The Partnership of the Dioceses of El Camino Real, Gloucester and Western Tanganyika
From the Diocese of Gloucester website:
Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury
Regarding the partnership of the dioceses of El Camino Real, Gloucester and Western Tanganyika
[in .doc format]
From the Diocese of El Camino Real website:
Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury from our Partnership Bishops
This letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury was drafted by Bishops Mary Gray-Reeves of the Diocese of El Camino Real, Gerard Mpango of the Diocese of Western Tanganyika, and Michael Perham of the Diocese of Gloucester.
Please read it at http://www.edecr.org/sitefiles/file/newsdocs/NEWS-Ltr2ArchbpREpartnDio-20100622.pdf [in pdf format]
Sounds very encouraging.
Thanks for posting this hopeful letter. It would be good for more relationships like this to come into being.
For some pleasant reading and looking, go to Episcopal Cafe, where you can look at a coloring book that the Diocese of Wyoming has prepared for children to introduce them to their new bishop and to teach them what a bishop wears and why. It’s delightful,
“We would like to share this letter to you more broadly by putting it on our websites and to share it more broadly, but we will refrain from doing so until 19 July in order to give you the opportunity to say if you think that would be unhelpful.”
I guess we can assume Canterbury had no objection then?
*****
On the whole, quite encouraging. God bless the bishops’ initiative, and may it produce further fruit in God’s Good Time!
Well thanks lots for this letter. This is precisely the sort of thing that drew me to become Anglican in the first place; and nourishes me as a progressive Anglican believer. I still find it deeply odd that this sort of dialogue can be generated ad hoc among the parties involved, across differences that are supposed to categorically divide us, and taking note of commonalities which are no longer supposed to draw us together in any recognizeable and effective shared communion – and not be valorized sufficiently (let alone ennabled sufficiently) by top Anglican levels like Canterbury and York and… Read more »
This comment by Chris Smith appeared on the wrong thread, so I am just copying it over for him. The letter that was drafted by Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves is the kind of letter that I wish Roman Catholic bishops would write. I hope the Archbishop of Canterbury has his own epiphany if and when he reads this letter. This speaks very well for the health of the Anglican Communion because, these are the kind of women bishops being consecrated. Truly wonderful and most insightful. An inspiration for those of us who are Roman Catholics and long for women in the… Read more »
It is a marvellous letter, is it not; an indisputable sign of hope. I would especially want to affirm the extraordinary courage shown by Gerard Mpango in reaching out to those whom many of his fellow bishops in Africa, and elsewhere, would regard as anathema.
I wish that Rowan Williams could have brought himself to make a gracious response to it, but perhaps it is enough that the three bishops have offered it to him as a pathway to a better understanding….
I agree that RC bishops should be studying this and imitating it. First indaba, now safari — will Africa lead the way back to a humane and evangelical mode of coexistence and handling of differences?
This is a reminder of the tradition that the paradigmatic doctrine of the Church of England (Anglican Communion) was in some quarters supposed to be the incarnation – not the abstract and impersonal, but the direct encounter. Theology recovered by such as Prof David Ford (Self and Salvation) in which the encounter with ‘the other’, the intimate encounter with difference, as well as the personal relationship are the place where theology is done, God is recognised, self is transformed. It is also a reminder of how costly incarnational theology is – that theology lived by people, priests and bishops having… Read more »