VirtueOnline - News:
If you want to know why the "Ct. Six" those faithful parishes in the Diocese of Connecticut left the diocese and the Episcopal Church; and why, more recently, Fr. Ron Gauss and Bishop Seabury Church, Groton, CT, departed; or why the Rev. Christopher Leighton of St. Paul's in Darien is weighing his parish's options, this statement by Ct. Bishop Ian Douglas should clear it all up:
"One of the best things that has happened for The Episcopal Church, with respect to our engagement in the Anglican Communion, has been the election and ordination of [the openly gay] Gene Robinson," Douglas stated in a recent interview with ENS.
Douglas noted that for decades before 2003, if even two people turned up for a hearing on an Anglican Communion-related resolution at General Convention, "we in the world mission committee felt like we were doing well ... Then after 2003 and the Windsor Report ... the hottest ticket in Columbus [at the 75th General Convention in 2006] was the open hearing on the Anglican Communion. More than 3,000 people attended and 92 witnesses testified. That's a huge change."
Douglas said that he also sees this change at the local level, in his own diocese, where every year an Anglican mission consultation draws 200 to 300 people from up to 50 parishes, "all of which enjoy direct partnerships in mission with dioceses, parishes, individuals around the Anglican Communion. That is facilitated by the greater awareness at the local level, which we didn't have a decade ago, and the flatter, digital communication world ... That's all part of the great communion that God is bringing about and it's the hallmark of the Episcopal Church's response to the communion."
The irony should not be missed. In July 2011, Douglas eliminated six positions from the staff of Diocesan House, representing a 27 percent reduction in the number of staff serving in the offices of The Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut in Hartford. One impetus for these changes was an anticipated $1 million to $1.2 million reduction for the proposed 2012 diocesan-wide budget, he explained. Based on pledge cards and other anticipated revenue, parish pledges account for about 92% of income for the convention's budget. Currently fewer than 70 of the 172 parishes fulfill their pledge of 12.5% of their operating income as set by diocesan convention.
Bishop Douglas then publicly admitted that, "For some time now the diocesan pledge system hasn't worked. The majority of our parishes don't participate at the 12.5% level."
So while Douglas eulogizes his pan-Anglican and mission consultation credentials and contacts, a hangover from his days as a missions seminary professor at Episcopal Divinity School, he promotes the fiction that all is well in his dream world of Anglican mission cooperation with global Anglicans, even as TEC embraces a pansexual world view anathema to the vast majority of the global South and his own diocese is slowly hemorrhaging parishioners and dollars...It is delusion piled on delusion.
Archbishop Isangoma sent The Rev. Pam Strobel, a senior associate at Christ Church, Greenwich, CT, who went to serve as a Mission Partner in the Anglican Church of Congo for two years, packing because of a number of personal issues making her stay and work impossible.
Recently, the 77th General Convention of The Episcopal Church pledged its ongoing support for direct Anglican partnerships, but at a much-reduced financial rate. Money is tight and a cut to the church's contribution to the Anglican Communion Office from the $1.16 million of this triennium to $700,000 showed the increasing contempt TEC has for its "partners" who have failed to deliver on its pledge to promote pansexuality throughout the communion and press for sexual inclusion even using old colonialist tactics to do so.
Douglas, who serves as a member of the Anglican Communion Standing Committee, claimed that the cuts to the inter-Anglican budget "do not model good stewardship."
"I understand that a lot of folk involved in the budget process are trying to balance a lot of difficult realities, and it's always easier to cut those things that are the furthest from home," he told ENS. "But I am quite upset on where we landed. The contributions to the inter-Anglican budget help to bring us together as Christians."
ANGLICAN COMMUNION OFFICE
Absent from the recent General Convention was The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, who nonetheless wrote that he is "more than heartened" by the passage of Resolution D008 that reaffirms the Episcopal Church's commitment to building Anglican Communion partnerships. However, TEC reduced by 35 percent, or $460,000, its financial support to the inter-Anglican budget for the London-based Anglican Communion Office. What about a budget cut of that size doesn't he get? What? No pain.
"There is obviously a huge well of goodwill and commitment," he told ENS in a recent interview at his London-based office. "The Episcopal Church has worked very hard at its relationships and more so in the last few years. Those relationships have paid off and are valued throughout the Anglican Communion. The question is how we are going to build on that commitment."
Really. What about the fact that the vast majority of the Global South, some 22 provinces, won't be seen at the same table as Katharine Jefferts Schori? What about the dozen or so absentee Primates in Dublin last year. Is Kearon suffering from short term memory loss? Or the even bigger reality that Rowan Williams is slinking off into the sunset nine years before he needed to because his Hegelian worldview was not strong enough to hold the Anglican Communion together.
Kearon said he also is "very impressed" with the extent to which the Episcopal Church has taken seriously the Anglican Covenant, a document that was initially intended as a way to bind Anglicans globally across cultural and theological differences.
Fact. The Episcopal Church declined to take a position on the Anglican Covenant atGC2012. A majority of the Church of England's 44 dioceses decided against the "Anglican Covenant". The proposed Anglican Covenant is now dead in the water in the Church of England. This also poses serious problems for the covenant in other provinces, noted Lesley Crawley, an English priest and moderator of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition.
"What is surprising and very heartening is the extent to which even those opposed [to the covenant] are now talking about the communion in a different way," Kearon said.
True. The Global South IS committed to the Jerusalem Declaration, not the Covenant, which they will never ratify as long as Section IV, which is disciplinary, is never applied with any force to The Episcopal Church. One doubts that Kearon had this in mind.
The Covenant also was a response to some church leaders crossing borders into other provinces to minister to disaffected Anglicans, said Kearon. True. While for the most part this has diminished, it heated up again this past week when it was announced that Nigerian Archbishop Nicholas Okoh is coming to the US and Canada to open a new diocese in Indianapolis. Clearly, he is not listening to Canon Kearon and cross border "violations" are very much on his agenda. Bearing in mind that his province is the largest and most vibrant in the Anglican Communion, one has to ask who really is calling the shots.
Kearon: "This has been a huge learning experience. People have learned in the process a lot about their identity and what the Anglican Communion is. Irrespective of the outcome, the experience of considering has been a very good learning experience for most Anglicans and has deepened their appreciation of what it is to be an Anglican."
VOL: The Global South has learned so much they don't want any part of The Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada and IF a new Archbishop of Canterbury is a white boy with fey orthodox leanings, you can kiss the Anglican Communion goodbye. They will give a deferential nod to Lambeth Palace but they will continue not to appear at Primatial gatherings when asked too.
Kearon: "We have tried hard to maintain our level of contribution to the Anglican Communion Office budget, and even though it will decline somewhat in the coming triennium, we intend to do all we can to maintain the individual partnership funding," Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told ENS. "I am also aware that other avenues for funding are being explored. International partnerships also are built and nurtured through Episcopal Relief & Development programs and United Thank Offering grants."
VOL: Interpretation. If TEC can use its money to move possible swing provinces in its direction over the acceptance of pansexuality, the checkbook will open. Otherwise, your people can starve. Have a nice day.
"I do believe that we are very much a communion in the process of becoming and I believe that at ACC probably the primary conversation will be about power and money and not primarily about human sexuality because I think we'll be in a place to have deep and meaningful conversations about our legacy of colonialism and how we are informed as Anglicans. It is a new world. Will we be a new communion?" said Douglas.
Interpretation: The Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool consecrations are etched forever into the history of Anglicanism; they have not been repudiated. The Global South will NEVER compromise on human sexual behavior. Douglas is dead wrong. Furthermore, what we are seeing is nothing more than a reverse colonialism with the Episcopal Church using money to hold poorer Anglican provinces hostage to their manipulations on sexuality. It is not a "new world" at all. It is the same old world where Western Anglicanism is slowly withering and dying, while the "new world" is the rising Global South, which increasingly can look after itself. Nigeria doesn't need a penny from the West. This province almost single handedly raised over $1 million for the first GAFCON gathering in Jerusalem.
The Global South is predominantly evangelical, opposed to pansexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood. They see nothing in the West to emulate or congratulate. They and they alone hold the future of Anglicanism in their hands; we must meekly and humbly accept that.
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