I know it is not short but please take the time to read it all.

A very good, careful statement, which also appears to me, after a quick reading, to be both historically and theologically sound and helpful.

I hope that the powers-that-be in the AC will have an opportunity to take it into consideration. We will all be waiting in the weeks ahead for a constructive response from the Communion. Many of us, after all, are still hanging around in TEC, but whether we continue to do so will indeed depend very much on what clear approaches are taken to these issues in the near future.

I liked his appeal for a quick Primates’ meeting to consider and deal with TEC’s “response” to DeS. If the Primates don’t act quickly, I fear they will be overtaken by events and they and the Communion will be rendered uselessly obsolete.

In faith, Dave
Viva Texas

An initial quick read (recommending careful, reflective perusal) finds Goddard’s phenomenoligical review concise, fair (whether “half full” or “-empty”) and thorough. Thank you for passing it along—it will be useful in discussions.

...make that phenomenological (talk about need for careful perusal).

This is exactly the document I have needed to answer my Vestry’s questions from our meeting last week; I’ll be printing it and giving it to all of my Vestry and Clergy.  It covers the whole story from Lambeth 98 to GC 2003 & 2006 up to the present in a concise and readable way.  Thank you Dr. Goddard and ACI.

What’s interesting here is that Andrew Goddard is a leader of the website/forum pressure group ‘Fulcrum’, which was established in opposition to ‘conservative evangelicals’ in England, while a co-leader of this group, Graham Kings, who contributes to T-1-9, has given quite strong support to the HOB statement - a triumph of hope over sober reality, I thought. Now Andrew has blown the gaffe on this one.
It would be harsh to call ‘Fulcrum’ ‘useful idiots’ to the revisionists in England, but I think ‘Fulcrum’ should take a reality check (as I believe Andrew has done here) and mend its fences with the conservative evangelicals, recognizing that obfuscation and longwindedness don’t serve the Gospel.

#7 Gordian. Thanks for your comment. A few points:

1. Please note that that the Fulcrum Response to the HOB New Orleans statement, which is not yet on T19, is on:

http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=236

It includes the sentence: ‘This follows from our careful analysis of the House of Bishops statement and a detailed comparison of it with the requests made by the Primates’ Meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.’

2. That analysis - our comparative study of the Dar es Salaam communique and the New Orleans statement - is on:

http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=237

3. Please note that in my initial comment on T19, written within an hour of the statement being made available, the first phrase was:

‘At first reading…’ and it pointed out some worrying aspects of the statement even then.

4. The Fulcrum response is my comment and our comment after my detailed study and our detailed study together.

# 8: thank you, I am sorry if my tone was a bit harsh; I see grave spiritual battles before us and believe evangelicals shouldn’t be fighting each other while North Atlantic (and Australasian) Anglicanism goes down the tubes. I think it goes wholly against the spirit of the Gospel to be splitting words and parsing phrases in a legalistic manner when our Lord said ‘Let your yes be yes and your no no’, and the goal of Christian obedience should be not ‘What’s the minimum I can concede to stay in with X?’ but ‘What does the Lord of the Church require of me?’ Gospel believers hold to ‘my utmost for His highest’.
Moreover, to focus on homosexually active *bishops as a casus belli is really hypocritical (and whiffs of snobbery), when homosexually active priests or laypeople are being tacitly accepted, without any consistent pattern of discipline - as now seems to have happened. This is where North Atlantic Anglicanism has largely sold the pass. Does any good come from continuing to debate these issues (as Andrew Goddard himself has been doing with Giles Goddard of ‘Inclusive Church’) with people who have already made up their mind to break with the Church’s historic teaching and enter ‘gay’ relationships? My reading of 1 Corinthians indicates this isn’t what Paul would have done.
Anglicanism is now in a perilous situation, because the trumpet has continued to sound an uncertain note and there has been little or no effective pastoral discipline here. By contrast, the Baptists and Pentecostalists have largely held the line, nitwithstanding their lack of centralized control.