This morning a minor miracle takes place. Our Indaba group, drawn almost from every nation under heaven, agrees all but unanimously on the way ahead for the Anglican Communion. We agree to a moratorium on actively gay bishops, on same-sex blessings and incursions from other provinces until a Covenant can be drawn up.
We agree to a Pastoral Forum to advise the Archbishop of Canterbury and provide mediation for disputes between provinces or dioceses.
We make several suggestions for strengthening and improving the “Instruments of Communion” including the idea that a future Archbishop of Canterbury might be elected from across the world.
We should strengthen the teaching office and decision-making ability of the Lambeth Conference.
The constituencies of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting need sorting out; at present they are not representative and America dominates.
Forty-three out of forty-five bishops agree to the moratoria and the Pastoral Forum and the other two more or less cancel each other out. There is one bishop who says that this would be too hard for his gay and lesbian people and another who says that the American church must repent before we can restore fellowship.
[blockquote]We are told that in the lawsuits in America between parishes and their dioceses it is the dioceses who are the defendants and the conservative parishes who are the accusers. [/blockquote]
Someone is misleading the good bishops!!!!!!!!!!
This doesn’t sound too unreasonably optomistic, but here’s my (Methodist) confusion — so they agree on a moratorium on same-sex blessings and “incursions.” We know the blessing ceremonies continue as of Saturday in MA and CA, and that the African & Southern Cone bishops have no intention of withdrawing their pastoral support. So the PB of TEC can file with the Pastoral Forum to object to “foregin incursions,” and bishops like +Schofield can file with the Pastoral Forum likewise. That may work, worth seeing play out — but as clergy conduct blessing ceremonies however nuanced or bishops with whatever protestations of “I can’t discipline my clergy for [blank] under the canons” let them go on in a public manner, how does a concerned bishop resident elsewhere register their sense that the moratorium has been breached in that area, and who decides that a ceremony in a chapel, not the sanctuary, by a licensed family member, not the rector, is or is not a breach of the same-sex blessings moratorium?
Which is what i fear will end up being one side saying “they’re still doing it” and the other side saying “they kept doing it first.”
OK, this bishop is living in Fantasy Land at Disney World….
[blockquote] In the discussion afterwards we are told that the US House of Bishops has regretted for the hurt it has caused and its lack of consultation and has issued a public apology – though no one has the exact wording. We are also told that the Canadians have voted against same-sex blessings – though two dioceses are pressing their bishops to change that. We are told that in the lawsuits in America between parishes and their dioceses it is the dioceses who are the defendants and the conservative parishes who are the accusers.[/blockquote]
I hope the Bishops had a good a laugh over this as I did, priceless.
‘We agree to a moratorium on actively gay bishops, on same-sex blessings and incursions from other provinces until a Covenant can be drawn up.’
“UNTIL” IS THE ANGLICAN WORD OF THE MILLENIUM. It’s one of the most favored words in the reappraiser lexicon, because when it is used, it gives them carte blanche to do whatever they damn well please.
“This morning a minor miracle takes place…. We agree to a moratorium on actively gay bishops, on same-sex blessings and incursions from other provinces until a Covenant can be drawn up”.
Ahhh, but this is not a “way ahead” or “a minor miracle”. This is only proof-positive of just how far from Godliness that the AC has drifted. If one can-with a straight face-make moral equivalence of utterly unchristian perversions such as electing gay Bishops and performing same-sex ‘blessings’, with efforts by godly leaders to rescue faithful Christians from the grasp of apostate leadership who would approve of the same, then this is no reason to rejoice. This is a stark reminder of just how far the upper echelon of the AC has strayed from its historical, Biblical moral underpinnings. Its moral compass, as it were, is spinning wildly. It is no longer firmly fixed upon the “bright morning star”, but is allowing itself to be drawn in equal measure to the pull of the spirit of this age, the father of lies. Sorry, but the clear headed Christian must conclude that the AC in its present form is dead. At a time in its history when the AC needs leaders like Elijah and Jeremiah to forcefully and unequivocally call sin what it is, and to warn of impending judgement if repentance is not forthcoming, we are instead left with Urijah the priest, who, at the command of King Ahaz, built a pagan alter, pushed aside the LORDS alter, and burnt the LORDS offerings upon the pagan alter (read the whole sad story in 11 Kings 16:7-16).
The GAFCON Bishops remind me more of the priests who bravely withstood King Uzziah when, he impetuously sought the priests prerogative to burn incense before the LORD, or the godly priest Jehoiada, who saved the Davidic kingdom from extinction and put the wicked Athaliah to death. The Apostle Paul puts it succinctly: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? We are not stronger than He, are we?”
GAFCON ably demonstrated that they understood this. Lambeth 2008-sadly enough-has shown that they don’t.
Here is how the legal issues work….the diocese hires lawyers to freeze checking accounts, stop trust funds, smear you in the papers, and then you file in the legal system for declaratory relief and they call that suing them…it comes down to who started all this…the conservatives who were doing their jobs or the liberals who were undermining our work by undermining the gospel.
An interesting statistic in Colorado…the diocese claims a sum total growth of 1,200 members over the last 20 years…my parish grew by 2,000 over the last 20 years–which means the liberal diocese had a sum total loss of 800.
Our parish is growing at an even greater rate having left TEC…and now are back up in attendance to where we were before all the fracas.
TEC will die a natural death…and then Common Cause will be what’s left standing (and flourishing) of Anglicanism in America…no matter what the misinformed Bishop of Exeter has to say…isn’t he the guy who just allowed a same sex blessing…shows how much he believes in any moratorium.
Fr. Armstrong – thanks for the update regarding your parish. I would like to hear how Overland Park and Plano are doing. Anyone out there who can update us…..
I thought this was priceless:
[blockquote]It took the Church hundreds of years to define the Trinity, decades to agree to contraception and to women being ordained and we can’t expect to get sexuality right in just a couple of decades. We must not be too impatient.[/blockquote]
… but, then again, I’m Catholic now, so I can finally laugh about such things.
I’m not sure read anything in the blog entry that I would describe as “important”. In fact, I really don’t think I’ve read anything I would describe as important coming out of the entire Lambeth spectacle. It’s been more like watching a traffic signal for three weeks– green, yellow, red….green yellow, red…..green, yellow, red…..etc, etc, etc.
Of course there could be no Rwandans in that Indaba because there were no Rwandans at Lambeth. As far as a moratorium on incursions goes, I suspect Rwanda will never abandon AMiA short of releasing her to a new orthodox province in the Americas.
Fr Armstrong, don’t you mean the Bishop of Lichfield (not of Exeter)? +Michael Exon, so far as I know, is a conservative, and – if memory serves – along with the Bishop of Winchester is recently reported to have asked Dr Williams to recognize that there are two Churches in the Anglican Communion and that an amicable separation is necessary.
Knapsack,
this mire IS one of the reasons that the Methodists went their separate way in post-Revolutionary America. The Anglican Communion needs a Book of Discipline like the Methodists. But, then again, why mess with perfection, right?
Years ago when I was aboard a USN carrier there was a group of believers (I wish to include myself in this group) that gathered many times and sang praises to the Lord, and then each night that we met one of would open the Scriptures and preach as we were led by the Spirit. Among us we had Baptists, Pentecostal, Methodists and a few other denominations. We didn’t curse and fight one another; we praised the Lord. Our Chaplain (Methodist Episcopal) after listening to for a few times asked us to conduct a Wednesday evening Protestant evangelical service in the Library. Next thing you know we had a few RC’s and an agnostic joining in with others just to listen maybe but the Lord used us. If there were boundaries there we didn’t see them.
GSP98: Thank you! You NAILED IT!!
Don Armstrong: I wish you all the best; and I observe that your congregation is in Colorado Springs (housed in one of the loveliest, most historic structures in that city, home ot eh Air Force Academy and other conservative, militaristic groups). That city is very ATYPICAL: it is the home of many conservative para-church groups, several nationally-broadcast ‘televangelists’ and other conservative Republican/Christian groups who found Colorado’s lax tax code to their liking….yours is NOT a ‘typical’ American city/suburb, and I while I wish you the best, from my personal experience I URGE others not to beat themselves up because their congregation is not as large as yours.