Category: Anglican News

According to this site, the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church said the following yesterday at the opening of  the General Convention:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

I’m stunned. I’m speechless. I just… don’t even have words to respond to this. I’ll let the comments from linked post speak for me:

Did I just hear the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church dismiss as heresy the confession of millions upon millions of Christ followers, from the Apostles to St. Augustine to the Wesleys to the GAFCON gathering of Anglicans last year to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in the Church of England meeting in the UK right now to the multitudes throughout our own Anglican Communion who are invited to make a personal confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior — and who do so daily, often at great personal cost, as their churches and provinces explode with growth in numbers and mission?

How is it that a Church which has done everything to remove “heresy” from its vocabulary can now so confidently proclaim that confessional Christianity is heresy?  How is it that a Church can dismiss the clear words of scripture (see e.g. Romans 10:9-10) as a mere “individualistic formula”?  What audacity and pride drives a leader of a church to ignore the wealth of an over 2,000 years of uninterrupted tradition that holds that a person must confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in order to be a Christian?

I just can’t join the ACNA fast enough, folks.

Daughters of the King is a “spiritual sisterhood of women dedicated to a life of Prayer, Service and Evangelism”. It is, for brevity’s sake, a convent for Episcopalian women. Over the years, however, DOK has expanded their order by admitting women from Anglican, Episcopal, Lutheran (ELCA) and Roman Catholic churches.

However, the mania currently engulfing The Episcopal Church has taken over some members of the Order, and at the DOK convention this past Friday there was a motion to limit membership to only those in “approved” Episcopal churches. While those members from Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches would have been kicked to the curb, Anglican women were the real target of what amounts to a beer hall putsch.

Thankfully, the Episcopalian women of DOK voted down the change in the by-laws! BabyBlue says that

[a]t the end of the day and through much debate – some of it quite painful – the DOK Triennial voted down all the amendments and the bylaws in place that include all the members of the Order remain unchanged. The non-Episcopalian members were reseated and the Triennial continued into Saturday.

At least someone with “Episcopal” in their name is acting rationally these days!

Read more about it here.

Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire whose consecration set off a firestorm in the Anglican Communion, dissed the new Province in a recent interview. Robinson, derisively known as the “Simple County Bishop” (SCB) by conservative Anglicans, said in an interview that

“A church that does not ordain women or openly gay people – I don’t see a future for that.”

Oh yes, Gene… because that’s been a huge problem for the Catholic and Orthodox churches in the past 2,000 years!

Robinson could not explain why the Episcopal Church only gets smaller and smaller as it becomes more and more “inclusive”.

More news from the ACNA:

His Beatitude, the Archbishop of Washington, Metropolitan of All America and Canada of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) announced recently that his church has ended its ecumenical relations with The Episcopal Church, and will establish instead formal ecumenical relations with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA made the announcement June 24 at a plenary session of the ACNA’s founding convocation at St Vincent’s Cathedral, Bedford, Texas.

This is big news, but not “big” news. It still full steam ahead for the ACNA, though, and that’s AWESOME!

via The Living Church Foundation | OCA To End Relations with TEC, Forge Ties to ACNA.

This just in from BabyBlue:

The Anglican Church of Uganda has now officially recognized the Anglican Church in North America and has transferred all their bishops and clergy to the ACNA, Bishop John Guernsey just announced to the ACNA Assembly in Ft. Worth.

The march towards orthodoxy continues! Read about it here.

Sorry for the lack of Anglican news lately. It’s just so… depressing.

Here’s something unusual though:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has sent the Rt. Rev’d Santosh Marray, retired bishop of the Seychelles (2005-2008) in the Province of the Indian Ocean, as his official pastoral visitor to the Anglican Church of North America Provincial Assembly in Ft. Worth, TX. Bishop Marray, was born in Guyana and is a former rector in the Diocese of Florida. He is a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Pastoral Visitor Programme started this past February.

I wonder what all this means? Nothing, probably. But it sure is… interesting.

As always, thanks to BabyBlue for the tip.

The Rev. Peter Toon, a giant in the war for Orthodox Anglicanism in the United States and the United Kingdom, passed away in San Diego this past Saturday. He was 70.

Ordained in the Church of England in 1973, Toon initially served in the Diocese of Liverpool. He would later serve throughout England and the United States. He wrote 25 books, and was president of the Prayer Book Society of the US in the last years of his life. A caring man and a scholar, his work on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal were top-notch.

He will be missed greatly.

Read more about him here.

Sorry, I don’t have the time to post more, but:

FAIRFAX, Va. (December 19, 2008) – The judge presiding in the church property trial between the Episcopal Church and eleven former congregations, now affiliated with the Anglican District of Virginia (ADV), ruled in the congregations’ favor today. The final rulings in this case concerned whether four parcels of property owned by the Anglican congregations were covered by the congregations’ Division petitions.

Hooray! There were, what… seven, eight different rulings in this case, and the Episcopal Church lost them all! What a great way to spend $5 million, 815!

Read more about it here.

As the sun came over the horizon this morning, a new day dawned on the Anglican Communion. Yesterday, the leaders of several conservative Anglican movements in the United States and Canada formed a new province, to be called the Anglican Church in North America. The leader of the new province – an archbishop, no less! – will be Robert Duncan, former Bishop of Pittsburgh.

The provisional constitution of the new province is available here. Here are some highlights:

1) We confess the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired Word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation, and to be the final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life.

2) We confess Baptism and the Supper of the Lord to be Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself in the Gospel, and thus to be ministered with unfailing use of His words of institution and of the elements ordained by Him.

3) We confess the godly historic Episcopate as an inherent part of the apostolic faith and practice, and therefore as integral to the fullness and unity of the Body of Christ.

4) We confess as proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture the historic faith of the undivided church as declared in the three Catholic Creeds: the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian.

5) Concerning the seven Councils of the undivided Church, we affirm the teaching of the first four Councils and the Christological clarifications of the fifth, sixth and seventh Councils, in so far as they are agreeable to the Holy Scriptures.

6) We receive The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship.

7) We receive the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1562, taken in their literal and grammatical sense, as expressing the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time, and as expressing fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief.

8) We affirm the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) Statement and Jerusalem Declaration issued 29 June 2008.

The new province’s canons are available here.

Want a good laugh? Here’s a line from the New York Times story about the conference:

The Rev. Charles Robertson, canon for the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said Wednesday, “There is room within the Episcopal Church for people of different views, and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ.”

How these people can say that with a straight face is beyond me! I think the actual quote was more like this:

The Rev. Charles Robertson, canon for the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said Wednesday, “There is room within the Episcopal Church for people of different vie…. hahahahaha!!! Oh, who am I kidding? We’ll sic our lawyers on these guys faster than you can say ‘KJS is a heretic’!”

So anyway… all kidding aside, I’m really excited about yesterday’s news. The new province will bring together parishes and believers from The American Anglican Council, The Anglican Coalition in Canada, The Anglican Communion Network, The Anglican Mission in the Americas, The Anglican Network in Canada, The Convocation of Anglicans in North America, Forward in Faith – North America, The Missionary Convocation of Kenya, The Missionary Convocation of the Southern Cone, The Missionary Convocation of Uganda, and The Reformed Episcopal Church.That’s big. So big that that 815 cannot simply ignore them. The question now is whether enough primates will recognize the new province. It’s a lock that KJS and company will not, and that the Global South bishops will… as always, it’s those wishy-washy folks in the middle that we have to worry about.

The only question I have is… where can I sign up?