The Covenant Design Group of the Anglican Communion has released the Lambeth Commentary. From ACNS:The Covenant Design Group publish [sic] today the Lambeth Commentary, which sets out the responses of the bishops at the Lambeth Conference in their discussions of the St Andrew's Draft for an Anglican Covenant.
The Commentary was complied [sic] by the Covenant Design Group at their recent meeting in Singapore and also sets out some of the initial thinking of the CDG in response to the comments of the bishops.
Hopefully the link will stay put. Whoever does the Communion's online work seems to like to reshuffle their web materials periodically- a fact that was enormously frustrating for me as I worked on and edited my canon law article. One would think that accessibility of important ecclesiastical documents would be a priority for these people, but that doesn't always seem to be the case!
Haha!
ReplyDeleteI love how a third of your post is griping about the webmaster, rather than substantive thoughts on the commentary.
You crack me up, dude.
Yeah, I haven't read the commentary... just throwing out the information for people.
ReplyDeleteI haven't followed the Anglican situation nearly as closely since this summer. There's simply too much going on, and too many conflicting interpretations of the same bit of text or decision. I'm sort of worried that my canon law article will be woefully outdated by the time it comes out in the T&T Clark volume- the timing for the Ecclesiastical Law Journal was solid gold, plus they were very open to me editing the manuscript as the process went along. As things stand, though, it looks like there will be a new Anglican province set up in America before the article goes to print again- not that it will change my analysis of what happened in 2005, but it will make some comments rather dated.
All that's to say, I said my piece about the Anglican situation and don't have any immediate plans to publish on it (or even keep abreast of it) again. Griping being an easier task than actually reading new documents, I'm happy to do so!
Did you see Byasse's article about Wheaton/Chicago's AMiA churches?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=4770
I have read Byassee's piece. It's a good- if rather painful- account of the situation in our area, and it's important for people to read.
ReplyDeleteI take issue with Byassee's closing sentiment about church divisions. I think it's rather disingenuous to compare these sorts of splits to something like Donatism. The caricature is all too easy to make, but I don't think it's at all fair to the separation that's occurring- during the reformation, in much of the denominationalism of Protestantism, and certainly in something like the current Anglican crisis. Byassee of all people should be able to do better than reducing this to a matter of "leaving one church to start a better one." As if an argument for equivalency is adequately propped up by this (rather thin) description!
That said, I have been candid in my concerns about some actions of the Global South primates despite remaining in overall agreement with their work. I think that Byassee does make necessary criticisms in this article, and the failures of Chicagoland Anglicanism are glaringly apparent. I came to Wheaton and found Great Shepherd- not from a disenchanted Evangelicalism or Episcopalianism, but simply as a new student looking for a church home. I came after the splits with other churches had taken place, and by the time I got here there was a very real (if not unanimous) sense of reconciliation amongst the Anglican congregations. The folding of Great Shepherd was a devastation, a relief; it was not a surprise but certainly a shock nonetheless.
All of this deserves critique, but I feel like it could have been done by an Anglican rather than a United Methodist onlooker. That said, what's written is written, and Byassee brings up some good points amidst the bad ones.
...upon further thought...
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised at how much the re-reading of Byassee's article has upset me. I apologize if I responded with undue harshness.
I think the personal pain that has touched everyone involved in the Anglican crisis is deeper than many of us realize when offering a more detached critique. Quite honestly, I think I am just immanently aware of the failures that Byassee brings up, and because of that I'm instinctively offended that an outsider like him would so openly put the microscope on what... let me assure you... most of us attending these congregations are already damn well aware is the case.
I grew up in mainline protestantism- not in Byassee's Methodism, but in ELCA and PCUSA. I don't think of myself as abandoning that mainline heritage in my current Anglicanism just because AMiA has fresher wounds from church splits than others do, or because it's perhaps more conservative than others. I'm also rather sick of reading Evangelicals damning the mainline and vice versa. While Byassee's piece wasn't entirely of this sort, it engaged in enough of those pedestrian skirmishes to frustrate me.