There is quite a lot of Anglican news these past days and weeks. Hard to keep up!
My continuing interest in "global" Anglican affairs leads me to focus this week mostly on "Anglican Communion" news, which, naturally, at the moment is "the" Anglican Communion news and the "Global Anglican Communion" news.
Three articles are of great interest in giving insight into how GAFCON's leadership came to announce the formation of the Global Anglican Communion, and what significant response to that announcement is:
"The Anglican Church of Kenya is likely a crucial bellwether for the project’s success. The Global South’s third-largest church and the host of important institutions like the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa, Kenya has long been an active participant both in GAFCON and the Instruments of Communion.
The church’s primate, Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the Global Anglican Communion announcement (one of his staffers told our reporter that getting a response would be “a Hail Mary pass”).
But the Bishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya’s Diocese of Garissa, Francis Omondi, said to TLC that breaking ties with Canterbury would be a major cultural shift for his church, which retains deep respect for its historical ties to the church that brought it the gospel and has a robust culture of internal consultation.
“Kenya will need a fundamental reworking to break with Canterbury. No archbishop can take Kenya away without changing the church’s law. This will be hard to achieve. Breaking with Canterbury may result in breaking the church locally, creating two provinces,” Omondi said.
“The position I take and which I advance is that we cannot and should not server links with Canterbury. We are so culturally intertwined that these breakaway talks cannot work. I think the challenge is desire for power and control. In Kenya, we represent reasoning from both sides but have chosen to reconcile them in a united church.”"
I do not see Tanzania as likely to join GAC, and certainly the Church of Southern Africa won't.
To me the biggest oddity here is the notion that a meeting held in and dominated by Sydney could imagine - some very intelligent men were there, I have met some of them - that it could be persuasive of provinces not currently in GAFCON to leave the Anglican Communion behind and become fully fledged members of GAC.
Back to Sydney in a moment, but also in recent news, King Charles [Governor, Church of England] prayed witn Pope Leo. Ian Paul has a post titled King Charles and Pope Leo: a step towards 'full visible unity'? No unexpectedly the usual formalities which stand in the way of "full visible unity" are brought out for our remembrance - and they do remain formal difficulties in the way of ultimate unity - but there is much to rejoice in when Catholics and Anglicans find all the ways we possibly can to work in unity together aside from those formalities.
I suggest that Jesus and the angels in heaven rejoice when they see and hear of our creative ecumenical endeavours.
But not all would agree with my suggestion (which, I further suggest, many, many Anglicans and Catholics around the globe would readily agree with). Within Ian Paul's post is this reaction from ... Sydney (I said we would be back to Sydney!):
But others saw it rather differently! Dominic Steele, on his channel The Pastor’s Heart, was unequivocal:
I feel betrayed by my king. On the most important issue, I feel like King Charles has betrayed me and Protestant Christians around the world. But even more significantly, he has grieved the Lord Jesus.
He explains his own upbringing as a Catholic (as I was!), and his coming to personal faith in an evangelical Anglican church (as I did!) and so how he personally feels about this event.
So for me it has been a punch in the heart this week to see the Pope and the King and the Archbishop of York praying together—something that the office holders of Pope and King have not done since at least the 12th century. And I feel so sad.
Okay. I didn't see that coming. Jesus grieved by two Christians praying together. Jesus grieved by a modest step along the journey to re-unity in the church of God.
In the context of surveying the "Anglican-scape" of our globe, I suggest this reaction by Dominic Steele is representative of the leadership of the Sydney Diocese (who readily and frequently appear on his Pastor's Heart channel). Such reaction is completely normal for the Sydney Diocese, no matter what the rest of us think about it around the global Anglican world. (Note, incidentally, within Ian Paul's post the way former Archbishop Peter Jensen responded to an invitation to pray with the Pope ...).
Now, we can understand - whatever we think of it - the logic behind such a "Protestant" approach to the Church of Rome, given starting points, with obvious Anglican roots into the 39A, that essentially say, Rome was wrong then, is still wrong now; and what counts in Christian action is doctrinal agreement, so, lacking that, we cannot act together, not even to pray. (And, any of us, from a Protestant or Catholic perspective can note that it is precisely lack of doctrinal agreement with Rome re the eucharist which is the sticking point in Anglicans and other Protestants being unable to share in the Roman Mass.)
There is another way (which King Charles and Pope Leo have exemplified) but that is not my concern at this point.
My concern is that this particular Sydney-Protestant-Anglican view is not a widely shared view among Western hemisphere Anglicans. Why would "the" Anglican Communion want to follow a Sydney lead and evolve itself into the "Global Anglican Communion"?
There are a few presuppositions not shared between the two Communions! If the Global Anglican Communion wants to be "Anglican", it needs to look at its presuppositions.
So, here is a closing thought: when two people pray together and Jesus is grieved, there is the basis for one Anglican Communion; and when the same two people pray together and Jesus rejoices, there is the basis for another Anglican Communion.
