Spellbinding.
Apparently the Anglican Consultative Council (number 14 to be exact) finished meeting in Jamaica. The big issue on the table was an Anglican Covenant. Sign it and you are part of the Anglican Covenant and everything is groovy. Unfortunately for the American church (aka the Episcopal Church) and their liberal allies the Anglican Covenant contains theology. And not just any old theology. Christian theology. Oh and discipline so that there are consequences for heresy or un-Christian behavior. The Americans have been openly against the proposed Anglican Covenant.
Now what happened to this Anglican Covenant… no one is entirely sure… but basically last Friday, May 08 weirdness and confusion reigned supreme. The Anglican Covenant was not approved – indeed so far as I can tell is did not get voted on but was punted down the road by handing it to the very stacked with liberals Joint Standing Committee. Sort of a relatively new Anglican Central Committee tovarisch.
The details – insofar as one can discern them – are disturbing. But the evidence seems to boil down to this. The Americans and their allies brilliantly subverted the process and basically took the Archbishop of Canterbury for a ride.
What a second - what just happened?!?
The word “perfidy” – so old and so delicious – has been brought out of retirement to describe what the Americans and their allies managed last week(end).
Rather than attempt to explain it all let me simply direct your attention to relevant postings at:
Shine Perishing Communion (Anglican Curmudgeon – perhaps the most brilliant and thorough of the commentators/analysts)
How it all happened: Let’s go to the videotape (Baby Blue Cafe – excellent as a source of information and links as well as analysis)
The Bait and Switch of the Anglican Covenant (Baby Blue Cafe)
Anglican Communion Institute statement on the Anglican Consultative Council
Report from ACC-14: Day 8 (Rev Philip Ashey of the American Anglican Council)
Anglican Covenant: Where do we go from here? (Rev Prof Stephen Noll)
Let me close with this quote from Chris Sugden:
So was this a conspiracy or was it a cock-up? Whichever it was it is a case study of how to win if you are a minority in a meeting. If matters are going against you, get a team to work, introduce endless amendments to the resolution you do not like to spin out the debate, introduce a competing proposal, have a chair who is known to be on your side who has a vote and allows discussion of the proposal out of order, a person to present the material as a formal amendment, the president of the meeting to point out to people what is being intended, and also to interpret to the meeting its own decisions in a way that would allow this intention to come to fruition, and a chair who proceeds swiftly to a vote on this amendment having allowed extensive debate on the first resolution that was thought would be cleared out of the way quickly.
Read the whole thing here at Anglican Mainstream.
What is amazing is how a tiny percentage of the entire Anglican Communion gets its way gets its way gets it way – even at meetings where a majority of the representatives (a smaller majority – since the number of representatives is not proportional to how many Anglican Christians you have in your province) disagree with the Americans and the Canadians. Read the posts – and please pardon the “violence” metaphor but it appears that the Americans and their allies lost every single fight.
But won the battle.
There are many (especially who are American Episcopalians) who say this is a good thing and hopeful and means the Anglican Communion will stay together.
I am not so sure.
It may take a while but let me suggest what I would be thinking in Nigeria or Uganda or any of the other large Global South provinces.
“The ‘instruments of unity’ have been so utterly coopted and subverted by the liberal minority… who brilliantly lie and manipulate every meeting we have to deal with this crisis…
To heck with it. We quit. No more Anglican Communion. Because we refuse to associate with fundamentally dishonest and wicked people”.
