Love in the Ruins (updated)

Oh dear. Things not looking good for the Anglicans. This just in from ACNS about the meeting in NYC: "We had honest and frank conversations that confronted the depth of the conflicts that we face. We recognized the need to provide sufficient space, but were unable to come to common agreement on the way forward. We could not come to consensus on a common plan to move forward to meet the needs of the dioceses that issued the appeal for Alternate Primatial Oversight. The level of openness and charity in this conference allow us to pledge to hold one another in prayer and to work together until we have reached the solution God holds out for us."

This was the first of several meetings. A lot is happening over the next six months. (Incidentally, I made an error in the story that link leads to, Tom Wright did not attend GenCon06, he merely sent a paper.)

The long process of the Communion attempting to set itself on the road to recovery should have continued at the NYC meeting in New York City, when Frank Griswold, Katharine Schori and the others considered the appeal, reported also on the Anglican Mainstream site, from the US conservative bishops for a commissary to be appointed to give them oversight. The meeting, convened by Dr Williams, whose Thought for the Day today on 9/11 is worth a look, is covered with links on Thinking Anglicans. It doesn't seem that things went well though, but at least no-one walked out.

The bishops met at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury and in consultation with the Presiding Bishop "to review the current landscape of the church in view of conflicts within the Episcopal Church." The Archbishop of Canterbury had received a request from seven dioceses for alternative primatial pastoral care and asked that American bishops address the question. The co-conveners of the meeting were Bishops Peter James Lee of Virginia and John Lipscomb of Southwest Florida. Other participating bishops were Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori and Bishops Jack Iker of Fort Worth, Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, James Stanton of Dallas, Edward Salmon of South Carolina, Mark Sisk of New York, Dorsey Henderson of Upper South Carolina, and Robert O’Neill of Colorado. Also participating was Canon Kenneth Kearon, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.

After New York this week will now come three more crucial meetings. US conservatives (now styling themselves Windsor-compliant "centrists", incidentally) gather in Camp Allen, Texas next week, at the same time as the Global South primates meet in Kigali, Rwanda.

Roughly in the middle of these two meetings, the Newark diocese will elect its new bishop, possibly another openly gay man. On 4 November, Katharine Schori will be invested in a ceremony at Washington as Presiding Bishop, entitling her to take her seat as the first ever woman at the next Primates' Meeting at Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania next February. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, still alert from his fast for the Middle East at York Minster, will represented the Church of England for the first time also, freeing up Dr Williams to adopt a more presidential role, as recommended by the Windsor Report.

But some, or much, of all this will depend on what happens this week in New York. "There is a big go-wrong factor here," my source told me, and it is not just the orthodox who might walk. Just as Rowan Williams is under pressure from liberals in his own church who believe he has sold out, some liberals in TEC are furious that Griswold intervened at GenCon06 in an attempt to keep TEC in the Communion and that he and Schori are taking part in this week's meeting at all. If neither side is prepared to compromise at all, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that TEC could itself decide it has had enough and seek communion with another body, such as the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht. This church is in communion with Canterbury, and is liberal on women and gays. I can imagine a scenario where, should the whole thing become a much looser federation, enabling the Methodists among others to come on board, the Old Catholics could end up part of the wider Communion in any case.

Maybe it would just then become The Communion, TC, with separate bodies such as the Episcopalians, the Anglicans, the Methodists, the Old Catholics, the Lutherans and numerous others all included. Then all the other continuing churches that left over women could come back on board, should they wish to. Rowan Williams or his successor, probably Dr Semtamu if Dr Williams decides to head back to academia after working a miracle at Lambeth, would then become a kind of Pope, with little of the power but with an awful lot of authority.

Maybe it will all fall apart, and the constituent strands will separate, with some dying off and others surviving, but more marginal, more sectarian in their outlook and how they are viewed.

Or maybe they will all just continue to struggle along together. I expect that, by the end of the next few months, after the Primates' Meeting in February, we might have some idea of what God, or the other chap, intends for the Anglican Communion in this millennium.

I think it is interesting that the plan is clearly to invite everyone and their spouses to Lambeth 2008. As they are not married, Gene Robinson's partner Mark Andrews could not be there as his spouse, but presumably could attend as his "lay chaplain"? Personally, I don't have a problem with that, even though the entire Nigerian contingent might boycott it as a result, although I doubt the Nigerians can truly resist the temptation to go and have their say and what promises to be the most humdinger of a Lambeth Conference yet, with upwards of 1,300 delegates in all. Matt Kennedy has done an interesting analysis of the situation, I can assure Matt that my story was based on original sources and not put topether from previously published material. There is also a good debate running on AAC. Surely far more ethical considerations must arise over the invitation which will presumably go out to the Bishop of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga, who banned all church services in the Zimbabwe capital yesterday and ordered clergy and parishioners to attend an all-day celebration of his 33rd wedding anniversary instead. It is extraordinary what this man has managed to get away with, not least sacking most of his lay and clerical staff and replacing them with his cronies and turning his church into a mouthpiece for Mugabe. It is unprecedented as far as I know for an Archbishop of Canterbury to intervene as he has and even call for such a senior churchman to be suspended, but needless to say Dr Williams' plea has not been heeded. His election in 2001 in the first place is another mystery which will presumably be understood one day, although it is beyond me. Now if the Nigerians and Americans and everyone else decided to split over that one, that I could understand. (Cartoon by Dave Walker)

I went through a period in adolescence and later of total addiction to sci-fi and fantasy, and have been thinking recently of  trying to get hold of a copy of Walker Percy's prescient novel to re-read it. If anyone has a copy, could I borrow it please? For some reason, maybe because of the title, it came back to me when a friend told me recently of his attempt to attend a morning eucharist in the south of England. He was in a classically picturesque small town in the south of England, where it seemed that every street, shopping centre and school bore reference in its nomenclature to the patron saint of the church. He went to the church for the service he had been told would be at 10.30am. A sign on the door said: "Church closed today. 10.30 communion at Christ Church." Christ Church was a good half hour away. It was 10.25. He turned and looked at the view from the forbidding oak door across the countryside, to be greeted by a sea of mossy tombstones, faded letters testimony to the ceaseless passing of Anglicans.

So he set off to walk to the town centre, thinking he might find an open church of another denomination nearby. He soon came to the local Roman Catholic church. Upwards of 300 smiling, chatting men, women and children, of all ages, were streaming forth from the doors at the end of Mass. Many gave him a smile or a "hello". He continued on down, to see another bustling hub of religious activity, a marquee on the market square, at the very heart of the town. "Islam welcomes you," said the sign in large letters on the front.

More recently, coming back from a bit of business in the City, I stopped on the newly-revamped plaza at Tower Hill to eat my salmon salad while listening to the open air lunchtime preacher, an occasional lunchtime indulgence of mine. It used to be a real education, in the days when the preacher was Donald Soper. That was towards the end of his working life and the start of mine, so quite how privileged I was of course I did not appreciate. (Also at that time, I could pop on Thursday lunchtimes for a quick communion service at the Coronarium Chapel in St Katharine's Dock. I still go there often, but it doesn't have quite the same feel, breaking croissants there now it's a Starbucks.)

Anyway, this preacher's subject was the Church of England. "If you like, try and join the Church of England," he thundered. "Go down and meet the local vicar. 'Do you believe in coffee after the service?' he will ask. 'Do you believe in singing hymns?' 'Actually, vicar, I don't believe in anything. I'm an atheist!' You will say. 'Well then you're very welcome here!' the vicar will reply."

As my friend from the first story said, as we discussed this failing parish church in the context of the latest torments of the Anglican Communion, "How can the Communion get well when the Mother is sick?"

Comments

[Roger Sansom]

(This is not a comment on the right article, but doing this a previous time - about 'believing' the da Vinci hpothesis -seemed to work, so I'll try it).

The article, Sept 30, on children's knowledge of Christianity makes me uncomfortable for various reasons. One is that the awareness of children taught as Christians, of those taught as non-Christians, and those taught as
non-anything seem to me to be three different subjects. Perhaps the researchers are aware of this, and I am judging them on a brief report.

We can always smile and tut over children getting the wrong end of the stick. But I wonder whether the sub-editor or whoever selected the heading "God? He was a dad to Jesus, wasn't he?" (possibly in the vein of mocking the child who wrote it) is aware of the connotations of the word "Abba".

What does "Son of God" mean? I'd like to hear the answers of adults to this, including those of lay Christians.

I am always fascinated not by how little people know, but how much. Trinitarian doctrine is so embedded in our culture that people, including quite secular ones, take Father and Son to be identical terms in this context, without noticing the oddness of doing so.

Similarly the child who says "If he rose from the dead, how come he ain't here now?" - however antagonistic, he understands about the Resurrection. He does not bother asking where Lazarus or Jairus's daughter, or anyone else from another age, is.

Best wishes, Roger Sansom

[Tamil]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24303

Islamists=Bible Heroes?
By Mark D. Tooley

The chaplain of a Church of England bishop has kicked up a stir in the British media by comparing the Islamist subway bombers in London last year to Old Testament heroes, Christian crusaders and even the angry Jesus in the Temple.

Canon Philip Gray claimed that the July 7, 2005 London subway bombers shared the same "religious passion" as the Christian crusaders of the Middle Ages. "Behind modern fanatical Islamic terrorism lie many spiritual and religious passions and narratives also found in the Christian tradition." he wrote recently in his diocesan newspaper."

Wow! some seriously sick puppies among the stuffy old british anglicans!

[William Tighe]

Further to my previous posting on the subject of the "Old Catholics" I am providing a link to a later article in *Touchstone* in 2004 by the late Dr. Lawrence Orzell (d. 2005) of the Polish National Catholic Church which takes the story further and details how the Utrecht Union contrived by a transparent slight-of-hand to expel the PNCC in 2003. It is worth reading, not least as an antepast of the contrivances likely to be employed by Anglican liberals in the future to effect similar goals:

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-04-056-r

[Douglas Knight]

“Things not looking good for the Anglicans”? Well, I think the title of your piece is bang on – ‘Love in the ruins’. Precisely. What could be a better a title for any piece on the Christian life and faith? “Love under the cross”, perhaps? This Christian life is not easy. A certain amount of discipleship is called for occasionally. After all, the ruins may not just be Anglican or even Christian ruins. They may be something to do with the decay of a civilisation that thinks it doesn’t need to learn from the Christian tradition, or from the Western tradition, however defined. But these ruins are us ourselves, so cannot be run away from.

The most eloquent writer on this subject is our very own Anglican and genteelly English political theologian Oliver O’Donovan. O’Donovan believes it is a crisis for a liberalism that cannot be bothered to do the work of arguing its case or showing how its case relates to the Christian (or any other) tradition of thought. You can find him tracing the intellectual origins of the crisis in a series of web sermons over at Fulcrum

http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/index.cfm?menuopt=1

But O’Donovan, does not do apocalyptic or despair – just discipleship, patience, and er, love.

I talk about O'Donovan and some of these Church issues in my own modest blog
http://www.douglasknight.org

thanks, and best wishes,
Doug

[Barnabas]

Ms. Gledhill has obviously blessed with both looks and talent! What a gift from God! But I digress...

I can't see how the non-Network TEC Bishops can be invited to Lambeth without fracture. The only exception would be as part of the implementation of a final solution that allows the Network Dioceses and other Network parishes that want to leave TEC to do so with their assets. I doubt any of the knowledgeable US leaders expects that will really happen.

The churches to pity are those few on the conservative side that have stuck around in non-Network Dioceses. They have no future and are losing members tired of all of this. The longer they delay leaving (and walking from their buildings) the more difficult it will be for them.

I wish more attention would be given to those orthodox in the US that willingly gave up their buildings, job security, etc. and are now flourishing under alternative arrangements. They could teach the rest of the group. If it is really not about money or buildings, then simply walk from you money and buildings. If it is of the Lord, He will provide. I know that sounds simple and naive, but it is the way of Christ.
PS, I agree that the Bishop of Harare should join those without an invitation!

[William J. Tighe]

If you are interested in the Old Catholics, and how they would "fadge" with ECUSA and other liberal Anglicans, perhaps my two articles linked in this comment would be of use. The body on my comment below is taken from a comment I posted yesterday on Titusonenine:

"True Old Catholic Churches were those that were members of the Old Catholic Union of Utrecht. Formed in 1889, the member churches were (until 2002) the OC Churches of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, as well as the Polish National Catholic Church in the USA and Canada (as well as tiny affiliated bodies in Croatia and Slovakia). You may find my two articles of interest:

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0998-tighe

http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-01-021-f

In 2003 the Union of Utrecht expelled the Polish National Catholic Church from its fellowship because of the latter's adamant refusal to recognize the "Orders" of women "ordained" to the presbyterate or diaconate in other old Catholic bodies. As I wrote once on another blog:

'My own judgment on the OCs runs along the lines of the famous sentence in the first paragraph of Karl Marx’s *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte* (1851): “The philosopher Hegel wrote somewhere that all great historical events occur twice. He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce…” The descent of world Anglicanism into the abyss of priestessism and sodomism over the period 1971 to 2006 was a tragedy; the almost risible (because so ineptly executed) way in which the European old Catholics caught up with, and then surpassed, the Anglicans in this facilis descensus Averni in the period 1982 to 2002 was a true ecclesiastical (and ecclesiological) farce.'

As you are probably aware, the Union of Utrecht Old Catholics have been in communion with world Anglicanism from the 1930s onwards, and the Polish National Catholic Church was in communion with ECUSA and the Anglican Church of Canada from 1946 to 1976 (when they broke communionn over WO).

As to Brazil, the "Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil" is not, and never has been, an Old Catholic body. It was founded in 1945 by Carlos Duarte Costa, a Roman Catholic bishop who had been deposed and excommuncated by Pope Pius XII for insubordination and rejection of Vatican I some years earlier. In the late 1940s it consecrated one or two "missionary bishops" for the USA, but these later went off on their own, founding small bodies most of which now "ordain" women and many of which purport to sanctify sodomy. The CAC in Brazil is still quite conservative: it has always condemned WO in the most agreeably strident terms, and has always regarded Anglican Churches as among those "Protestant sects" whose "Orders" ir declines to recognize. In 1997 its "Patriarch" authorized some of its bishops to reconsecrate the bishops of that estimably body, the "Charismatic Episcopal Church" (whose bishops had first been consecrated by Continuing Anglican bishops), and the two bodies (the CAC and the CEC) now are in full communion fellowship with one another."

All of the (9) European Old Catholic bishops (2 for the Dutch, 1 for the Austrians, 1 for the Czechs, 1 for the Germans, 3 for the Poles & 1 for the Swiss), except for the Swiss bishop, are ex-RCs, and all of them (save for the Czech and the 3 Poles) are very much "Affirming Catholic" types. So if the deal goes ahead I will look forward with some bemusement and not a little glee to see the emergence of a "Neo-Gnostic Pseudo-Catholic New Old Catholic Alternative Anglican Communion."

WJT

[william mcgovern]

I've been reading Ruth Gledhill for years and always assumed she was a little, old biddy who has been reporting on religion since, well, the Reformation. Now I see her picture, and WOW! She's a babe.

[emanuel appel]

dear J Pearce,

My interest here is not religion per se but the social results of the modern world on religion.

I maintain that there's degeneration going on and the failure to confront the present medieval Islam is a sign of it.

Those Scots you accuse of being hard line are like that regardless of whatever branch of religion they profess. In the USA, it's amusing to see that the type has moved on to the Southern Baptists ( a different bird from the Northern Baptists) and the Methodists because the American branch of Calvinism is not rigorous enough. It is these same Scots that have the stuff to save you from Islam and you mock them to your peril.

Second, those elements you mock are the Hebrew Bible. I'd support you ignoring our book, our history , since it really has little to do with the New Testament. It's very obvious to me that the devout find themselves in the position of having to defend the Jewish people's heritage. They won't admit it and will find various theories and ruses to avoid the fact.

If those devout people also support the Arabs and hate Israel, they are very confused indeed.

[Old and gray-headed]

"Love in the ruins" is still in paperback print. Amazon.uk shows it at approximately
£7.
I have a copy, but it would cost more to ship it from Oregon than to buy one new!! (rg adds: thank you, after another suggestion along same lines, I have now ordered one from Amazon for aout £2!)

[Craig Goodrich]

I dunno. It's pretty clear that +++Rowan, with his totally conciliar view of Anglican authority, would not unilaterally disinvite anyone to Lambeth. On the other hand, we have a Primates' Meeting coming up, and if the consensus is that bishops who have shown open contempt for Windsor should not appear at Lambeth, I doubt that he would resist too strongly -- C of E liberals to the contrary notwithstanding. Remember that the C of E HoB [Lordy, we're getting as bad with acronyms as the techies!] overwhelmingly approved Windsor, and that +Wright has little use for ECUSA's response to it.

So we'll see...

[J Pearce]

Emanuel,

Read the article. Not so much a malaise, rather more like stating the bleedin' obvious. I have noticed that Christians and Jews alike get rather exercised when being reminded of the murder/death/kill policies that have been carried out in the name of their respective religions.

It seems they prefer to think of themselves as morally superior to Islamist murderers on the principle that "it was all done in the past and it wasn't me", although one is tempted to argue that the inhumanity handed out to slaves in the deep south (y'know, lynchings, hangings, that sort of thing) wasn't actually that long ago. And as I recall, Hindu's were butchering Muslims a while back in India. Lets not even mention Lebanon.

I personally am repulsed by Islam and the evil carried out in its name, but the bottom line is, all religions have a knack of motivating certain people to go out and commit atrocious crimes in the name of their "God". I have no doubt that many, many Hindu's, Jews and Christians around the world would find the motivation to commit equally henious crimes as the Islamists, given the right trigger.

Its not a sign of self hatred or weakness to point out these uncomfortable truths.

[James]

You know, emanuel - we live in an age where people (especially 'intellectuals') are less equipped to critically think than they ever have been in recent history.

That's a result of how we educate (or really don't) our kids.

Today's kid knows less about the deep things, and is less able to bring logic to bear upon them, than almost ever before.

Instead, the average kid (and many grown-ups today are just kids) today sees most things as a gray murasma of feelings and emotions, where nothing can ever be said to be true or right, and where any strange thing may be believed, no matter what facts or history say.

James

[emanuel appel]

As an example of malaise
see http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24303

[Stephanie Miller]

Check your facts, sweetie! the Bishop of Harare cancelled services in honour of his wedding anniversary.

After I read that litle faux-pas, I was left to wonder about the authenticity of the rest of the article. (rg writes: thanks Stephie, fair cop, I've changed article accordingly.)

[James]

"I expect that, by the end of the next few months, after the Primates' Meeting in February, we might have some idea of what God, or the other chap, intends for the Anglican Communion in this millennium. "

---

Actually, God has already spoken very clearly about what He intends and expects.

The real question is: Do Anglicans intend to listen?

James