Updated Sunday morning
Rachel Zoll of AP has another report Episcopalians to Choose New Leader
Michael Conlon of Reuters also has a report Episcopal Church panel OKs gay issue apology
Jim Naughton has “No quotes, no votes, no nothing”.
Ruth Gledhill has Split now inevitable, saving miracle.
Sunday morning
The full text of the address by The Rev. John Danforth, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a former US Senator, has been published by ENS. Or you can watch it on video.
The state of the Windsor resolutions is summarised for ENS by Herb Gunn. And their progress is explained by Solange De Santis for Anglican Journal.
Newsweek has two interviews, one with Robert Duncan, and another with Gene Robinson.
Steve Levin of the PIttsburgh Post-Gazette has Church leaders moving carefully.
The BBC radio programme Sunday opens with a discussion about events in Columbus featuring Robert Pigott (Real Audio)
Kendall Harmon comments on where things are at Into the Fulcrum
A pessimistic view of the US General Convention is that the 11 Network diocese will split and their allies in Central Africa will demand that the Network dioceses be considered the Anglican Convention’s representative in the United States and that ECUSA be expelled from the Anglican Communion.
Would this trigger schisms in Great Britain that would move parishes or dioceses to communion with ECUSA instead of the Anglican Communion?
The Church of England is as far as possible schism-proof, because local churches do not belong to their congregation. Although they theoretically “belong” to the rector/vicar, in practice they can not be detached from the diocese in which they are situated.
There is nothing to stop a congregation leaving its buildings and setting up elsewhere, as with the Rev Charles Raven in Kidderminster, but they are now a free church outside the Church of England.
It could make life “interesting” in the Scottish Episcopal church, however. It occurs to me that individuals are used to choosing a church based on local as well as doctrinal issues, and tend to arrive at a compromise. This leads to – and maintains – a diversity of belief within any one denomination, within any one church; but trying, on the denominational level, to redefine denominations on purely doctrinal grounds would be terminally daft, threatening to separate friends who’ve worshipped together for decades on the grounds of some doctrinal issue or other. I just wish some other members of the… Read more »
Alan, it works the same way here in the U.S. If a parish wishes to leave its diocese, that’s fine, but it cannot take the property with it. That’s part of why the Network types continue to make a pretense of being Episcopalians–they don’t want to give up the goodies.
Frankly, I would be willing to give them their churches if they would just go away.
So now we have two representative contrasts in a nutshell, juxtaposed in Ruth Gledhill’s take next to Fr. John Danforth’s take. (Just follow the blog links already posted.) Danforth admonishes us who are sort of present at the GC by proxy thanks to streaming internet video, that before we as believers ever answer any particular question of doctrine or controversy, we may wish to clearly preface all with a brief statement of our distinctive ECUSA calling to reconciliation. Thus the implication is that no particular doctrine or controversy is an armament of war, requiring us to pledge any sort of… Read more »
There’s an interesting quote from Bishop Duncan at the end of his interview with Newsweek where he says that “a majority opinion doesn’t make it right.”
It is this same logic that should apply to Archbishop Akinola’s gay-bill endorsement. It’s one thing for Nigerians to decide not to officially recognize gay marriages — it is quite another for the majority to tell a minority that they have no voice.
I await Bishop Duncan’s call to Archbishop Akinola telling him that “a majority opinion doesn’t make it right.”
Infuriating.
Apparently a majority opinion does make it right inside The Episcopal Church when they elect their Presiding Bishop! When they do that, a majority is not just right, it is declared to be the work of the Spirit and you can’t get any righter than that! Unless of course a majority opinion doesn’t make it right but just reflects what most people think. (At least that’s how I thought democracy worked?) But if that’s right, then how can we know what to do in the church, how can we discern the leading of the Spirit? Maybe we’ll just have to… Read more »
Translations, they are Translations!
Not the Bible. Translations.
Dear Matt, Majority opinion is actually pretty irrelevant. What really matters is God’s opinion!