just forgive us — it remakes us.
Jesus lived this tension perfectly. He spent time with the outcasts and those on the margins, yet He always called them to repentance and offered transformation — the kind of transformation only He can bring.
This is the calling of the Church today:
To love as Jesus loved — full of compassion, full of truth. To call people to repentance that leads to healing and holiness. If we truly love someone, we will tell them the truth — not to wound, but to heal.
If we withhold truth out of fear, we don’t love them.
But if we speak truth without kindness and mercy, we don’t love them either.
Love without truth isn’t love.
Truth without love isn’t Christlike.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to be salt and light in a world that desperately needs both.
Salt preserves and adds flavor — it stands out.
Light reveals what’s hidden and shows the way forward.
To be salt and light means to be distinct and to guide.
We don’t blend in, but we also don’t blind others with harsh brightness. We shine with the warmth and clarity of Christ.
So, in that spirit, let us go — to love and serve the Lord.
To be people of both truth and love.
To speak hard words with soft hearts.
To live as reflections of Jesus Christ, whose perfect love always tells the truth, and whose truth always loves.
by Joel V Webb | Oct 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
Less than a month ago the first woman was appointed to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury. This decision has thrown the Anglican world into a fury of activity and debate as to what to do next. As an outsider of the Anglican Communion it has been fascinating to watch those inside the Anglican movement discuss, debate and make plans for the future from here. The questions and debates brought up because of this appointment are challenging and important.
For many Anglicans, the appointment of Sarah Mullalley represents a foundational theological problem purely on the issue of the ordination of women. Myself, as someone in the Methodist movement overall which originated in Anglicanism, and the Free Methodist Church specifically has a long history of stalwart orthodoxy while also allowing for and advocating for the ordination of women. That being said, it is a point of deep contention within the Anglican world, with some Provinces (national or semi-national) and Dioceses (similar to a conference or district) have differing positions on the issue. With the Anglican Church in North America (ANCA) varying from within on the issue. All of that being said, the new appointment has thrust the debate to the forefront of the conversation, with even more intense vigor.
My contribution to this discussion (as much as it is worth not being formally Anglican) is not to take issue with the appointment of a woman, but with the particular individual who has been appointed. I, like those in my tradition and denomination, uphold women’s ordination to the ministry. Seeing it as the fulfillment of God calling all humanity to be proclaimers and ministers of His Gospel. This is rooted in an Edenic and Kingdom ideal and principle that the divisions and contentions between the sexes are ultimately healed and restored in the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth through His Church. I won’t be making the full case for women’s ordination here. It is something I have done in other places, and there are those who do it more regularly than me, such as Marg Mowczko.
My primary issue with the new Archbishop is her overall theological and moral framework and outlook. Sadly, over the decades in the Church of England (CoE), as it has been in Canada and the USA (which led to the creation of the ACNA) has been a quick march away from Biblically foundational truths, particularly surrounding gender, marriage and abortion. These issues in particular are where the new Archbishop to be sadly is deficient in all. Sarah Mullally regardless of her being a man or a woman is not fit to lead the CoE, or act as head of the Anglican Communion purely on the basis of her theological positions that are contrary to the Biblical foundations of not just the Anglican expression as laid out in the 39 Articles of Religion, but that are also found in Scripture.
She has expressly made her position on marriage and abortion clear in the past, demonstrating that it continues to line up with the progressive voices in the Church of England that continue to chip away at the solid truths that it was established on during the Reformation into nothing more than a secularized state church that rather than proclaiming the Gospel, seeks to equivocate on the issues of the day by collapsing at the feet of pandering words and wholly un-Biblical expressions of love that affirm rather than speak truth.
For myself, I am thankful that as a Free Methodist I have Bishops that I can trust. Are they perfect, no. But they have continued to demonstrate their submission to the Word of God, and holding fast to the faith once delivered to the saints.
In response to all of this, GAFCON, which was established itself in 2008 as a clear and Biblical voice to the insanity of liberalizing Anglicanism in the West has now just put themselves forward not as a conservative alternative to the Anglican Communion headed up by Canterbury, but as THE Worldwide Anglican Communion that represents the voice and interest of that tradition worldwide. With it, a majority of Anglicans worldwide, most represented in the global south in Africa, South America and South-east Asia will effectively reduce the historic Anglican Communion to a shell of its former self.
This move, while certainly sad to see in one sense, also seems to be the only option. The pretences and precepts that before allowed differences among the variety of perspectives in the Communion are being totally shorn away, making it clear that there is only one path forward. “Progress at all costs.”
May this be a warning to all followers of Christ in any tradition. Yes, we are to contextualize the sharing of the Gospel to our age and culture. What we are not to do is pervert and fold to the voice of the age, exchanging the truth of God for the shallow pool that is the temporal approval from culture. The Gospel calls for transformation of us into His image, not the other way around.
