Some further articles from the press and the blogs:
Earlier Tuesday items at the bottom of this article.
Associated Press Rachel Zoll Episcopalians Address Gay Bishop Impasse
The Times Ruth Gledhill Canterbury oversight offers chance of truce and some information in this blog item too
Steve Bates filed rather more copy than the Guardian had room for yesterday, some of his additional comments are below the fold here.
The Living Church reports that Two More Dioceses Will Consider Alternative Oversight and Doug LeBlanc collected these comments about the PB-elect.
For what’s happening in the House of Deputies about the resolutions, Jim Naughton has the latest here, and also see his earlier comments here.
Lionel Deimel has published an essay titled Is the Episcopal Church About to Surrender?
Kendall Harmon has an essay published by Beliefnet What Do Conservative Episcopalians Want?
This BBC story is dated Monday, but US Church vote highlights tension
Stephen Bates writes:
Yesterday, Archbishop Rowan Williams, a supporter of women’s ordination, took 18 hours to offer even a lukewarm welcome to her election, pointing to the impact on ecumenical relations.
Whether this will be the event that precipitates the long-predicted schism of the third largest Christian denomination remains to be seen. Only a minority of its 38 provinces ordain women at all, though the Americans have now done so for more than 30 years and the CofE for more than a decade. Despite that, the communion has so far held together in a way than seems less probable in its divisions over gays – another issue on which the liberal US church has led the way.
The odds on Katharine Jefferts Schori, 52, being elected first woman primate in the Anglican communion as presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church, must have been pretty long. Firstly, she was raised as a Roman Catholic and secondly she specialised in marine biology at university.
Bishop Jefferts Schori – married to a retired theoretical mathematician and with a grown up married daughter who is herself a US airforce pilot – has a list of accomplishments rare in a bishop.
An expert in the squids and oysters inhabiting the sediment in the North East Pacific – the subject of her doctorate – she will be able to deal with the more antediluvian members of the Anglican communion’s bench of bishops.
Perhaps even more important, the subject gives her no truck with the fundamentalist Christians who still believe the Bible’s account of Creation.
The new presiding bishop is also a qualified pilot – lessons bought for her by her father when she was a student – and enjoys flying high above the deserts of her diocese of Nevada.
In Episcopal terms, she is a liberal, having voted three years ago for the election of the gay bishop Gene Robinson, though she did not attend his subsequent consecration. What she lacks in pastoral experience – she has never been a parish priest – she makes up perhaps in her membership of numerous church committees.
She dealt adroitly with her first press conference responding to a British conservative evangelical questioner who demanded to know where she stood on the homosexual issue by saying briskly that there were many more pressing issues for Anglicans, particularly in the Third World: “I think the majority of the church is concerned with more fundamental issues of hunger, housing, unclean water and the availability of education for their children.”
But in a measure of the problems she will face, American conservative evangelical journalists are already deriding both her liberal views and her looks.
Steven Bates claims: “Only a minority of its 38 provinces ordain women at all, though the Americans have now done so for more than 30 years and the CofE for more than a decade.”
Really?
This chart indicates that 25 provinces, fully two thirds of the 37 provinces responding, ordain women to the priesthood and an additional 3 ordain only to the deaconate. Only 9 provinces have no provision for the ordination of women.
http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/documents/Anglican_Communion_Provincial_Checklist_on_Womens_Ordination.pdf
To me Lionel Deimel’s piece here, clearly enunciates what is at stake at GC ( as did his other, longer piece. Really Anglican writing at its best).
I am particularly moved as an lgbt person by his refusal to see THC sacrifice others for its beliefs or comfort. ( We are like pin-cushions have been offered up so often by the C of E!)
BUT DO read the whole piece !
Thank you for the encouragement to read Lionel Deimel’s article. It is inspirational, clear, and worthy of wide circulation. If only the AbC were as articulate and honest about the nature of Anglicanism the Primates, Prelates, Priest and People of the churches which make up the Anglican Communion would be lead into a living and loving expression of the Christian Gospel that could challenge rather than scandalise the secular world.
Lionel Deimel piece was awful. Doing what god calls you to do?
Look the Spong-ites can do whatever they want with the Church (and itappears they are doing just that) but please don’t pretend God has anything to do with it. In fact, it takes a serious intellectual exercise in circumventing the word of God to do what they are doing.
They may be affirming Anglicanism but they have turned their backs on Christianity.
Laurence Robert: Thank you for the compliment on the other comment somewhere on here. Lionel really does speak from an American Experience. Culturally we are different from the Global South. In the last 20 years we have seen: the genocide in Rwanda, Idi Amin in Uganda, Civil unrest and military govts in Nigeria, one of the most corrupt governments in the world in Zimbabwe not to mention the AIDS Epidemic and a host of other maladies. Most American’s and First world countries have even seen a stoning as is done in some parts of Nigeria (not to mention living through… Read more »
Bates misleads when he says that +Katharine Jefferts Schori’s record as a parish priest. She has never been a ‘rector,’ which is the priest in charge of a congregation that is not a mission congregation. But she has served as vicar of a Spanish-speaking mission congregation, and is experienced (though not as experienced as other nominees) as a priest in congregational ministry.
Too bad she doesen’t believe in the ressurection or an afterlife. You’d think those would be key Christian doctrines…
“I don’t await permission from the rest of the Communion”, says bishop Ackerman :—- The election of Bishop Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop and chief consecrator of the bishops of The Episcopal Church presents a challenge to the “sacramental certainty†of the Church, Bishop Ackerman said. “The Bible, the ecumenical councils, the Vincentian canons†are founts of “our knowledge of sacramental certainty†and should not be interpreted through “sociological constructs†based on American “exceptionalism,†he argued. “I think that the outcry internationally will be rather significant†from the election, he noted, but added that it would be “very unwise to… Read more »
Ryan: Actually, and I have it on good authority she does believe in an afterlife. Because someone reads +Spong or Borg or Crossan doesn’t mean you believe everything. +Spong has some very good points concerning social justice. The National Cathedral has a presentation by him you can watch on windows media. There is not one time that +Spong mentions no Heaven, Hell or afterlife. We can have good dialogue with people without agreeing on every little point.
Does anyone have any idea what Alternative Primatial Oversight would actually look like? Or is this just an almost meaningless symbolic gesture? As far as I’ve ever heard the only sacramental resposibility the PB has is to be chief consecrator, and past PBs have delegated consecrations to other bishops for any number of reasons.
Jon
Robert Christian, “I have it on good authority she does believe in an afterlife.” Could you summarise her beliefs? Does she believe in Heaven? Does she believe in Hell? Does our Lord Jesus Christ have anything to do with all this? I heard a clip of her being interviewed on the Radio and when the interviewer asked her point blank “What happenes when we die?” she gave a waffling answer. “+Spong has some very good points concerning social justice.” Spong does not believe in God, maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but I think such a belief precludes you from… Read more »
Robert Christian,
+Schori does NOT believe in an afterlife. Download the 6/19 radio show from this site http://www.albertmohler.com/radio_list.php, and listen from 32:20 on. Is that the sort of response a Christian bishop would give? She is a non-theist like her mentor +Spong.
Within a few years, Episcopalians will need to be re-baptized to join a Christian sect… because no denomination will recognize Episcopalians as believers.