The head of the Anglican church has made it clear he is powerless to stop conservative Canadian and U.S. congregations, upset with their national churches’ positions on homosexuality, from leaving and affiliating with orthodox branches in Latin America and Africa.
It was a frank admission by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, of the limits of his power, even though he is opposed to cross-border ecclesiastical moves.
Williams was responding to a plea by the liberal leadership of the Anglican Church of Canada to address the fact that the orthodox Anglican Church of the Southern Cone of the Americas had started in November giving oversight to some congregations — or “intervening” in Canada.
“I have no canonical authority to prevent these things, but I would simply repeat what was said in my advent letter (in December), to the effect that I cannot support or sanction such actions,” Williams wrote the Canadian archbishops.
++Rowan Williams has no power to keep people from leaving the Anglican Church, true enough. But he certainly has the authority to declare who is and who is not part of the Anglican Communion (by way of welcome to Lambeth). Sadly, he has continually failed to use that power to exclude the pansexual agenda type folk. He will go down in history as having let the Anglican Communion fall apart.
No, I don’t think so. He will go down in history as the godly man who could do nothing to stop Anglicans fighting each other like ferrets in a sack.
Isn’t the point that they are not leaving the communion but only the native church of Canada or the US? Bishops KJS and Fred Hiltz have been saying that leaving the North American churches means leaving the communion. Apparently this is not the case.
There are all kinds of things that one province or primate can’t sanction or support about the others. TEC has marriage and remarriage canons that can’t be sanctioned or supported by many primates around the communion. Women bishops in the US aren’t sanctioned or supported in quite a few provinces of the Communion. All the great fuss about who is in and who is out is really pointless, don’t you think? If one province has bishops and faithful people in the old franchise territory of another, so what? Better to deal with things the way they are rather than the way you wish they still were. Here in Louisiana, it became common to speak about “the new normal” after the hurricanes tore our region apart a few years ago. I suggest that same term has application among faithful Anglicans of all stripes: after all, aren’t Episcopalians supposed to respect the dignity of every human being (even Anglicans from other provinces who happen to be next door)? Spending too much time yearning for an Anglican Communion that has already gone the way of the dodo is a waste of kingdom time and resources.