A Response to the Upcoming Texas Meeting
For Immediate Release
August 12, 2006
The planned September meeting in Texas of a group calling themselves "Windsor Bishops" is to be deplored. It is divisive and harmful for our church. This group has announced that one of the bases for their meeting will be affirming that Lambeth 1:10 is the "official" teaching of the Anglican church. (The resolution proscribed sexual relations among homosexuals and opposed same-sex liturgies.) This resolution cannot be made official by the Bishop of Texas or the Archbishop of Canterbury or by anybody else, since the Lambeth Conferences have no legal standing within the Anglican Communion. The group will also be asked to affirm the Windsor Report as the way forward for our church. Our church is by no means agreed that the Windsor Report can or should have any such quasi-legal standing. Moreover, the report itself was conceived in hostility toward the Episcopal Church. The group will be asked to declare that the response given at General Convention was inadequate to the demands of the Windsor Report. Let us be clear: this group does not like what happened at General Convention and now seeks to undermine it. This is an end run.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, has apparently blessed this meeting and accordingly will send two English episcopal emissaries as a means of expressing his support. We are now faced with the astonishing action of an English Bishop (Canterbury has no legal standing in this country or this church) trying to sabotage the Episcopal Church. The Archbishop is certainly entitled to his beliefs, and he may not like what our General Convention did; but this does not give him the right to meddle in our internal affairs with an eye to undermining or overthrowing our process.. We had thought the Archbishop was a neutral arbiter. This outrageous act now shows him to be aligned with those who seek to harm this church. We very much encourage the Archbishop prayerfully to consider what he is doing.
Contact: the Rev. William R. Coats
Remaining Faithful: The Episcopal Majority
Wrcoats@optonline.net
posted by Lisa Fox at 8/13/2006 12:41:00 PM
4 Comments:
It's time we responded to the outrageous actions of the conservatives. "Windsor Bishops" is a figment of their imagination and it's time we don't let them control the conservation with their mythology. Thanks to you for your efforts on behalf of the rest of us.
The outrageous actions happened in 2003. The Episcopal Majority spoke then and again at General Convention this summer. Windsor Bishops is a response to unfaithful ecusa.
"Unfaithful" to what? It seems to me the Episcopal Church, faced with the choice of being faithful to the call of the Holy Spirit leading us to more fully include all the baptized into the Body of Christ, "chose the better portion" when she chose to follow Jesus rather than Bob Duncan, David Anderson, et al.
As repugnant as it is to have to fall back on the rules, plain faithfulness to the Consititutions and Canons of the Church is a common low denominator that should define the actions of anyone on any side of controversial matters. The ABC and the malcontent revisionists, however, like Duncan, Stanton, Iker, and Wimberly, are ignoring the Constitutionality of the actions with which they disagree. Further, they are all seeking to violate their own much-revered Windsor Report in their attempts to set up some sort of tran-atlantic jurisdiction for the ABC and an ideological province with no geographic boreders. Perhaps we need another War of Independence?
Post a Comment
<< Home