For the Anglican Communion, 2010 was not a year on which it could look back with undiluted pleasure. While not quite the Annus Horribilis that was 2003, the communion remained divided and distracted, nursing a colossal hangover watered by decades of doctrinal abandon. While individual provinces, dioceses and church movements flourished in different parts of the globe””as an international body the Anglican Communion ended 2010 crapulous, dispirited and decrepit.
The pace of decline has quickened: 2008 saw the collapse of the Lambeth Conference as a pan-Anglican body, losing its credibility through the absence of a majority of the African bishops and its rationale for being; 2009 witnessed the breakdown of the Anglican Consultative Council at its meeting in Kingston; and 2010 foreshadowed the end of the primates meeting as a credible body of leadership for the wider church and a mounting distrust of the London-based bureaucracy.
On Nov 7, 2006 the Primate of Uganda, Archbishop Henry Orombi told his general synod: “There is a proverb that says, ”˜When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold’.”
Beware “the sickness that is coming from America,” he warned.
All due to catastrophic leadership on several levels of our non-hierarchy. Or maybe it’s just because we have been abandoned to the futility of our own minds.
The latter seems to be the case, SP. I think we are finding out about meaning of the suffrage (not surprisingly removed from the last revision of the American BCP) at Evening Prayer: “And take not thy Holy Spirit from us.”
I love that opening paragraph — what a way with words!