“Whether a target’s on my back or not on my back is not my chief concern,” [Bishop Mark Lawrence] said. “I believe we should get on with the mission to which God has called us in the Anglican Communion.”
The bishop said that energy for mission is moving away from institutions, whether the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion’s Instruments of Unity, and toward more direct relationships, such as the diocese’s new arrangement to welcome the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the retired Bishop of Rochester, England, as “visiting bishop in South Carolina for Anglican Communion Development.”
“Out of these relationships, I believe, the solutions will emerge,” Bishop Lawrence said. “We’re living in a world in which inhibitions and depositions can intrude into a vision.”
Lawrence added that he does not see himself as violating his ordination vows to conform to the doctrine and discipline of the church. Instead, he said, bishops who approve unconstitutional canons or who revise church teaching on sexual morality have violated their vows.
“We’re increasingly in a world in which people expect a bishop to swear fealty to every resolution of General Convention, regardless of its theological foundations,” he said.
Bonnie Anderson asks if one part of the body of Christ needs to protect itself from another part of the body. I would respond yes, if one part of the body has become cancerous, then the healthy part needs to protect itself from the cancer.
The “National Church” has become a cancer, look at the fruits that it is producing. The Diocese of South Carolina is right to try to protect itself.