BabyBlueOnline: An Honest Look at the Primates Communique

Via Baby blue ... a great look at what happened last week ....

Has anyone been paying attention to the leadership of TEC, especially the Presiding Bishop, since the last call for gracious restraint less than two years ago at the Primates meeting in Dar es Salaam? The leadership of TEC has accelerated litigation against those who fled to other Provinces, suing parishes and individuals at an astonishing rate. We count at least 56 cases TEC has initiated directly and through dioceses. And this does not even take into account the litigation they have yet to file in the dioceses of Ft. Worth and Quincy. When challenged at the Lambeth Conference, revisionist TEC bishops had the audacity to lie through their teeth and claim that local churches were suing them! Where is the humility and integrity in such reckless indifference to the truth? Where is the gracious restraint against such accelerating, costly, punitive litigation?

Where is the gracious restraint and self-limitation of a TEC House of Bishops who have tortured the plain meaning of the canons to depose 12 bishops and 104 priests and deacons for transferring to another province of the Anglican Communion in order to maintain integrity and faithfulness to Communion teaching on human sexuality? Where is the gracious restraint and self-limitation where, without any due process or appeal, the Presiding Bishop deposes a sitting bishop for what he might do? Or where she deposes a bishop ordained and canonically resident in the Church of England? Or where she dismisses a lawfully constituted diocesan standing committee and substitutes her own? Or where she hires a personal litigator to guide the accelerating litigation on the very eve of the Primates meeting?

And the list goes on…

It is no surprise that within minutes of the release of this Communiqué, the Presiding Bishop signaled her own feelings about gracious restraint in the ENS press release: “The long-term impact of 'gracious restraint' is a matter for General Convention.” “We are going to have to have honest conversations about who we are as a church and the value we place on our relationships and mission opportunities with other parts of the communion and how we can be faithful with many spheres of relationship at the same time. That is tension-producing and will be anxiety-producing for many, but we are a people that live in hope, not in instant solutions but in faithfulness to God”(5)

Since she has already announced that General Convention will not even consider the proposed Covenant until 2012 (or 2015 if constitutional changes are required), there will be no gracious restraint to hold the Communion together while the leadership of TEC continues to export a false gospel to the rest of the Communion, and impose it at home. What will happen to the Biblically orthodox, faithful Anglicans in TEC, “dear sisters and brothers in Christ,” who will continue to face inhibition, deposition and other canonical abuses over the next three years, without any recourse to Communion structures? What will happen to the men, women and children in TEC pews who have not received enough sound teaching to recognize this false gospel as a counterfeit?


BabyBlueOnline: <i>An Honest Look at the Primates Communique</i>