Fifty-one Anglican and Episcopal bishops announced plans yesterday to form a separate Anglican province in North America within 15 months, giving disaffected Episcopalians a chance to flee their increasingly liberal denomination.
The Common Cause partnership, which includes bishops from several Episcopal dioceses and leaders of nine Anglican organizations, met yesterday in Pittsburgh. The leaders represent 600 congregations and more than 100,000 people.
The bishops said they will meet in December to put together an office staff for a 39th province of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion.
“We took some steps in the right direction,” said Bishop Martyn Minns, the former rector of Truro Church in Fairfax who now leads the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a group of 60 former Episcopal churches that have left the denomination. “It was quite a journey but I am pleased with the movement we made.”
From the Washington Times:
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has refused to recognize CANA and similar breakaway Anglican groups as part of the Anglican Communion. [b]However, yesterday’s document did not refer to Archbishop Williams.[/b] It did refer to some 20 “Global South” bishops, most from Africa, who in 2006 instructed the North Americans to start forming a “separate ecclesiastical structure.”
From the Hartford Courant:
The Common Cause bishops plan to meet every six months, provided their individual territories vote to join the partnership. The partnership plans to hold its first constitutional convention late next year and [b]seek recognition from the Anglican world spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.[/b]
As the song of “Sesame Street” goes, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…” Which one is it?
Although 51 bishops may have come to the meeting, there were only aout 30-something in the final picture.
The bishops of Albany left early and “did not sign anything.” the Albany leadership has been told, “we are in a holding pattern.”
It will be good to find out exactly who comprise the CCP for now.
The document does not mention the ABC, and it may be because +Duncan and others have already dissed and dismissed him. They apparently plan to seek recognition from the primates and by-pass the ABC, who won’t recognize them any way.
I wonder who else left early.
The chief cause of such meetings, I believe, is to find efficiencies in ministries of people preaching the same Gospel. As far as forming a so-called “new” church goes, I think a decision on that awaits a Primates decision and the possible concurrence of the ABC. Whether the Episcopal church cracks up or not, we need to preach Christ to an anxious and lost world.