Here are some choice excerpts:
I continue to maintain that the Covenant is not needed. We have the Bible, the Nicene Creed, the Lambeth Quadrilateral, and Anglican liturgical life as our standards. Any relationship which cannot be sustained by those pillars will not be strengthened by a Covenant. Moreover, the Covenant is powerless. Any Covenant which the Church of England can sign will not be able to perform the tasks that the secessionists want it to accomplish. Nigeria wants a sledgehammer to crush progressives and England wants a doily to cover the stain of open disagreement.This aligns with Mark Harris' recent considerations of the Year of the Tiger:
Remember, the sin of ECUSA and Canada is not that we have a gay bishop or that same-sex blessings are performed. Those things happen in several other provinces. The sin of ECUSA and Canada is that we are honest about who we are and what we are doing. If Anglican leadership wants to move toward a church of deliberate ignorance and puritanical moral teachings, they will find themselves without much company.....
The more that lay people share in ministries across the Communion, the greater our bonds of affection become. The more we ensure that all voices are heard, not just mitred megaphones, the greater our sense of Communion becomes. The more that we bloggers shun angry fear-mongering and invite thoughtful conversation, the greater our ability to embrace Christ’s call for costly discipleship and wide-embracing evangelism.
So, dear friends, be not afraid. The Anglican Communion is alive and well. So long as we cling to hope and not fear, all manner of things shall be well.
The Episcopal Church is a vocation within the Christian community, it is part of the Anglican Communion, we are Anglicans, and we are, even in our most Tyger moments made by the one who made the Lamb. The confidence that such is the case has been missing of late, but it is returning. This year will be a year of the Tyger, a year of prophetic sensibility hopefully for the Anglican Communion as a whole, but surely for The Episcopal Church in its witness in the Communion.
In Chinese Astrology,the Year of the Tiger is one filled with drama and there is often tension & unpredictability in the air. Events can happen quickly.So there you have it: several predictions for the new year, and what to expect. Let's see how prophetic they truly are.
2 comments:
Puh-lease. There must not be much else to talk about today.
Seriously.
Well, thanks for the kind words.
Peace,
Scot+
Another good recent blogging comment is by Simple Massing Priest (a Canadian) in Rowan and the real revisionists. It begins:
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I was struck by the irony that the so-called conservatives are pushing for the most radical redesign of the Anglican Communion imaginable. Instead of a fellowship of Churches united by bonds of affection and a common heritage, these wide-eyed revisionists and radicals would have us become a legalistic bund, with central control by a secretive and thoroughly unaccountable star chamber. If one were to take the worst excesses of Pius IX, Joseph Stalin, Joe McCarthy and Oliver Cromwell, you couldn't have come up with a worse system.
Let's consider how this silly Covenant came to be.
A committee produces a report that says "maybe it would be useful if we had an Anglican Covenant something like this."
Then, by quasi-papal fiat, with no honest discussion or consultation about whether or not this is a good idea, some English civil service appointee declares that we are going to have a Covenant whether anyone else likes it or not.
Now, that may be the way they run things in the QUANGO called the Church of England. It is certainly the way the prince-bishops and pompous prelates of the so-called Global South run things in the unaccountable and authoritarian soviets of Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. It makes one wish that Tony Blair's bonfire of the QUANGOes had gone a might farther, and that a little perestroika would break out in the Global South.
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