…I have my eye on the meeting continuing on in Canterbury, with Anglican heterodox and orthodox bishops meeting to try to avert the imminent crisis of a world wide split. It was reported yesterday that Canterbury tried to employ the Delphi Technique, that clever business of getting everyone divided up into small groups and not letting them talk altogether. Each small group is managed by a facilitator who reports up the line what the group has said. “Consensus” and “Agreement” are achieved through a carefully managed and crafted process and nothing frank or honest is ever reported to have been said. Also, they, the primates, had to all turn in their cell phones.

Being the pessimist I am, I muttered, “of course” when I read this. But, then, in the depths of my soul, I discovered a kernel of something I haven’t faced for a long time, grief.

Because, it turns out, though I hadn’t been willing to look at it, and I wouldn’t have been able to face it even if I could, I also had been harboring hope. Not a single person who walked away from the episcopal church, unlike Lot’s wife, did so without much agony and looking back. It’s not that we were unsure, or confused, it’s that we were sorrowful, grieved. Because the episcopal church had been a place of nourishment and beauty. It is a church full of lovely things to look at, beautiful music, and interesting people who are, as I like to say, God Curious.

But, well, the leaders of that church, Michael Curry more brilliantly than anyone, have mixed just enough truth with just enough error to wreck everything. If you really want to know God on his own terms, not shaped and molded by the dubious sensibilities of the age, you won’t be able to stay there. You have to get into a church space where the Word of God is unfolded completely

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Read it all.

Memories of this paternalistic and monochrome view of Africa returned as I observed the response of some members of the Episcopal Church to the recent meeting of the Primates. I have listened as we lambasted “the Africans” as if they form one country that spoke one language and shared one view of the world: apparently, uninformed bigotry.[1] We have pretended that they are not a multi-cultural continent with the same mix of good and bad that is indicative of all societies. I must say this as plainly as possible: If Korea, Japan, India, and China shared a similar view on human sexuality would we blame ”” implicitly and explicitly ”” “Asian” culture? Would we speak about them as a monolith? Would we assume that they are unthinking and “behind” America and the West? This smacks of cultural imperialism. It is cultural imperialism.

Western Anglican media coverage of Africa often follows a familiar pattern. The coverage of non-Western Anglicans usually focuses on economic development, especially the work of Western companion dioceses in the third world. The subtle message is clear: theology is for the West; the Global South receives our aid. Thus, when the Anglican Communion does gather to discuss issues of theology and Africans repeat the official teaching of the Communion and the teaching of the vast majority of Christians everywhere, they are rebuked for taking the focus away from the common mission (of African economic development) that unites the Communion. We seem to be confused as to how those Africans would dare do this after we have spent the last thirty years congratulating ourselves for granting the aid that we have made the basis of our common life. We cannot understand why they would be so divisive and on the wrong side of our definition of justice.

Read it all from Esau McCaulley.

Read it all.

[Journalists] haven’t noticed that the Anglican Communion has already shattered to pieces and can no longer be described as a ”˜Communion’. There are still Anglican Churches and there are still relationships, but the truth is that there is no longer an interchangeable ministry, intercommunion and common prayer.

Even more importantly, there are no longer any regular meetings of the Communion nor any structures of Communion that carry any confidence. The Primates’ meeting has not met since 2011. The 2018 Lambeth Conference has been postponed, and at least a third of the Primates failed to show up for the 2008 Conference when they found they were to be subjected to endless exercises in so-called ”˜Indaba’ ”“ a supposedly African tribal form of talking through differences.

The remedies that Archbishop Rowan Williams attempted to put in place to deal with the problem of Anglican fragmentation in the wake of the Gene Robinson controversy ”“ including the Panel of Reference, the Windsor Report, the short-lived exclusion of the Americans and Canadians from the Anglican structures and the now-forgotten ”˜Anglican Covenant’ ”” had failed.

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The old saw about the Communion used to go something like this: “The Africans pray, the Americans pay, and the British make the rules.” It now appears that the British alone no longer make the rules, and that the Americans are already not paying as much as they did before. (The Africans, it may safely be said, have never stopped praying.) The latest statement from the Anglican Communion Office shows (see the last page of the link) that ECUSA has paid through 2014 less than half of what was requested (£204,772 of £538,280). Thus the withdrawal of all funds by ECUSA may turn out not to be the decisive step that many Episcopalians conceive it to be.

What is certain is that in three years, the Anglican Communion will not be what it is now, nor anything like what it was in 2003: the Episcopal Church (USA) has already seen to that. If the recent sanctions provoke ECUSA to amend the Preamble to its Constitution, and to cease proclaiming itself as “a constituent member of the Anglican Communion”, both the Communion and ECUSA would be the better for it.

ECUSA as a former Anglican province has long since decided to walk apart from its fellow Anglican provinces, in its single-minded elevation of human justice over God’s justice as expressed in unequivocal Holy Scriptures. It is time to stop the pretense that it remains willing to be “in communion” with the See of Canterbury — at least, so long as Canterbury remains faithful to Lambeth 1.10, and especially if ECUSA withdraws its financial support (as, in all honesty, it should once it withdraws its membership). Let it find its new communion partners among those who likewise think the Holy Spirit is doing a “new thing” among them, and let the test of Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-39) decide who, ultimately, is in the right.

Read it all.

O Thou, who givest to thy children liberally and upbraidest not: Preserve us from all envy at the good of our neighbour, and from every form of jealousy. Teach us to rejoice in what others have and we have not, to delight in what they achieve and we cannot accomplish, to be glad in all that they enjoy and we do not experience; and so fill us daily more completely with love; through him in whom thou hast promised to supply all our need, our Saviour Jesus Christ.

So then, there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God; for whoever enters God’s rest also ceases from his labors as God did from his.

–Hebrews 4:10-11

The practical consequences of the primates’ action will be that, for three years, Episcopalians will not be invited to serve on certain committees, or will be excluded from voting while they are there. However, the primates do not have authority over the Anglican Consultative Council, the worldwide body of bishops, clergy and lay people that facilitates the cooperative work of the churches of the Anglican Communion. I serve as a representative to that body, along with Bishop Ian Douglas of Connecticut, a four-time deputy before his election as bishop, and six-time Deputy Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine of the Virgin Islands, and I am planning to travel to Zambia for our scheduled meeting in April and to participate fully.

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