The Anglican Consultative Council’s 16th meeting opened in Lusaka on Friday.
Madeleine Davies is in Lusaka for the Church Times and has so far sent these reports.
Discussion of ‘consequences’ as ACC sessions begin in Lusaka
Be united in joy, Welby exhorts his Zambian congregation
The Anglican Communion website has this page devoted to ACC-16. It includes links to ACC-16 Documents and to relevant items from the Anglican Communion News Service.
One such item is Archbishop Welby briefs ACC members on the Primates’ gathering and meeting.
[This is also on the Archbishop’s own website here.]
Mary Frances Schjonberg is reporting from Lusaka for the Episcopal News Service, including this item on yesterday’s Eucharist: ACC gets African Anglican liturgical welcome to Zambia.
There are photographs of the service here.
The ACC standing committee met earlier in the week and issued this report of its meeting. Included is this sentence, “The Standing Committee considered the Communiqué from the Primates and affirmed the relational links between the Instruments of Communion in which each Instrument, including the Anglican Consultative Council, forms its own views and has its own responsibilities.”
Thoughts on the ‘Discussions on Consequences’ article. ABC: “Primates’ meetings, Lambeth Conferences and ACCs are not a question of winning and losing, but of discerning together in love.” Nevertheless, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people were losers in the outcome of the Primate’s Meeting. If we want to talk about impaired relationships, one could do worse than to reflect on the impaired relationships that exist between LGBT people and the Church. Countless people write off the Church, appalled by its discrimination and marginalisation of these minorities. Those are impaired relationships that really need repairing. It may not be ‘about winning… Read more »
‘Interdependence’: it is used as an argument and byword for NOT affirming gay sex and gay marriage (and to tell TEC to kindly stop doing it). But actually, it’s possible to have interdependence without doctrinal uniformity. What harms interdependence is if one group tells another group what they *must* do, against their own conscience, as a condition for membership and togetherness. We could have interdependence, right here in the Church of England, without just one uniform view on human sexuality and gender. Local churches could stand by their conscience on the issue, and vary, and be diverse – yet providing… Read more »
From the Church Times article: “Speaking after the Archbishop’s presentation, the Vice Chair of the ACC, Canon Elizabeth Paver. referred to this comment as a “direct request from the Primates to us”. “She said that the leaders of the ACC were now asking members if they were “individually and collectively willing to work together for mutual flourishing relationships”. Votes were “divisive”, she said, but “we would like, in Christian love and friendship, in our Anglican way, to be able to say to our Archbishop – to affirm our beliefs as a body to work together with our Primates on these… Read more »
“This sounds absolutely ridiculous. The Archbishop and the Vice Chair, hesitant to call for any vote on anything meaningful, instead ask for applause?
“Put your hands together if you want to work with the Primates on these difficult issues!”
Really? Is this what the Communion has come to?”
“”Do you believe in fairies? … If you believe,” he [Peter] shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.” “
Jeremy, for me it brought to mind the clap for Tinkerbell piece from Peter Pan.
One lovely thing about this Meeting of ACC16 is the joyful presence of two African Anglican Leaders – both high-ranking in the Communion:
A.C. Secretary-General Idowu-Fearon, and
A.C.C. Chair Bishop Tenga-tenga
I read this report with great interest. The possiblity of the next chair of the ACC coming from the Episcopal Church is intriguing. http://www.deputynews.org/douglas-will-not-stand/
Regardless of the ACC, I think the American pew-sitter is pretty much *done* with the Anglican Communion – at least, I hope so.
Enough with pharaoh and his hard heart. The sea is opened, move on.
Susannah: ‘And when the Church repudiates gay relationships and sexuality, as less than ideal… when it discriminates about which people can marry the partners they love… when it marginalises openly gay priests… or fires them for getting married… when it still suggests gay sex is a sin… or uses airbrush and erasure to kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ on its diocesan websites… then, yes, Justin, there are losers in this process. And it damages and wounds profoundly. And alienates a generation.’ You’re not wrong there. And it occurs to me that, if we want to put a stop to… Read more »