It was made starkly clear by the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG) that actions moving toward affirming same-sex unions, including those in the Anglican Church of Canada, have increased the danger of fracture in the Communion. The WCG’s call to observe the Windsor Report’s moratorium on such rites, seconded by Archbishop Williams, was widely supported by the bishops. Most of the bishops also seemed to concur with Archbishop Williams’ challenge to receive the Covenant as the best hope for an enduring Communion. Only as we as a church receive the Covenant positively do we have the best chance of remaining full participants in the Communion. As any marriage counselor will tell you, holding a family together finally means facing hard truths and making sacrifices.
A theme of Archbishop Williams’ addresses was thinking and acting out of “the centre” of our faith. Such a centre implies accountability to one another in important matters of doctrine and practice on behalf of the Church catholic. He said this as centrifugal forces of a confessional right and a revisionist left strain at our Communion. I wonder if Archbishop Williams didn’t have the voice of another melancholic Celt in the back of his mind: “Things fall apart/ the centre cannot hold”¦”
We give thanks for the bishops’ experiences of unity at Lambeth, and for proposed new means to support it. But will the centre hold? That depends in part on our own church. Time may soon tell.
Very interesting.
[“ballyhooed indaba” – is there a recipe?}
This is what the theological virtue of hope sounds like. Would that I had as much hope for our future as this author does. Still…
I have a lot of hope too, but NOT for the AC in its current, obsolete, broken form. The fact is that the center/centre is ALREADY not holding. The tear in the fabric of the AC is growing wider and wider with the passage of time, and all indications are that this trend will continue, with or without the much ballyhooed Covenant.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Oil and water simply do not mix, and no amount of shaking will induce them to bond. As soon as the shaking stops, the separation will commence.
But the end of the institutional structures of the AC as we have known it does NOT equal the end of Anglicanism (though some people, including some of the noble leaders of the ACI and Fulcrum, may judge the Anglican experiment to have utterly failed at that point). I firmly believe and contend that the Old Anglicanism has to die, in order for a New and Better Anglicanism to arise in its place. But there can be no resurrection, without a death first.
The real problem of so much of Anglicanism in the secularized west or industrialized global north, is that the theological centre has already collapsed. In many ways the genius of Anglicanism has been to concentrate on the essentials of the faith, the core doctrines and disciplines of the Christian faith and life, and to leave the outer limits of orthodoxy and orthopraxis relatively vague and not sharply defined. At our best, we have aimed at the bright red center of the archer’s target, leaving the outer rings of the target pretty much out of focus in the process.
Alas, in our day, Anglican standards of doctrine, discipline, and worship resemble not an archer’s target, but a doughnut. There’s a gaping hole where the bright red centre ought to be.
Or to change analogies, what holds the earth together is the massive gravitational pull exerted by the hot, dense, molten iron core at the center of the planet. Without it, we’d fly off into space as the earth spins on its axis, generating a lot of centrifugal force.
And Anglicanism in the global north has lost its molten core of biblical doctrine and discipline. Western Anglicanism is hollow and empty, where the dense core ought to be. There is no centre there anymore. So naturally, the center will not hold.
At least, that’s true for the AC in its current institutional manifestation. But Anglicanism as a religious culture and system, as a unique evangelical-catholic hybrid, is greater than the AC as an institution. And the demise of the latter does NOT equal the death of the former. At least not in my opinion.
But the movement represented by the new Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and associated with GAFCON will go from strength to strength, since it does have the requisite core of sufficiently weighty doctrinal and moral content to survive and even thrive, even in a hostile social environment such as the post-Christendom global north.
Anglicanism will be reborn, even after the Anglican Communion splits and shatters, as it inevitably will. The New Reformation has already begun, and it’s future is as bright as the promises of God.
David Handy+
Enthusiastic proponent of that New Reformation
Wow. Some of this guy’s statements are so delusional it is hard to know where to start.
Wrong. Rowan skillfully finessed the crisis with his fraudulent conference format and “reflections” document, which successfully keep his revisionist juggernaut full steam ahead.
Wrong. Rowan knew if the Communion and its bishops dealt with the crisis, his shameful support of the revisonist agenda would go down in flames, so he prevented it being dealt with.
Wrong. The real question is whether they translate into ACTION to repair our crumbled Communion.
Wrong and mendacious. The fracture has already happened.
Wrong. The primary force causing the disintegration of our Communion is Rowan Williams, through his active support of the revisionist agenda and his decision to undermine orthodox catholic biblical anglican Christianity.