The Anglican Communion is in imminent danger of collapse unless it endorses an Anglican Covenant and agrees to hold fast to the moratoria on gay bishops and blessings and cross-border incursions by foreign bishops, delegates to ACC-14 were told this week.Representatives of the 38 provinces of the Communion gathered at the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, for the 14th triennial meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council were offered a sombre picture of the state of church.
Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the recently retired Primate of the West Indies and chairman of the Covenant Design Group, told delegates in a May 4 speech presenting the third “Ridley” draft of the Covenant, that “the Communion is close to the point of breaking up” over the issue of the morality of homosexuality.
“If we are not able to commit ourselves to this sort of being a communion, the break-up of its life is staring us in the face,” he said.
The choice was simple, he said.
“Either we are a family, which means that each member of the family has care for and respect for the other members of the family, or we will have to learn to go our separate ways. The question is, do we wish to remain a Communion?” Archbishop Gomez asked.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was equally grim. In a May 5 address calling upon the ACC to adopt recommendations put forward by the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG), Dr Rowan Williams noted the end might well be nigh.
However, “before we do say goodbye to each other in the Communion, we owe it to the Lord of the church to have these conversations and to undertake that effort and listen to one another and taking that seriously in the Gospel” - remaining united while finding a way forward through divisions over doctrine and discipline.
ACC-14 opened with a Sunday morning Eucharist in Kingston’s National Arena with 8,000 Jamaican Anglicans, and a welcome to delegates from the island’s state and church leaders.
The pageantry of the opening day quickly faded as the opening business session on May 4 led by Archbishop Gomez focused on the Covenant, and the May 5 session led by Dr Williams focused on the WCG.
Draft resolutions prepared by the Joint Standing Committee of the ACC and the Primates were distributed and afternoon sessions were devoted to private discussion of the documents.
The Rt Rev Gregory Cameron, Bishop of St Asaph and secretary of the Covenant Design Group and the WCG told reporters the texts of the resolutions were not set in stone, but served as a guide to deliberations by the delegates.
At “decision-making plenary” on Friday May 8, the ACC delegates will vote on the final forms of the resolutions crafted by the delegates, and on May 9 elect new officers.
The general outlines for both the Covenant resolution and the WCG recommendations were laid down by Dr Williams and Archbishop Gomez. The principle behind the crafting of the Covenant was that the “the communion guides, each church decides.”
The Covenant would not supersede the canons of any member church, but would serve as “a method of dispute resolution” which is “not coercive but advisory.”
Archbishop Gomez urged the ACC to back the Covenant saying the “chance that the Covenant offers to give something to the communion as a description of what Anglicans care about, in which we can agree a basis for future discussions, and which puts something in place that could really hold us together won’t last much longer.”
The WCG report asks the ACC to endorse the moratoria on gay bishops and blessings and cross-border poaching by foreign bishops. It had been created to “contain the chaos and division” over the disparate views on sexual ethics, Dr Williams said.
While the Anglican Communion had never called itself a “church”, it was more than a “federation” or “an assembly of local churches who happen to belong to the same bureaucracy,” he argued.
The Communion was working towards a model of a “church-like way, recognizing ordained ministry, shared sacraments, sharing teaching, and to a large extent, doctrinal formulations and canonical positions,” and need the time and space to allow for its growth, Dr Williams argued.
In addition to the moratoria, Dr Williams presented nine recommendations to manage the current crisis suggested by the WCG, and a strengthening of the “listening process” to allow all sides to present their views.
To enable the Communion to live through its current crisis the moratoria were necessary.
“I would like that our Anglican Communion is a place where it’s possible for some people to say, ‘I will hold back from doing this so long as we can have a conversation in which I can explain to you why I felt it was a good thing to do this’,” he said.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Source (RI)
SV (ED)