What’s your advice to the remnant of evangelicals still in the Episcopal Church about giving up church property?
Their property isn’t worth their souls’ health. While our property is precious and important, if it becomes an overwhelming aim, it’s probably good to let go of it. But having said that, the principle thing I would say is that we’re very hopeful that the spirit that we’ve been blessed with here in Pittsburgh will produce a settlement that will [make] a better way forward across the country. We’re also hopeful that the Episcopal Church, in losing battle after battle, will finally just decide that these property battles aren’t worth fighting.
So three things: First, I hope that the way we go through this will provide a precedent both moral and legal for the way other situations might be settled across the country. Second, I hope that the continued failure of the Episcopal Church in its litigation might help it wake up and cease the litigation. And third, in any place where the property has become an overwhelming issue, it might be better for evangelicals to let go of it. Trust the Lord that he’s got the cattle on 10,000 hills. He’s able to restore to us what we lost.
Do you have any second thoughts about creation of this new province for conservative Anglicans?
No second thoughts about it. I would have hoped that the Anglican Communion might simply recognize us as the legitimate bearers of the Anglican franchise here. But that’s not likely to happen in the short run. The significance of the Episcopal Church deposing me is much greater than what most people would assume in this battle for a province. For the worldwide Anglican Communion to see me deposed has been absolutely sobering, and even moderates are shocked and stunned by it.
God bless Bp. Duncan! We should all be grateful for his grace, steadfastness, and faithful witness.
Amen to that, Irenaeus (#1). I don’t admiringly call him +Bob Duncan the Lion-Hearted for nothing. Like Luther, he is great-hearted indeed.
Some of the best parts of this interview are right toward the end, so I encourage everyone to read both pages of the interview with Timothy Morgan, who asked some helpful, leading questions.
Let me highlight a couple points. First, +Duncan is confident that the Common Cause Partnership will have completed all its necessary homework by Christmas in order to gain the formal backing of the GAFCON/FCA Primates’ Council. That’s encouraging, though not surprising. We’ll see how the CCP meeting goes in early December.
Second, I especially welcome +Duncan’s remarks about the diminishing role of Canterbury in the future of Anglicanism. I think he is right on, myself. Like the royal family, Canterbury is doomed to decline and take a much more peripheral role in the future as the “Global (Post-Colonial) Settlement” gradually takes shape, supplanting the obsolete “Reformation Settlement” that we’ve always had up until now. I thought +Duncan’s remarks about ++Rowan Williams were very positive and gracious, much more so in fact than ++Williams really deserves.
And I fully endorse and applaud the remarkably far-sighted and broad vision that “the once and future” Bishop of Pittsburgh allows us to glimpse in that final paragraph where he calmly asserts that we orthodox Anglicans are, wonder of wonders, blazing a trail that will perhaps prove of great significance to the whole Christian Church in the secularized, pluralistic, post-Christendom western world or global north. I whole-heartedly agree with him that this is just the start of a New Reformation that will shake the whole western church to its foundations and will extend far beyond the boundaries of Anglicanism.
In the original Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the English Reformation began after the German and Swiss Reformations, and continued long after the others had stabilized (I am one of those who argues that the English Reformation didn’t really end until the Restoration of the monarchy and Anglicanism in 1660 and the adoption of the compromise 1662 Book of Common Prayer). So we were the Johnny come lately’s back then. This time, surprisingly perhaps, in the inscrutable providence of Almighty God, we Anglicans are the leaders and forerunners of the New Reformation. Who would ever have guessed it?
Perhaps it should be noted that many of the top staff at Christianity Today are Anglicans. Not least, Senior Managing Editor Mark Galli, (perhaps I flatter myself by calling him a friend), and who attends the thriving church in Wheaton, IL that my children also attend, big Church of the Resurrection (AMiA) with an ASA of over 700. Fr. Kevin Miller, the associate priest at big Rez, is one of the top executive V-Ps at CT too.
David Handy+
I agree wholeheartedly with both of your assessments.
If I am reading this correctly, and based upon information I have read elsewhere +Duncan is expecting a new North American province to be in place if not by the end of this year, at least by early 2009. I am very anxious to see what this will mean for those Diocese that have now removed themselves from TEC and those planning their departure. I am also waiting anxiously to see what this might open up for those of us stuck in liberal TEC Dioceses that have nowhere to turn at the moment.
Speaking of new provinces, if I may, what are the prospects of additional Global South Anglican provinces joining GAFCON during the next year? Which are the likeliest candidates?
Irenaeus (#4),
Well, your guess is probably as good as mine. Others may chime in and add their speculations about the likliest candidates among the conservative GS provinces, but I’ll note first that GAFCON represented two major African provinces aligning themselves with Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda, i.e., Tanzania and West Africa.
That was a promising start. But that still makes only six of the 12 African provinces that have signed the Jerusalem Declaration so far (i.e., 12, if you include Egypt among the CAPA provinces, and likewise Mauritius and the Indian Ocean, another CAPA province). I’d expect some of the remaining 6 African provinces to be among the first to jump on the FCA bandwagon.
But I also think some of the crucial indications that provinces are abandoning the Canterbury-centered, Instruments of Communion-based, Covenant-process approach (that is moving at glacial speed at best) will be seen when provinces like West Indies and especially Southeast Asia finally throw their support behind GAFCON/FCA. And I DO expect both of those key provinces to do so, though probably only after the Covenant is presented to the ACC in May, and little (alas!) comes of it. But I think TEC’s fateful deposition of +Bob Duncan will backfire on 815 and help speed up the process.
David Handy+