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Technorati2004 has been undoubtedly a tumultuous season for conservatives, moderates and liberals alike in the Anglican Communion. The year began in the bitter aftermath of the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) bishops’ decision to ordain an active homosexual as bishop, and it continued with the subsequent severance of “communion” by dozens of conservative Anglican bodies. The Canadian Anglican Church also began blessing gay unions, and the Church of England itself was on the verge of electing an openly homosexual priest as the bishop of Reading.
Following such developments, the Communion released a study – the famed Windsor Report - on maintaining the historic ties that bind the international Anglican churches together. However, the report’s call to communion also seems to have fallen on deaf ears, with bitter homosexuals saying they will no longer remain as “second class citizens” for the sake of unity, and with concerned conservatives saying they will not exchange social leniency for scriptural authority.
Philip Giddings, the head of the conservative Anglican group Anglican Mainstream, released a commentary on the situation, encouraging those who suggest the “Anglican Communion may split” to “remind ourselves how the Anglican Communion came into being.”
“Some argue that just as Britain replaced its lost Empire with new friends in Europe and the USA, so the Church of England could replace its global Communion with narrower relations with other European and North American churches engaged in mission to the same type of culture,” he added.
But, according to Giddings, this argument “raises two critical issues.”
“First, it is quite clearly accepting a racist separation of white Christians, mostly rich in this world’s goods, from black and brown Christians,” he said. “Second, it assumes the state of the Church of England and the state of the Anglican Communion can be separated.”
He emphasized that the battle currently undertaken is not in regards to the two aforementioned issues, but rather “over authority, and particularly over what is biblical teaching and orthodox Christian faith and practice.”
“The Anglican Communion, then, is worth fighting for – and so is the Church of England,” he concluded. “And not because of their history, but because they both stand in the authentic scriptural tradition, faithful to the apostolic witness.”
The following is the full of Phillips’ statement, as released by the Anglican Mainstream:
With the reactions to The Windsor Report suggesting the Anglican Communion may split, some people in the Church of England are asking what is the point of belonging to the Anglican Communion any more. They say it is only the religious left-overs of the British Empire. Although of doubtful historical accuracy the challenge does raise a question which has to be answered.
First, we need to remind ourselves how the Anglican Communion came into being. It is the product of a major expansion of the church which began in the seventeenth century and took off in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That expansion was rooted in a voluntary movement which, significantly, also sought to change social conditions in Britain while campaigning against the slave trade. The nineteenth century mission movement originated from a major Christian revival and cultural revolution in British society. The slave owning and trading nation of 1780 had become a leader in ending the slave trade by 1832. Continue >>
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