Both the New York Times and the Washington Post report the news that the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to ask Archbishop Akinola not to go to Virginia:
Michelle Boorstein Archbishop Angry About Minister Becoming Bishop
Neela Bannerjee Anglican Church Intercedes as an Episcopal Rift Widens
Update
According to Anglican Mainstream here both David Banting and Gerry O’Brien are attending this event, and further, both the bishops of Rochester and Southwell & Nottingham have sent messages of greeting.
Jim Naughton has written some commentary about who are the intended audiences for Archbishop Peter Akinola’s visit to Virginia today at Daily Episcopalian: Who’s watching?
Dave Walker has a picture of The Contents of Archbishop Peter Akinola’s Waste Paper Basket.
I do suspect that “narcissistic personality disorder” is at work among many of the current disputes in the Anglican Communion and Episcopal Church. If so, all the issues under discussion are quite secondary. What methods, then, are workable toward reconciliation and resolutions?
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/narcissistic-personality-disorder/DS00652
From a property point of view, Akinola coming now cuts both ways. The Virgina churches need Akinola to install Minns to establish that CANA Churches are not just breakaway churches but represent a split off within the AC. But if they are hoping to establish the AC as the overall structure, Akinola’s rebuff of the ABC’s request shows that the AC is merely a federation of autonomous churches.
Psychological issues aside, I suspect that ++Akinola (and his supporters in England) may be prey to believing his press, and that of those who support his view. Their actual experience of the Episcopal Church is minimal, and relies for information on a rather small but vocal minority. This grouping gives the impression that there is a huge groundswell of support for division, “orthodoxy” or realignment; in fact, even in the most fervently conservative dioceses the situation is far from unanimous, and those dioceses represent a minority of the church. The recent court decisions in South Carolina and Florida will be… Read more »
Akinola’s action is the decisive act; after all, the Episcopalians were given a sort of deadline (even if they were not going to meet it) and that time has not yet arrived. Akinola has jumped the gun, rendering the whole communiqué dead in the water. It is indeed now a federation, and the action to be taken after 30 September is precisely nothing, which was probably how it was going to be. So then will come Lambeth 2008, many words and attempted declarations from this group and that, and likely nothing as a result. What matters is the Church of… Read more »
Akinola and Minns are all about the conservative realignment campaign. As somebody has posted, three bishops is a magic number because they can pancake other bishops to be like glial cells, nurturing and fostering the much vaunted and much bandied emergence of the extremely conservative new USA Anglican province and its implicit nervous systems. Bishop Duncan may rightly be worrying about his high place in all that emergence. Is he front lobe tissue? Or just a needed part of the motor cortex? Or an even farther removed nexus in the reflexive spinal cord? These issues are obviously not at all… Read more »
Kendall Harmon is live blogging from the scene. BabyBlueOnline has videos and sermon audio.
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/
http://babybluecafe.blogspot.com/
Tobias —
Not even sure about California, actually.
Many of the “reasserters” are saying that Bishop Minns’ installation is no big deal since he is already a bishop. In one sense this is true, but in another it is startlingly disingenuous — in part because an Anglican primate is entering another province to perform episcopal acts without permission of the existing authority, but also because the acronym CANA has shifted from “Convocation of Anglican Nigerians in America” to “Convocation of Anglicans in North America” — a significant change!
Shame on you, Michael Nazir-Ali and George Cassidy, shame on you. Whatever your personal feelings in this, it cannot be helpful to openly support this outrageous challenge of episcopal authority.
I think Dave Walker has it wrong. Archbishop Akinola has a shredder.
Yes, Prior A, I may be mistaken about California in the long run. The lower court has ruled against the dioceses, but that may well not stand once it gets to the next stage.
Drdanfee wrote: “The new conservative Anglican campaign is a clear bid for empire in the most overt guises. The clue? Most conservative believers will only know for sure that they are in power when they get to police the rest of us, quite finely.”
Indeed so. But, Thanks to God! the Age of Empire is gone.
(and, mercifully, Emperor Louis the Pious who started all this Empire Evil in Europe is not a direct ancestor but only a great grandfather of 1st cousins ;=)