What is needed now is firm, decisive leadership which clearly protects and promotes the Biblical Christian faith. It is around such a position that the Communion could unite. In practice this means that discipline should be applied to TEC.

Which, face it, is not going to happen with this ABoC.  We’ve mistaken ++Rowan’s moral weakness for thoughtfulness, his evasiveness for cunning, his fecklessness for resolve.  He’s been slowly sawing off a branch these past years, but it’s the one the orthodox are sitting on, not the heretics.

I will loudly proclaim my error if things turn out differently, but I seriously doubt they will.

I join with Jeffersonian.

Reform speaks loudly, but cannot deliver on this.

YAWN!

But in the spirit of Kendall’s editorializing post above…

I took this from the website of Reform and added my italicized comments

“As a network we are wholeheartedly for:

  * the ministry and training for ministry of all believers [who are not gay]
  * the gospel of grace being available to everybody [who is not gay]
  * church growth [but without counting gays]”

Well, an evangelical Anglican vicar friend calls these persons “ultra-evangelicals,” and finds himself in a bit of a pickle there, because he thinks they’re way beyond where he is willing to go, and yet is unhappy with certain “liberalizing” (my word) tendences in the C of E. He thinks that the “Reform” and like-minded folks are serious about setting up an alternative province in the UK. It is possible that they could try to do a Duncan.

The important point here is that failure to discipline ECUSA in a serious way will have the effect of splitting the C of E—recall that +Scott-Joynt claimed that 60% of CoE bishops wouldn’t attend Lambeth if ECUSA were given a pass, and for the church to lose its evangelicals at this time would be rather like a paraplegic losing his last healthy limb.

Moreover, it’s pretty clear that finessing the situation would greatly exacerbate the strains between the (growing) Diocese of Sydney and the (moribund) rest of the Australian church, not to mention that the Communion itself would be dealt at the least a severe blow (and possibly a fatal one) by the Global South—perhaps two-thirds or more of the Communion’s ASA—distancing itself from the rest of the AC, if not separating entirely. 

I believe +++Rowan is playing his cards closer to his pectoral cross than it may appear.  For all his tact, British diplomacy, and current playing to the gay lobby, I don’t think he’ll actually let Canon Kearon lead him off the cliff.  But we’ll know before the end of the year; stay tuned for more exciting episodes, boys and girls!

A tiny proportion of the Reform leadership might try to go it alone - say 10-20 parishes. But if they intended to take their parish buildings with them, they would face the insuperable difficulty that those buildings belong in effect to the parish rather than the congregation, and are protected by the English courts. Reform would have to re-form in rented accommodation, and such organisations rarely last for long in England. They would certainly not be regarded as Anglicans: “Anglican” in England means the parish church, not a free church down the road.

Re. “Moreover, it’s pretty clear that finessing the situation would greatly exacerbate the strains between the (growing) Diocese of Sydney and the (moribund) rest of the Australian church”

I don’t know where this recurring fantasy concerning Sydney diocese comes from. In 2001 Sydney diocese launched a massive 10yr mission and evangelism plan to convert 10% of Sydney. By 2006 (half-way through the plan) Sydney diocese had LOST 10.5% of its members. Which is a greater loss than liberal Melbourne (9%).