The departure of Quincy and three other conservative dioceses raises questions about the future of the Episcopal Church. The church, led by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, represents the U.S. branch of the 77-million-member worldwide Anglican Communion. However, leaders of the conservative breakaway dioceses are pushing for a second province in North America. Approval of an additional province by the archbishop of Canterbury would be unprecedented and pose a strong challenge to the Episcopal Church.
“You have some significant, traditionalist Episcopal dioceses that no longer feel that they have a future in the Episcopal Church. That’s a tragedy,” said Rev. Kendall Harmon, a theologian in the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. “Now, we also have a bigger group that’s trying to organize, link with the Global South and compete as Anglicans within the same territory. It will be interesting to see how the leadership of the Anglican Communion responds to this.”
Must the ABC approve a new province? Where would the power to do this come from? LM
It has little or no historical foundation. There was some suspicion (not without evidence) that in the 1630s some high-churchmen wanted to turn the See of Canterbury into a kind of “British Patriarchate” with authority over the Churches of Scotland and Ireland, but Laud himself rejected the notion, and it was firmly repudiated after 1660. (Indeed, if one were to count antiquity of foundation as the criterion, Armagh would have a far better claim than Canterbury or York to be the Anglican primus inter pares.) It was only with the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, organized and sponsored by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a kind of informal meeting without any synodical status or authority other than “moral” that the notion that “communion with Canterbury” was a criterion of “Anglican status” began to have some specious plausibility. I write “specious” because such a notion would exclude the English Nonjurors (who lasted from 1690 to 1807) or the Scottish Episcopalians (from 1690 to their first recognition by the British Parliament in 1792) from counting as Anglican; and the main function of such a historically unfounded view today is to be able to dismiss the various “Continuing Anglican” churches, on the one hand, and Evangelical Anglican bodies such as the Reformed Episcopal Church or the Church of England in South Africa as somehow “not Anglican” or “not kosher Anglican.” I reckon the notion as an attempt to keep “the franchise” in liberal hands, and think it should impress only those ecclesiastical equivalents of the ignorant folk who, when they went through the door labelled “The Egress” in one of P. T. Barnum’s travelling circuses, thought that they were entering another section of the menagerie or fun-house.
It’s global warming. ECUSA recedes like any other glacier. KJS’s organization looks more like Kilomanjaro every day.
“Refocus its ministry.” Refocus what? The leadership of TEC seems very focused. It is just the rest of us that are looking at something else. I thought this quote illustrates the arrogant exclusiveness of out leadership. There is no place for thoses who are “out of focus.”
Of course, it offers the ECUSA/TEC/GCC/EO-PAC an opportunity to see it has erred so it could focus. That will happen when a very much larger load of pixie dust than 4 geographical dioceses lands on the PB and the HOB and they all fly.