The next stage of the never-ending Anglican schism comes this week when the Archbishop of Canterbury and other key Anglican leaders fly out to New Orleans to meet with the Episcopal Church\u2019s House of Bishops.<\/p>\n
Some might say that this is the crucial stage in the crisis given that the Primates at Dar es Salaam named September 30 as the deadline for The Episcopal Church to comply with the Windsor demands for repentance, a moratorium on same-sex blessings and ordinations, and alternative pastoral care for \u201d\u02dcconservatives\u2019 who are estranged from their diocesan bishops.<\/p>\n
I have my doubts about how crucial this will be, given that the deadline seems to be meaningless. There is no scheduled meeting of any kind in the Anglican Communion to assess whether The Episcopal Church (TEC) has complied. Furthermore, it seems likely that the House of Bishops will attempt to convince the Archbishop\u2019s party that it has indeed complied as far as it can but only a full General Convention can make the necessary response. The fact that there has already been a General Convention meeting last year which could barely even agree on what the Primates and Windsor meant in their demands, will be neither here nor there.<\/p>\n
It seems clear that TEC, aided and abetted by the London-based Anglican bureaucracy is playing a long, tactical game. If the process, and the Anglican Communion, can just limp along from hurdle to hurdle without an overt split then the opposition will just melt and die.<\/p>\n
The Episcopal Church will continue to downplay the crisis, no matter that scores of parishes are leaving, that dioceses are on the verge of breaking links with the whole edifice, and that African Primates are consecrating bishops and creating parallel jurisdictions in the US. It is business as usual, to the extent that the Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, even had the brazen cheek to stand for the Primates Standing Committee during their meeting in Tanzania, and got elected. She thus ignored the fact that TEC\u2019s very status in the Communion is, at the very least, a secondary one according to the Windsor Process, until the demands are complied with.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard more than one Primate during the past decade express frustration about their dealings with The Episcopal Church. They feel deceived after years in which the leaders of TEC refused to discuss the changes they were making in the whole area of human sexuality. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold would do anything to avoid conflict and assured the Primates that nothing had changed and the rapid technology of the internet was distorting what was really happening.<\/p>\n
In reality, the technology of the internet ensured that all those who had an interest could see what was really happening in the Episcopal Church. And, let\u2019s be absolutely
\nclear, it\u2019s about much more than sexuality. Bishop Harold Miller put it very well in an article in the Church of Ireland Gazette earlier this month: \u201cIn so many ways, parts of the Episcopal Church have been losing deep aspects of their identity. If God is not Father, Jesus is not Lord, the Son is not unique, baptism is not necessary, the creeds are optional, repentance and sin are dated concepts and the atonement is marginalised or even rejected, where do we go from here? \u201cThe faith remaining will be a very different
\nfaith from the Christian faith once delivered to the saints \u201d\u201d and I, for one, am not going there!\u201d\u009d he concluded.<\/p>\n
He, like me, has seen incredible divergences between the faith widely held in The Episcopal Church and the faith of Anglicans elsewhere. For my part, I believe it is the baptismal liturgy of the 1979 Prayer Book that is the crux to understanding the direction of The Episcopal Church. In Anglicanism what you pray is what you believe, which is why Cranmer\u2019s Prayer Book is the nearest we have to a unique foundational statement of theology. The US liturgy has much less of an emphasis on sin, repentance, deliverance and transformation than liturgies elsewhere. Wherever you go in The Episcopal Church you now hear the appeal to the Baptismal Covenant.<\/p>\n
This is the real covenant Episcopalians are saying, and the foundational nature of baptism is emphasised to the point where it is held that all the baptised are equally entitled
\nto all the sacraments of the Church -including ordination. This kind of theology makes no demands of its adherents. The baptised are all equal members of the same club. No confirmation, or preparation, is necessary for admittance to communion, and there are increasingly fewer barriers to ordination. Thus there are huge numbers of divorced and remarried priests, and as many homosexuals in partnerships. This kind of theology in which sin, repentance, atonement is unfashionable has little need for Jesus and the Cross, which is why in the past I\u2019ve described it as verging on unitarianism.<\/p>\n
Any settlement of this Anglican crisis needs to face up to this divergence in theology. But it should be a compassionate and unity-building settlement. Demands for The Episcopal Church to be thrown out of the Anglican Communion are ultimately uncaring and uncalled for. The need is for the re-evangelisation of The Episcopal Church and this can hardly be accomplished by outright schism.<\/p>\n
–This article appeared in the September 21, 2007 edition of the Church of England Newspaper, page 14<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The next stage of the never-ending Anglican schism comes this week when the Archbishop of Canterbury and other key Anglican leaders fly out to New Orleans to meet with the Episcopal Church\u2019s House of Bishops. Some might say that this…<\/span><\/p>\n