Charles Raven has written a timely series of lectures on contemporary Anglicanism delivered in May at George Whitefield College , Cape Town , South Africa and recently posted on the GAFCON website.
Although these lectures were presented well in advance of Bp. Forster bringing Welby’s greetings to ACNA Provincial Assembly, Raven addresses the Archbishop of Canterbury’s mandate to keep everyone at the table talking together as long as it takes, as evidenced by Archbishop Welby’s message to the ACNA Assembly:
“It is apparent that there are no easy fixes as far as the current fissures in the Anglican Communion go. In these circumstances we need to keep all available channels of communication open, and to listen patiently and above all prayerfully to each other. When there is division in the church it is only by digging deeper into the life of God, which He graciously shares with us, that we will understand anew, the true bonds of unity in our one Lord, one faith and one baptism.”
Archbishop Welby is here continuing the shift begun by Archbishop Rowan Willliams from a “confessional ecclesiology” to a “conversational ecclesiology”, where the process matters more than the content. Raven charts the development of this seismic shift in Anglicanism, a process that is also at work in the mainline Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Raven gives a remarkably clear, concise and admirably documented history of the disintegration of institutional Anglicanism over the past sixteen years and how it fell into the chaos of the “current unpleasantness.” This is ABSOLUTE MUST READING for anyone wanting to understand the underlying dynamics of the Anglican realignment in real time. To access the pdf lectures, click on the links provided. (I have posted very brief excerpts in addition to the general summary for each of the three lectures. You can also find a more detailed analysis of ++Rowan Williams’ Hegelian experiment in Raven’s masterful account, Shadow Gospel, which I highly recommend):