Bishop Robert Duncan, Moderator of The Common Cause Partnership (CCP), appointed a “Collegiate Vicar” for The Association of Western Anglican Congregations. The decision was announced to the Western Anglicans House of Delegates meeting in Newport Beach today. As the Collegiate Vicar, The Rev. Bill Thompson, Rector of All Saints Anglican Church in Long Beach, California, will serve as an ambassadorial link between Western Anglicans ”” a cluster of 21 orthodox Anglican congregations in Southern California and Arizona ”” and the Common Cause Partnership (CCP).
“The appointment of the Collegiate Vicar is a wonderful step in the process of unifying orthodox Anglican believers in North America,” said Ron Speers, Western Anglicans President. “We are modeling at the grass roots what CCP is doing at the national and international level.” Thus far Western Anglican member congregations have canonical ties to the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone of South America, The Anglican Province of Uganda, and The Reformed Episcopal Church. All Common Cause Partners churches in the region, whatever their jurisdiction, are invited to participate.
The format to the link is messed up. Try this.
[url=http://www.acn-us.org/archive/2008/06/vicar.html]Read it all[/url]
The chrysalis of a new Anglican presence in North America. Praise God.
I went to the website and I did NOT see any of the congregations mentioned being part of the Reformed Episcopal Church. These folks are mostly Uganda, Southern Cone etc.
The Reformed Episcopal Church is (currently) a part of the Common Cause partnership but I cannot see one of our churches being intimately involved (board of directors, delegates) with a parish which has ordained a female to the transitiional diaconate.
How can I encourage its growth? (Thanks for the link Jeremy.) Larry
#3’s comments raise a profoundly interesting question. Is Common Cause yet ready to be the prototype for the new Anglican province?
Father Martin (cited later in the piece) also appears ambivalent to the notion of church hierarchy. “[i]Ministry happens person-to-person at the grass roots level,[/i]” he says “[i]A hierarchy can’t make it happen. We’re looking forward to bishops who defend the historic faith, who share the faith with the unchurched and plant new churches, not just leaders wielding monarchical power.[/i]â€
Is this declaration to be understood merely in terms of the recent misuse of episcopal power by certain individuals or does it foreshadow a resolve to minimize the sacramental and apostolic nature of the episcopate? There’s nothing wrong with what Father Martin wants from bishops but given the Archbishop of Sydney’s take on eucharistic theology, I could easily imagine other catholic elements of Anglican identity becoming subject to dispute. And it would be nice to know what we’re getting into before we take the plunge.
Recchip: Lighten up, will ya? One thing at a time!
Hey RecChip, my understanding was that this is a liaison appointment between the parishes out West that are in the Network and the CCP. But I could be wrong. That would explain why the list of parishes doesn’t list an REC parish — because the REC is not a part of the Network.
Jeremy,
You raise a good point. I recall, that once, at the closing of a mortgage the lawyer became quite peeved when I took my time reading the documents before signing them. “Just sign the damn things, don’t read them”, I heard him mutter. To which I replied that ‘when I’m rushed I can become real dumb, real quick.’ Needless to say, he said no more. Perhaps every one’s egos can be assuaged by making everyone in the new Province a bishop?
The Association of Western Anglican Congregations is pretty clearly intended to compete with the Episcopal Church in Southern California and Arizona. They have every right to do that, of course, since they have left the Episcopal Church. They also have every right to set up an alternative organization as a preliminary step towards forming a diocese, and to seek recognition by the Anglican Communion as an alternative or supplement to TEC.
However, it seems to be really, [b]really[/b] bad timing for the Bishop of Pittsburgh to be appointing a Vicar (clearly a proto-bishop or commissary) for that organization while he stands accused of abandoning TEC. One is inevitably reminded of John Wesley’s appointment of Asbury and Coke, which was the major step leading to the Anglican-Methodist Schism. All that this action does is provide additional ammunition for those who want to label Bp. Duncan as an [i]episcopus vagantus[/i] who is exercising oversight as a personal prerogative, rather than as the representative of a particular church. Surely this appointment could have been made in some other way.
Of course, once Bp. Duncan has chosen to leave TEC and form an outpost of the Southern Cone of South America, he can do anything that his new province authorizes. However, so long as he is a bishop in TEC, he should not be acting as the representative of a competing denomination.
Dale, The Episcopal Church has no right to the claim that they, and they alone, are the rightful claimants to the title of “sole expression of Anglicanism in the United States.” There is nothing in writing anywhere which guarantees them that right.
If Bishop Duncan is helping to lay the foundation for a new and authentic orthodox Anglican province in this country, more power to him, and I say “God bless you, Bishop Duncan!” I remind you that it is TEC which have left US, and not the other way around. Otherwise, none of this mess would ever have happened, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
rechip, St. Luke’s REC in Santa Ana, CA was welcomed into Western Anglicans on Saturday. The Rector and several lay representatives were at the meeting. They could not have missed the female clergy, who were quite evident.
recchip,
In for a penny, in for a pound.
RECCHIP: are you saying that the REC will not work with or be in communion with the female priests of the Diocese of Pittsburgh when they pull out of TEC? How about the Bishop of Pittsburgh?
Eugene,
That is precisely why I said ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. I still see a number of unsettled issues which could blow apart Common Cause. I’d like to think that the powers-that-be amongst the leadership are aware of them and have a plan. At this point, although I’m with CANA, I fear we have a rather fragile alliance that to some degree may be perceived by some as being “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Jeremy Bonner (#5), your first assumption is correct. This comment from Fr. Martin had in mind the misuse of power by TEC bishops. I can assure you that Western Anglicans has a very high value and view of the episcopate. In TEC there was a pervasive tendency to see the role of the parish to be to serve the diocese. I think the appropriate view is to see the diocese having call to support and serve the parishes. It is in the parishes, after all, that 90% of ministry takes place. The primary role of the bishop (among others) is to be a defender of the Faith once delivered.
Regarding recchip (#3), what #11 wrote is true. There is at least one other REC parish that is interested in joining Western Anglicans as well. It is also highly likely that three APA parishes will join soon, along with an AMiA and a CANA parish. It is our hope that Western Anglicans can model what we hope CCP will be like on the national level. The reason that such moves are not noted on our website is that it has not been updated in the last few weeks. Those changes will be made.
#13 As to who will work with who, that is a subject of much discussion. Even Bishops Iker and Ackerman (I think) made comments at CCP meetings that they could not be in “full communion” with diocese with Woman Presbyters. This whole thing as been described as “hanging by a thread” by at least one Bishop of the REC and has been described as “they a whole different kettle of fish” by another. (Speaking of CCP/Network folks).
Let me point out that my postings are NOT OFFICIAL POSITIONS OF THE REC but do reflect a number of discussions which have taken place with various folks. Our current Presiding bishop has spoken of “duel integrities” in all this. Also, the CCP been described as “a confederation not a union” so we will see. I know FOR A FACT that we have been promised that we will NEVER have any “female priests” even so much as participate in anything we are directly involved in. (i.e. inter-partner meetings).
#16,
The statement regarding those present at the meeting in which the REC parish participated seems to fly in the face of your[blockquote] I know FOR A FACT that we have been promised that we will NEVER have any “female priests†even so much as participate in anything we are directly involved in. (i.e. inter-partner meetings). [/blockquote] How do you propose to reconcile the two?
Re #10–The issue is not whether TEC has an exclusive claim in the US to the name “Anglican,” but whether TEC has an exclusive claim to the loyalty of its own bishops. If a TEC bishop is free to appoint the leadership of a church that is in direct competition with TEC for members without facing discipline, then it is hard to see why an Anglican bishop is not free to ordain gay clergy. Either bishops are bound by the collective discernment of the church they belong to, or they are free to act on their own private conscience. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
To repeat, the members of the Western Anglicans don’t have that problem because they aren’t in TEC and Bp. Duncan won’t have the problem when he leaves TEC. Just at the moment, however, he is a TEC bishop and should not be functioning as if he were not. For him to do so simply gives ammunition to the critics who claim that he has already abandoned TEC and should be removed from its ministry.
Incidentally, I never suggested that TEC has the right to the claim that they, and they alone, are the rightful claimants to the title of “sole expression of Anglicanism in the United States.†After all, the REC has been around for 134 years. At the moment, however, TEC is the sole church that is recognized as a member of the Anglican Communion by the majority of other churches in that Communion. There actually are “things in writing” that confirm that status until or unless the Communion formally acts to change them.
The fact that AMiA is recognized by Rwanda or CANA by Nigeria means exactly as much as the fact that the Philippine Independent Church is recognized by TEC and the Church of England in South Africa is recognized by the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. Until those entities are recognized as members of the Communion by the Communion as a whole, they may be Anglican in a sense, but they are not part of the Communion. Again, I have no problem with them calling themselves Anglican if they wish to do so, they certainly are in communion with unquestioned Communion members, and the Communion as a whole may recognize them in the future. Still, that is not the same as proof that one is formally a part of the Anglican Communion today. Several of the Common Cause jurisdictions quite specifically repudiate being a part of the Canterbury-led Communion.
What I did suggest is that bishops in TEC are elected to provide pastoral oversight within TEC, not in some other ecclesiastical body that is expressly in competition with TEC. For so long as such a bishop is still in TEC, he should dance with the one that brung him. If he doesn’t, he is simply giving ammunition to those who have suggested that he has already abandoned TEC.
Similarly, the Republican Party has no right to claim that it is the only political party in America, but it would clearly take action against a state party chairman who started funneling support to the Democrats. If he wants to do that, he should resign from the Republicans and join the Democrats (and not expect to bring all the furniture and office equipment from the Republican state headquarters with him).
REC and APA participation in Common Cause when/if it becomes an official church organization is going to have to be what the no-WO English have and are about to lose: a separate male-only ordination and authority track. Without that, it won’t work. And it can’t be viewed as “first things first, others later.” In the view of the no-WO parishes, this IS the first thing that started the cascade.
(I would add easy divorce and remarriage to the WO problems as a combination which has to be addressed.)
Bp Duncan is the head of an ecumenical group that includes Episcopalians and non-Episcopalians. The appointment of the local leader is merely a reflection of his responsibility of his official status in the CCP. He has stated that he is proud of the organization that brings together continuing Anglicans, realigned Anglicans and remaining Episcopalians.
I imagine there are leaders of community soup kitchens involving diverse local churches, who could be accused by Dale to have similar conflict of interests.
Dale Rye, Bishop Duncan and others like him should be free to transfer to another member province of the Anglican Communion, taking their people with them, as +John-David Schofield, my bishop, did, while at the same time remaining in the U.S. TEC seems to have a problem with that.
Why?
No. 16 – rechip – Why doesn’t the REC ordain women?
Excellent question, rob k, and a quick visit to their website doesn’t immediately provide the answer. The APA declines on sacramental and ecclesiological grounds. If the REC has been explicit about the reasons for its continued adherence to church tradition I’d like to see the statement.
I would imagine the REC doesn’t accept ordained women because they take seruously the plain meaning of Scripture, a major Protestant principle, and don’t ignore it through imaginative contextualizations and strained exegesis. When Paul says “I do not permit a woman to teach” and backs it up with an argument based in the Fall, you have to be really creative, in a TEC fashion, to conclude that doesn’t apply to ordination.
Chris Hathaway, I’m on your side on this issue. What I would like to see is what the REC’s official rationale is. Do they base it on Scripture, as you do? In that case, they are not likely to change. I’d like to know what they say.
Katherine #25 and others,
Your wish is my command. Here is the applicable section from the canons of the REC.
(Canon 7 sections 9 )
Section 9 In accordance with the plain teaching of Holy Scripture, and the historic practice of the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, only males may be admitted as Postulants for Holy Orders in this Church.
So we do base it on Scripture and the historical practice of the Church. I will leave it at that.
recchip, thank you very much.
[i]All that this action does is provide additional ammunition for those who want to label Bp. Duncan as an episcopus vagantus who is exercising oversight as a personal prerogative, rather than as the representative of a particular church.[/i]
I understand your point here, Mr Rye, but it should be pointed out that Bishop Duncan [i]is[/i] acting as the [i]episcopus[/i] (not the representative – that isn’t what bishops are) of a particular church, viz., the Church in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Admittedly, Bishop Duncan’s at least philoscophical crossing of those sacrosanct diocesan boundaries that Episcopalians have been crossing in the American West since they moved into (Spanish and Mexican) Catholic dioceses is another matter.
No. 24 – Do you understand it in the same sense as does much of the LCMS, in which shere is still much resistance to women teachers, especially in seminary, or in school. Do you mind your kids having a female school teacher?
rob, first, I don’t have kids :-), but if I did I wouldn’t mind them having female teachers on secular subjects, though the absense of male presence in schools is a bit of a problem culturally. I believe mixed education is a grand failure and single sex schools are far superior. I don’t buy the argument that kids should be learning intersexual social skills. I frankly believe that the sexes should be segregated as much as is feasably possible until they have learned some sense and gotten over the rush of hormones. But that’s a sane society that would take quite a few years to resurrect in this decadent culture.
As for adult education, as long as it isn’t teaching doctrine I could tolerate female teachers. But I believe that a propoerly ordered society is male led. Female leadership is sympotmatic of an unhealthy society just as is youth oriented leadership. It’s a problem when women are better leaders or more ready to lead than the men, and it’s a problem when the young are wiser than the old, or thought to be so.
God created us male and female, and the sexes should function correspondingly according to the gifts God has given them. It is for men to lead, and the pattern for that leadership is found in the Prototype. Adam is the Prototype of fallen Man. Jesus is the Prototype of redeemed Man.
#30 Amen.
At our parish we have only men on the vestry, only male wardens, only male lectors and only boy acolytes.
In the Sunday School Classes. The women teach the ladies class and the kids classes up to grade 3.
The ladies do the altar guild (and God help the man who messes with that!!0 and the flowers.
Everybody serves and nobody either dominates or is subservient. Everybody fulfills their calling and everybody is happy. Let me note, our bylaws do not prevent females from running for vestry, but our ladies don’t seem to want to. (And after some 2 hour vestry meetings, I wonder if they are not smarter-GRIN).
I think the last few posts should be widely disseminated in TEC. That would quite clearly kill any desire whatever that 95% of Episcopalians might ever have had of reconciling with anyone who holds these views. A comedian might say, “With the reappraisers gone, you could move on to outlawing both the women’s shoe and contraceptive industries, so that women could be kept in their proper state on a permanent basis.” On the contrary, I don’t think it is particularly funny, but rather seriously revealing, that there are still adult Americans in the twenty-first century who not only feel this way but feel free to express themselves in this way about those feelings.
Please, please, don’t keep this a secret, but let everyone know how you feel about this, so that all the women vestry members who have voted to take their parishes out of TEC can get an honest look at their future in the “Orthodox Anglican” movement. Do the women clergy in Pittsburgh (to say nothing of the women Sunday School teachers in San Joaquin, Fort Worth, and Quincy) really understand that this is what they are facing?
Dale, it is typical of revisionists like yourself to be aghast at beliefs that were widley held by all society just a little more than a century ago. It is the symptom of our age that we feel morally superior to all our forefathers as if they represented a barbarsim from which we have escaped. But perhaps if you were more widely read you would not be so shocked. Critiques of our sexual egalitarian society are increasingly common even here in the West, for the simple reason that the scheme you favor doesn’t work so well. Western society is disintegrating around us. And what or who would you blame? Bush?
You might also be shocked, if your were open minded enough to look, to see how many women agree with these ideas. Getting women “out of the kitchen”, so to speak, and thrust into the rat race alongside men (with all the delights of sexual harrassment and sexual harrassment laws, the the backlash to those) many women are finding much less fulfilling than it was promised to be.
But please, do diseminate these comments. Mostly I find people don’t want to hear them. They would rather stick their fingers in their ears and play pretend. So provoking the argument would be a service. Thanks.
On another note, Dale, it is “quite revealing”, in your words, that you are disturbed that some may “feel free to express themselves” when their views are so displeasing to you. I guess free intellectual discourse is not a big thing with you. Everybody loves freedom of speech, as long as it’s the correct speech.
A wee bit fascist, don’t you think?
Chris,
Are you saying that one cannot believe in an all-male sacramental priesthood and object to the economic and social pressures that increasingly deny women the option of being stay-at-home mothers without also arguing for the sort of functional separation that you outline?
Indeed, if one questions the latter, does that make one a
“revisionist”? For that matter, have Kenya and Uganda become
“revisionist” by abandoning that standard for the sacramental priesthood?
If there are God-given talents to be exercised (and obligations to God and family are not sacrificed), then is it not akin to hiding one’s light under a bushel for a woman – as for a man – to fail to exercise them to the fullest? Is scholarship – including theological scholarship – the credentials for which are undeniably orthodox to hold a lesser place simply because of the gender of its author?
I know of one instance of a new (extra-provincial oversight) congregation in the West, where several women who had been deeply involved in its formation deliberately held back in order to encourage the men to assume leadership roles, but theirs was a self-denying prersonal decision, not one imposed by fiat. Seems a much better model of servant ministry to me.
And you will have to write +Bob out of the equation, too. He can hardly be sound, what with a female canon missioner and numerous female ordinands to his credit. Which brings us neatly back to the original question. Is CCP ready to assume the role which +Bob clearly has in mind for it?
Jeremy, no I am not so arguing. One can believe anything one wants. I was arguing for such a functional separation on its own merits. Dale I name a revisionist because of the obvious give away of chronological snobbery, as Lewis put it. He some how thinks that certain ideas should disappear with time, as if we grow out of them. Such is the trademark attitude of liberalism and revisionists who automatically dismiss the past as inferior unless it agrees with them.
But you seem to be offering a false dichotomy: either women must be allowed to lead along with men or they can do nothing. Leadership is a very narrow section of ministry. God has given women exceptional gifts. Leadership over men is simply not one of them. Once they are freed from the vain burden of pursuing that which God has not called them to do they will be free to excercize their true gifts more fruitfully.
I also do not equate scholarship with teaching. A woman may write a brilliant theological treatise. But for it to be accepted in the church requires authority. And that requires a Y chromosome.
As for CCP, well, everything is in a period of transistion. Isn’t it? Arguments such as mine will be present to continue the theological argument that must take place. It’s one thing to seperate from a dead liberal institution. It’s another thing to then examine how much liberalism you have taken with you. I believe that away from this greater apostacy the seeds of that disease will be more clearly visible, just like some stains on your shirt show up in better light. Modernism and liberalism is a disease that has infected the entire Communion to varying degrees. It has also infected Rome, but they have better antibodies. We in TEC are living in the worst infected region. Once we exit we will have to carefully and prayerfully start looking at all the other symptoms and causes of infection in ourselves and in the Communion, even in places where sores have yet to develop.
I don’t know if we will be able to hold together. Some who are conservative in TEC will be on the liberal end outside it and may not be willing to give up that bit of liberlaism. Some may be willing, but not for the sake of a catholicity that their strong evangelicalism rebels against.
Canterbury and the CofE was an artificial center that held together the different elements of Anglicanism in tension. But the center will no longer hold. Can the conservatives of all stripes hold together for together’s sake long enough to refashion another center?
Time will tell.
Thanks all for your clarifying replies on the “leadership” principle. I still think the deepest divide in Anglicanism is between Catholicism and Protestqntism. It’s time to realize that ithe Church can hold together two different ecclesiologies.