Anglican leaders meeting in London have rejected a move to “separate” the Episcopal Church from the wider Anglican Communion, a proposal that officials called premature and “unhelpful.”
The proposal was offered Saturday (July 24) by Dato Stanley Isaacs, a member of the Anglican Communion’s Standing Committee from the Province of South East Asia, according to a statement issued Monday.
The Episcopal Church has come under fire from sister Anglican churches for its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire in 2003, as well as a lesbian assistant bishop in Los Angeles earlier this year.
I am sure that other members of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Consultative Council (which for some reason also styles itself as “the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion”) would find such a proposal “premature and unhelpful”. After all, representation on the Standing Committee is heavily biased towards liberals and liberal sympathisers.
Looking at other sites, Liberal bloggers are outraged. They query why the Standing Committee has power at all to consider such a matter, and that is a fair question.
But their outrage seems to primarily arise from a disbelief that anyone could consider ejecting TEC from the Anglican Communion.
Anyway, if nothing else, Mr Isaacs showed great courage in making this proposal, in the presence of KJ Schori and +Douglas, no less. Faithful christians should be thankful for the witness of Mr Isaacs and his home province of South East Asia.
Its interesting also that the Standing Committee considered the proposal. They didn’t rule it out of order or throw it out, even though members like ++Aspinall, Kearon+ and Trisk+ probably wanted to. Perhaps they are now more aware of the strong beliefs of many orthodox Anglicans on this issue.
Given a chance to act, perhaps decisively, they have chosen not to act. And there, in a nutshell, is the Anglican problem. Larry
It should be obvious, I would think, that Schori and Company should know by now that there was a very good reason why this was even brought up in the first place. What do they expect, for God’s sake? This is going to happen again…..perhaps in a different form by a different committee, but sooner or later, it will happen again. And if I were them, I wouldn’t count on it not succeeding the next time around.
This was only Round 1.
Larry at #2,
Respectfully, I don’t think “the problem in a nutshell” is a failure to act, rather the primary problem is that many Anglican leaders are either apostate or openly flirt with apostasy.
If the Standing Committee had been dominated by KJS and her TEC cronies, it would have acted decisively (to endorse TEC and censure the orthodox) but wrongly. If the Standing Committee had been dominated by the orthodox Primates, it would also have acted decisively (to censure or expel TEC) and rightly. The reason it didn’t act at all is because it is torn – many of its members are trying to sit on the fence between orthodox Anglicans and liberal Anglicans.
This struggle we are waging is essentially the clash of two different gospels and it will in the end be a struggle to purify the leadership of the Anglican churches (as much as any church can be purified in this present age).