Beneath these particular quarrels are two deeper problems within Anglicanism, and these problems shed light on the deeper problems within every ecclesial body derived from the Protestant Reformation.

The first problem is one of identity. Just what is Anglicanism? Before it went global, Anglicanism was the Church of England, with all its genteel and lovely customs. The Anglican Communion was the Church of England transplanted.

Things have moved on. Now, most Anglicans live in Africa. Anglicanism is uncertain about itself. Is it English or African? Is it Protestant or Catholic? Is it essentially liberal? It used to be that no one much cared. Now the Anglicans in all three groups are entrenched and are increasingly adamant about their own stance — and are prepared to fight the other two sides for the heart of their church.

The second foundational problem is the one of church authority. When I was an Anglican priest, thinking through the problem of womenÂ’s ordination, I listened to both sides. They both had their experts. They both had arguments from Scripture. They both had arguments from tradition. They both were made up of prayerful, sincere people who believed they were being led by the Holy Spirit. How to decide?

This question led me to realize that Christians need an external authority structure to make the final call, and of course, that question led me to the banks of the Tiber.

As Catholics, it is important to understand the problems facing Anglicanism because the underlying fault lines can expand into our own church if we are not careful.

Read it all.

Catholics who keep up with Anglicanism may have observed that the whole thing seems to be visibly coming apart.

On the one hand, at June’s rally of the world’s conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem — the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) — over a thousand conservative leaders declared their willingness to work outside the official structure and indeed to intervene in the errant Western Anglican churches in defense of their marginalized and oppressed conservatives.

On the other, over 200 conservative bishops, mostly from Africa, simply refused to attend late July’s Lambeth Conference, the decennial meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops, because the bishops of the Episcopal Church — who, by ordaining an openly fornicating homosexual bishop, had thumbed their noses at the rest of the world’s Anglicans, and the Christian moral tradition to boot — were seated with full voice and vote.

Of particular interest will be the fate of the small Anglo-Catholic party, the wing closest to Catholicism in doctrine and devotion, now found almost entirely in England and the English-speaking former colonies. It was once, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most creative and effective party in Anglicanism, but has kept declining since.

Read it all.

Bishops of the Anglican Communion, a confederation of churches with roots in the Church of England, held their once-a-decade meeting recently and managed to avert a long-predicted schism over homosexuality. Although 200 conservative bishops boycotted the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, other conservatives showed up and joined their liberal counterparts in soul-searching sessions inspired by the Zulu indaba, or tribal conference.

Still, tensions were evident between liberal bishops from North America and conservative ones from the “Global South.” The archbishop of Sudan demanded the resignation of Gene Robinson, the openly gay New Hampshire bishop whose ordination in 2003 was the casus belli of the crisis. A female bishop from the United States suggested that “many of our bishops come from places where it is culturally accepted to beat your wife.”

Read it all.

2. The call from the Archbishop of Canterbury for a Primates Meeting in 2009. This will determine where the wider communion is and how broadly support for the Instruments remains. We hope all Primates will be present and that the work of the Communion will continue in these challenging days. If there is to be a Faith and Order committee of some description, as suggested, the input of the Primates into this important initiative is critical.
3. The endorsement from the Archbishop of Canterbury of the Covenant Process, Lambeth 1.10, Communion Partners, and a Pastoral Forum. In several public statements he clarified considerably his own view on the teaching of the church in the area of human sexuality, and was clearer about the consequence of pressing forward with departures from that teaching. In our view, this indicates a realism about the probability of Bishops and Dioceses moving forward with same-sex blessings in a more concerted manner. Already we are seeing news reports to that effect.
4. We welcome the call for moratoria and the timing of these, as this places the matter firmly before the Communion as a totality.

Read it all.

Our loss of this vision is clouding our ecumenical efforts with the Catholic Church of both East and West and they are now quite confused as to who they are to speak with now as a result of our recent decisions and indecision. Is the Anglican Communion Catholic or Protestant. Cardinal Kasper writes about our confusing decisions to further cloud the answer to this question.

As I stated when addressing the Church of England’s House of Bishops in 2006, for us this decision to ordain women implies a turning away from the common position of all churches of the first millennium, that is, not only the Catholic Church but also the Oriental Orthodox and the Orthodox churches. We would see the Anglican Communion as moving a considerable distance closer to the side of the Protestant churches of the 16th century, and to a position they adopted only during the second half of the 20th century.

Since it is currently the situation that 28 Anglican provinces ordain women to the priesthood, and while only 4 provinces have ordained women to the episcopate, an additional 13 provinces have passed legislation authorising women bishops, the Catholic Church must now take account of the reality that the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate is not only a matter of isolated provinces, but that this is increasingly the stance of the Communion. It will continue to have bishops, as set forth in the Lambeth Quadrilateral (1888); but as with bishops within some Protestant churches, the older churches of East and West will recognise therein much less of what they understand to be the character and ministry of the bishop in the sense understood by the early church and continuing through the ages.

I have already addressed the ecclesiological problem when bishops do not recognize other’s episcopal ordination within the one and same church, now I must be clear about the new situation which has been created in our ecumenical relations. While our dialogue has led to significant agreement on the understanding of ministry, the ordination of women to the episcopate effectively and definitively blocks a possible recognition of Anglican Orders by the Catholic Church.

Who does Rome talk to now? That is the question they are asking. The penultimate paragraph comes in Cardinal Kasper’s conclusion as the framework for taking a New Oxford Movement to the table where real conversations for ecumenical dialogue and visible unity can be discussed again with the utmost seriousness and trust that we all want the same thing–that we may all be one as He is one. It is not a secret that the goal and hopes of this movement will be full reunion with the Catholic Church where the people of this great land of England can look and see that the Church is one and come to believe. That is our mission and that is the goal of Christ’s call to spread his love, mercy, grace and glory throughout the world. His promise is that he will never leave us nor forsake us so we take up the plough and do not look back.

Read it all.

I write on the Conference’s final day. There is a sense of exhaustion here, and a sense of frustration.

The Communion is in crisis. Its life and mission have been disrupted, both by the actions of its North American provinces and their effect in other provinces, and by the amount of time and energy which have been devoted to dealing with the resulting crisis, without success.

Indeed, this lack of progress has itself deepened the crisis, as provinces express frustration with the impotence of the Communion’s structures and leadership, the apparent failure of leaders and provinces to carry out decisions that seemed to have been agreed, and, at bottom, the sense that the Communion is no longer bound by its historic common understanding, its Reformed Catholic understanding, of the Faith. As a result, the bishops of Uganda, Nigeria and Rwanda, as well as those serving the Diocese of Sydney in Australia and many individual bishops, decided to absent themselves from the Conference.

No one seems to be sure exactly how many bishops are here. The press have a list only of the last names and dioceses of those who wished to make their presence known. Bishops complain that they cannot locate other bishops, because (in contrast to earlier Conferences) they too have no list. The Conference’s official press spokesman puts the number of participants at about 650.

Neither does anyone seem sure exactly what is going on in the Conference as a whole. The press have been excluded from most sessions in order to ensure that the bishops can speak freely to one another, and be more free to alter their opinions, without fear of their words being posted to the world, and that is surely right. But the bishops themselves are segmented: they have had little structured opportunity to interact with people outside their 40-member indaba groups, apart from the hearings on specific proposals. As a result, they have little sense of the overall tenor of the Conference, much less, of where it is going. And if the draft of the Reflections document is any measure, it will do little to provide such a sense; the draft is more a summary of ideas and possibilities regarding the various topics, than a synthesis that articulates Lambeth’s vision for the identity and direction of the Communion.

Bishops on very different sides of the contentious issues have expressed a real sense of being manipulated and controlled; and though the indaba process has been enjoyed by many, there is a common feeling that it has been used to exclude the members of the Conference from the final decision-making.

Read it all.

More than 80 percent of Anglicans lived in Britain in 1900, in contrast to a mere 1 percent in sub-Saharan Africa–a figure that had risen only to 8 percent by 1970. Now, a majority (55 percent) of the world’s Anglicans live in sub-Saharan Africa. British Anglicans now constitute one-third of the world total, and the Church of England notes that low church participation makes the figure for great Britain deceivingly high.

–World Christian database, research version, May 2008, as cited by Christian Century, July 29, 2008, page 14

Holding a future Lambeth Conference in the south would help the Church better understand the diverse contexts that many members of the Communion emerge from and prevent over-simplified conclusions about geography and theology.

What about the host? What about the Archbishop of Canterbury, the first among equals, who this year and in years past addresses the gathered bishops from his throne in the Cathedral in Canterbury? Could he still be the first among equals if the next Lambeth were in, say, Johannesburg or Madras?

There is no reason that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t maintain his position as “first among equals” and an instrument of unity in his person while playing the role of guest rather than host.

By dislocating the Lambeth Conference from its English moorings, this important gathering could rid itself of some of its colonial vestiges and relocate closer to the heart of the current Anglican Communion. A change of this magnitude would take some imagination on the part of bishops gathered this week in Kent, but as modern leaders in a religious tradition that produced poets and artists like John Donne, William Blake, and Julian of Norwich, such vision would not be impossible.

Read it all.

A postcolonial conversation, a critique of colonialism involving patient listening and that includes everyone equally, is long overdue, yet most Anglicans tend to avoid the discussion, said the Rev. Joe Duggan, an Episcopal priest from the Diocese of Los Angeles and a doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester’s Lincoln Theological Institute (LTI).

LTI, along with the Journal of Anglican Studies, co-sponsored the panel discussion, “Anglican Identities and the Postcolonial,” a Lambeth Conference “fringe event” held at the University of Kent’s Darwin Hall. Featured speakers included: Robert Young, author and a professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University; Bishop James Tengatenga of Southern Malawi; Bishop Mano Rumalshah of Pakistan; and Bishop Assistant Stephen Pickard of Adelaide in the Anglican Province of Australia.

Duggan said the panel discussion was planned for Monday, the day bishops would be addressing Anglican identity and mission. “We wanted to initiate a global conversation about what is the postcolonial in a way”¦not caught up in polarization with controversy in the debate, but a patient listening. Our hope is that you’ll take these questions back to your dioceses.

“There’s never been a Lambeth Conference that’s looked at what is the theology and ecclesiology after the colonial period,” Duggan told the gathering of about 75. “If you look at Anglican theologians around the world, the space given to colonialism is very brief and very short. So it’s not surprising we’re in the situation we are. We are trying to step back and provide resources”¦to begin asking the questions.”

Read it all.

I first attended an Episcopal Church a little over 30 years ago. I joined the Episcopal Church 22 years ago, and I was ordained 19 years ago. Looking at the developments that have occurred over this period, someone might draw the analogy that I was a newly commissioned officer who sailed out in a fast speedboat to catch my ship that had already left port; and I took my place as a crew member on the Titanic just moments before it hit the iceberg….

Certainly, the Episcopal Church has been in a state of declining membership and increasing departures from historic, biblical Christianity for virtually the whole time I have been a member. But I always thought that the Anglican Communion would be the Episcopal Church’s salvation, not that the Episcopal Church would be the cause of the Anglican Communion’s destruction. I really never thought it would come to this.

Read it all.

(1) Nowhere in the lecture did he refer to the Windsor Report and to conciliar authorities. No reference was made to the instruments of unity or to Canterbury as the focus of unity. Missing was also the quadrant-demarcation of churches and power blocs in Communion’s “Cold War” (to borrow Cameron’s allusion to NATO). His approach in mapping the Communion future is strikingly different from that undertaken by Fulcrum and ACI, which by and large offer a structural and conciliar solution to the present Communion crisis.

(2) The above is underlined by the astonishing way Cameron reinterpreted and defended the Anglican Covenant. The idea of Covenant was first proposed in the Windsor Report under the heading “Canon Law and Covenant” (Windsor Report, 113-120). The sequence and relation between the two are important: “Canon Law” first, then “Covenant”. The Windsor Report has in mind that the Covenant would be a “Communion law” that “would make explicit and forceful the loyalty and bonds of affection which govern the relationships between the churches of the Communion. The Covenant could deal with: the acknowledgement of common identity; the relationships of communion; the commitments of communion; the exercise of autonomy in communion; and the management of communion affairs (including disputes). (Windsor Report, 118)”

In sharp contrast, Cameron (intentionally?) dismissed the juridical and administrative language…

Read it all.

In a HARDtalk interview broadcast on 10th July, Stephen Sackur talks to (Arch)bishop Greg Venables, Primate of the Southern Cone.

Watch it all (almost 23 1/2 minutes).

WHAT makes a group (of voters, relatives, believers) stick together, even when its membership is varied and quarrelsome? Sometimes deference to a common authority; sometimes fear of adversaries; sometimes common axioms that trump any differences; and sometimes a sentimental “family feeling” that makes people tolerant of eccentricity or even obnoxious behaviour. If none of those factors is present, then break-up looms.

The Church of England may be approaching that point. Matters came to a head at the session this week of its ruling General Synod, which saw more than its share of tears, jeers and cheers. The topic under discussion””or so it was reported”” was whether women, who have served as priests since 1994, could also be bishops.

Actually, that was not precisely the matter at issue; the idea of women bishops had been accepted in 2005, and nobody suggested that this decision was reversible. The furore was over what accommodation, if any, should be made for the minority of the faithful who disagree with the idea of women bishops (and, in most cases, with the idea of women priests). Of these, some say that administering the sacraments (to put it simply, rites in which God’s grace is mysteriously invoked) is a male-only prerogative; others take literally the teaching of Saint Paul that authority in the church is best handled by men.

Read it all.

On several of the threads related to the Lambeth conference in the past 48 hours there has been discussion of a remark made by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about the disproportionate numbers of American bishops attending the Lambeth conference. In this article she is quoted as follows:

ENS: What kind of presence will the Episcopal Church have at the Lambeth Conference?

KJS: The bishops of the Episcopal Church will represent about one-quarter of all bishops in attendance. One of our tasks is not to overwhelm the gathering just by our sheer numbers.

That has stirred up curiosity and discussion. One commenter did some quick calculations as to relative ratio of bishops / members. We decided to take that research a bit further and turn it into a spreadsheet. It’s very revealing.

TEC and Canada together comprise 3.6% of the membership of the 20 largest provinces of the Anglican Communion, and yet combined they have 27.5% of the total 682 bishops among these top 20 Provinces. We elves are working compiling a detailed statistical overview of all Anglican Communion provinces. Look for more data from us about Provinces, relative size, relative growth and their representation at Lambeth in coming days.

-elfgirl

PHILLIP ASPINALL: Oh well I think if people tried to make off with property that belongs to the Anglican Church, the trustees of that property in the church at law would be, would have an obligation to protect it.

I hope we don’t get to that point, I mean I hope sense will prevail and respect for people will prevail and that kind of thing wont eventuate but you know people who hold at law, positions of trustees where they have a responsibility to ensure property is used for a particular purpose, have obligations at law to protect it.

MONICA ATTARD: It would be a very dangerous route I imagine because I think at the moment the situation in the United States at least is that a lot of the decisions are going the way of those who are attempting to move away from the mainstream church.

Is that something that might give you pause to think here?

PHILLIP ASPINALL: Oh look I think there are more important reasons for pause, nobody wants to resort to law but, there are no winners, once you get into court cases about these kinds of issues, there are no winners.

People should understand what the ethos and spirit of life in the Anglican Church is about and abide by that spirit and live by the family rules.

MONICA ATTARD: Have you discussed this option with the Archbishop of Canterbury?

PHILLIP ASPINALL: No I haven’t.

MONICA ATTARD: Is it something that you will at Lambeth?

PHILLIP ASPINALL: No, I don’t intend to.

Read it all.

As the worldwide Anglican Communion prepares to meet at Canterbury, England, July 16-Aug. 3, the church finds itself in a terrible crisis on many sides. The Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade gathering of bishops from the 38 provinces of the worldwide Anglican Communion, will meet behind closed doors this time to see if they can heal and mend the tattered fabric of their frayed unity. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, has drawn up the guest list and guided the design for the meeting. He intentionally left off the guest list two Episcopal bishops from the United States, the bishop of New Hampshire, V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, now formally married to his male partner. Also off the list is Bishop Martyn Minns, an American Episcopal priest who was consecrated a bishop in the Church of Nigeria. They ordained him bishop without the permission of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, to minister to conservative Episcopalians who are threatening to leave the national church.

Read it all.

Many of those who are not attending Lambeth are in Jerusalem this week for an alternative meeting, to discuss how they see the way forward. The parallel meetings are a clear manifestation that the bonds of communion have broken down. The Archbishop of Canterbury is not in Jerusalem, and is not welcome there. The breach appears irreparable and therefore the Anglican Communion’s days as a global community centred in Canterbury are numbered.

That is a sadness for those, like myself, who have affection for the Anglican sensibility. But sensibilities are not doctrines, and it cannot be the case that members of the same communion can hold directly contradictory views on matters of grave importance. The Canadian and American proponents of same-sex marriages are arguing that homosexual acts can be morally good, and even sacramental. The traditional Christian view is that such acts are sinful. That is a gap that cannot be bridged: Either one holds to the ancient and constant teaching of the Christian Church, or one rejects it in favour of a different position. It cannot be that both views exist side-by-side as equally acceptable options.

It is not a disagreement only about sexual morality. It goes deeper than that, to what status the ancient and apostolic tradition has in the Church today. There can be no doubt that the blessing of homosexual relationships is entirely novel and in contradiction to the Christian tradition. So if that tradition no longer holds, it raises questions about the apostolicity of those communities which have abandoned it.

An additional sadness for Catholic and Orthodox Christians is that if the Anglican Communion embraces the path of doctrinal innovation, they will be closing the door on closer ecumenical relations. By unilaterally choosing to do what Catholics and Orthodox have always taught is outside our common tradition, they would be choosing the path of division.

Read it all.

Listen to it all (it starts a little past 45 seconds in). Mr. Piggott is the Religious Affairs correspondent of the BBC and he is interviewed on the BBC’s very fine “Sunday” programme.. Note carefully the quote from Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney at the conclusion of the segment.

It is a large pdf file which may be found here.

From the thread below:

I received a note late today from a faculty member of Trinity Schol for Ministry informing me that John Rodgers has personally told him that he is NOT the author of the SPREAD document to which I have responded. (As I noted, no author was cited.) Another name was mentioned as the author, but rather than potentially further confusion by passing along second-hand information, I will not repeat it. According to the note, John Rodgers is NOT the convener of SPREAD either, as David Virtue reported. What he will say at GAFCON, I am told, is not known.

I apologize for associating John Rodgers’ name with a document he apparently did not write, and with an organization for which he is not the convener.

As early as 2005, however, Rodgers was one of two signatories to a Petition to certain Global South Primates (still on the SPREAD website), where he was listed as “Chairman” of SPREAD. Perhaps he no longer is. He seems to know the author of this particular piece. The Petition he did put forward, however, and which he signed certainly covers the same ground as the “Urgent Call”. It describes Rowan Williams as a an “anti-Scriptural” “threat” to the Gospel and to Anglicanism who refuses to “repent”, and the like””the Petition also likewise lumps in Abp. George Carey into an equivalent camp, quite misleading readers as to Carey’s actual views””and so on. The main difference between the two pieces is that, in the earlier one, the need for a new Communion is laid out as implicitly necessary, now it is laid out as absolutely so. My arguments apply in each case across the board””so I have no apologies to offer on that score in the least. The Petition, I would note, lists several items where Williams is imputed views on the basis of his sitting on the editorial board of something. I don’t know whether this should apply, by analogy, to the SPREAD documents.

I shall have my piece revised so that Rodgers’ name is changed to “the author”, and make other related adjustments.

Meanwhile, I find it interesting that in the thread of one post ”“ the present one ”“ the topic is tied to the dean of one seminary associated with a writing that itself associates the Abp. of Canterbury with “anti-Christ” (and yes, “the author” does indeed “associate” him in this way), with many apparently agreeing that this is a fair characterization, while just above is another posting, from a member of that dean’s own faculty, commending Rowan Williams’ fine theology (pace the Petition’s unmitigated condemnation of his orthodoxy), based on an invited paper delivered at an Eastern Orthodox seminary conference. I’m glad it’s all so clear to everybody ”“ including seminary faculty, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Global South ”“ since apparently Williams has “guaranteed” everybody else’s actions in a decisive way, through his failures””proleptically initiating, it seems, the AMiA itself and its vision even before he was Archbishop of Canterbury””and thereby managed through the deployment of his moral vacuum, to set the course for the New Future.

The whole thread is quite important and I encourage your participation therein. I am closing comments on this entry so that any further comment will continue on the thread below–thanks.

Rowan Williams’ paper read by Fr. Goodall was extremely clear and lucid. It began with greetings to the society and a commendation of the theme of the conference, the meaning of primacy. “The subject matter could hardly be more timely.” The ABC repeatedly made the point that every church is a daughter church except the church in Jerusalem. Each church receives the Gospel from elsewhere and this dependence on that which is received is vital because it reminds each local church that it is not self-sufficient.

There followed a recommendation of the communion ecclesiology of John Zizioulas and others which emphasizes the church as local Eucharistic fellowship gathered around a bishop and which critiques institutional and bureaucratic understandings of church authority. “The church is not an organization controlled from a single point.” However, the ABC went on to say in his paper that “the pendulum has swung too far.” Communio ecclesiology is sometimes taken in a way that encourages an understanding of the church which misses the necessary interdependence of local churches and their existence in an economy of giving and receiving the Gospel. “One bishop is no bishop.” I didn’t get the exact words in my notes but the ABC said in effect that one local church is not the church, again stressing the interdependence of churches.

The paper continued with a reflection on the role of the bishop and of primacy. “The bishop sustains and nourishes his churches’ dependence on the larger church especially as the celebrant of the catholic oblation.” “Identification of primacy apart from the fellowship of all the bishops is questionable.” Primacy should be exercised in terms of sharing the gift of the Gospel and the Spirit. The exercise of the primatial office in the promulgation of a Gospel that cannot be shared outside of the context of one local church and culture is a contradiction of the office of episcopacy and primacy and this is a problem on both the left and the right in Anglicanism.

Read it all.

The British publication International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church commissioned a volume on Covenant and Communion in 2007. This essay was prepared by invitation for that volume several months ago, and it will appear in published form in May 2008. It was posted on the ACI site so that it could be referred to in the context of a General Seminary event in New York last week. The remarks prepared for that context are much briefer, and aimed at a more general audience. They should be posted as well on the ACI site shortly. This was an event attended by Archbishop Gomez and Gregory Cameron, as well as others. Archbishop Gomez is on the ACI Board. I was present as representative of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.

In order both to set limits and for clarity’s sake-themes to which I shall return- the present essay will undertake theological reflection on covenant and the appropriateness of using this term for work presently before us in the Anglican Communion. This requires some threshold consideration. By ”˜theological reflection’ I mean, giving a comprehensive account of Scripture with concern for its total, mutually-informing witness. I take this to be the concern of one of the Articles, with a long prior history, that scripture be read in such a way that its portions be not repugnant, one with another. The same concern also animates what in our present period is called ”˜canonical reading.’

It will be a basic contention of the present essay that this hermeneutical caution is traceable to the rule (kanon; regula) of faith (regula fidei) in the early church. Indeed, in the period of the formation and consolidation of New Testament writings and especially relevant because of the character of that ”˜work-in-progress,’ the rule grounds Christian convictions about the nature of God in Christ in the witness of the stable, inherited scriptures of Israel. The rule of faith is an appeal to the total witness of scripture, especially the Old Testament, as constituting the speech and work of the selfsame Living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in Israel and in the Apostolic witness to Jesus Christ.

Read it all (follow the link provided at the bottom).

It seems that most of my speaking engagements in recent years have focussed on three topics. Each of these is a subset of that traditionally unmentionable trio – politics, sex and religion. A standard conversation at home is “What are you speaking about this time? War? Homosexuality? The Anglican Communion?”. Of course I’ve often found myself speaking about two of the three on the same occasion – I’m sure you can guess which two! Today I think is a first in that I’m going to speak about all three in the same presentation!

My decision to include war is obviously triggered by the title’s use of ‘conflict’ but also by two memorable quotations. One comes from Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished 20th century Christian historian. He apparently once suggested that one could adequately explain all the wars fought in human history simply by taking the animosity present within the average church choir at any moment and giving it a history extended overtime. The roots of war, in other words, are found within the conflictual life of the church at every level. The other comes from the memorable response in 2000 of the then Primate of Canada to the consecration by the Primate of Rwanda and the then Primate of South East Asia of two American priests to serve as bishops in the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). “Bishops”, Michael Peers, said, “are not intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactured on one continent and fired into another as an act of aggression”. The means of war, in other words, have their parallels within the life of the church at every level.

Of course, we are, thankfully, no longer likely to kill each other and that is not an insignificant development and difference from literal ‘war’. However, having said that, the events of recent weeks announced by Changing Attitude are a sad and shocking reminder that physical assault and threats to kill are still real dangers for some who openly identify as gay or lesbian and something all of us need to oppose and make sure we don’t in any way encourage. We must also confess that at a spiritual level Stephen Bates was sadly not too far wrong in calling his book “A Church at War”. We risk as an international body the sort of self-destruction brought by war. We need to recall Paul writing to one of the many New Testament churches wracked by conflict – “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (Gal 5.13-15).

So, how are we to think about conflict and making good moral decisions? What I am going to say falls into two parts – broadly a longer one on conflict and one on covenant….

Read it all.

The true call and mark of the church is faithfulness to the gospel of Christ. This is nothing but the worship of God and the preaching of the message of the cross: the proclamation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The call to focus on Christ and His Mission is essential, but the idea that church structure is set in stone and that bishops deserve unquestioning respect would seem to go against the very teaching and practice of our Lord Jesus. The actions of synods and bishops will always be open to question. What next? Will laypersons be accused of abandoning the Anglican Communion if we work with our Pentecostal, Baptist and Presbyterian brothers and sisters? The urgency of our common calling is relevant to those who are lost and who need to know that The Living God will one day come again to judge this world.

The only means to unity is faithful obedience to Jesus. No human may break this bond. Some in the Anglican Church of Canada would have us believe that decisions made by synods or bishops are capable of overriding the will of God Himself. It is puzzling to see my own corner of the church fragmented because Anglican leaders have failed to provide effective pastoral oversight to those of differing viewpoints. Our officials seem to have a very limited and confused ecclesiology. They think that they can pronounce whole congregations as being out of fellowship with each other, as though unity depends on ecclesiastical agreements or instruments of unity. When I join my brothers and sisters through the week I do not leave the Anglican church behind. I represent my church and bring my heritage with me to work with and draw upon as I serve the lost and encourage my co-workers. This includes all that I have learned as a Christian whether from my own tradition or that of a co-worker. Indeed whenever Christians work together, God’s Church, both visible and invisible, is truly present with all its warts and powers.

Read it all.

This was not just an instance of the West defining itself against Christianity, but also, more tellingly, of a post-Christian West, still recovering from seeing religion as contagion, mobilizing behind a domesticated highbrow view of culture for safeguard.

At Lambeth itself, and subsequently, there was widespread consternation among Western bishops that the Third World bishops seemed misguided enough to think that the Bible could replace enlightened reasonableness as a standard of guidance and Christian teaching. The unprecedented large conversions taking place in Africa and elsewhere were viewed as unwelcome resistance in the path of the West’s cultural juggernaut.

—Lamin Sanneh, the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at Yale Divinity School

In this case, a central clue as to what is going on was given by Bp. Schofield’s March 12 Statement in response to the vote to depose him on the basis of his having “abandoned the Communion of the Church” (Canon IV.9.2): “I have not abandoned the Faith,” Schofield stated; “I resigned from the American House of Bishops and have been received into the House of Bishops of the Southern Cone. Both Houses are members of the Anglican Communion. They are not ”“ or should not be ”“ two separate Churches.” Bp. Schofield’s point is straightforward: if the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone is not a “separate church” from TEC, how can he have “abandoned” the “Communion” of TEC’s own ecclesial existence? Does in fact TEC “recognize” the Southern Cone as an Anglican Church with which she is in communion? In what sense, then, is “abandonment” taken?

The basic ecclesial issue, then, is one of recognizability. Yet this is just the issue that is at stake in the Anglican Communion’s current struggles. Archbishop Rowan Williams himself spoke to it straightforwardly last December in his Advent Letter to the Primates. The Anglican Communion’s “unity”, he wrote, “depends not on a canon law that can be enforced but on the ability of each part of the family to recognise that other local churches have received the same faith from the apostles and are faithfully holding to it in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture and bestows his grace in the sacraments. To put it in slightly different terms, local churches acknowledge the same ‘constitutive elements’ in one another. This means in turn that each local church receives from others and recognises in others the same good news and the same structure of ministry, and seeks to engage in mutual service for the sake of our common mission.” The issue of “recognisability”, of course, is more than a matter of Anglican Communion concern; it has become a central feature of ecumenical discernment. And therefore, the fact that the Presiding Bishop, her advisors, and the House of Bishops as a whole can determine that Bishops Schofield and Cox are worthy of deposition under Canon IV.9.2 would seem to indicate that they believe that both bishops and the Province of the Southern Cone do not share with TEC in the “constitutive elements” of “church” in the fundamental ways that provide “communion”.

Read it all.

What does commitment to “Global South work” mean for two iconic primates from Africa and Asia? Such clarification is necessary. Without which Anglicans across the Southern Hemisphere do not have a shared platform on which they can discuss how to support one another in promoting the common good.

In what follows, I shall chart the emergence of “Global South Anglican”, and place its rise within the broader historical developments of churches in the Southern Hemisphere. I shall end with some broader questions for the future of the Communion.

Read it all.

Paul Moser is beginning to speak at the Mere Anglicanism Conference–check out his homepage.

A reminder of what I will be up to for the next three days.

In examining the origins of the conservative movement in the Episcopal Church, Hassett challenges some widespread opinions held by members of the liberal community. The oft-repeated charge that the support of Global South bishops for American conservatives at the 1998 Lambeth Conference and subsequently was “bought,” she dismisses as reflecting an inadequate grasp of where most of the Southern bishops stood. That there are problems with the disparities of wealth between North and South and how wealth is shared between the two cannot, she believes, explain why the crisis has developed as it has done. More controversial, especially in America, will be the conclusion she draws from her experience of worshipping and talking with the St. Timothy’s, regarding the genuineness of the professions of concern for moral teaching that come from groups like AMIA. “Although homosexuality is often singled out for particularly vehement opposition,” she writes, “my time at St. Timothy’s showed me that evangelical Episcopalians’ responses to homosexuals are framed in the same language of sin and the need for transformation through a relationship with Jesus Christ that they apply to their own lives.” (42)

Conservatives, however, should not become complacent. Hassett has her own view of the myth that has grown up around Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, which has led some to see the shift in the locus of power to the Global South as the inevitable triumph of Christian orthodoxy. (249-52) Her Ugandan experiences demonstrate that the sense of a monolithic Southern Church that one can sometimes derive from the statements of certain primates is far from accurate. She notes, for example, the greater degree of tolerance for homosexuality (though not a denial of its sinful nature) displayed by the Bakolole fellowships that emerged from the East African Revival; the understanding of homosexuality as an imported “colonial” practice that has made it a matter of nationalist well as religious significance; and the continued reservations expressed by Ugandan bishops and priests about the wisdom of constituting AMIA.

Read it all.