Bishops are meeting, wreckage follows.

The days leading up to the meeting of the Primates in Dar Es Salaam, February 12-19, will be interesting. There are various meetings of bishops going on, several occasion of Anglican Primates visiting these shores, without any indication that they will visit the Presiding Bishop, and of course the events in and around the Primates Meeting in Dar Es Salaam itself.

The second Camp Allen meeting, spoken of as being of “the so-called “Windsor Bishops” in the Episcopal Church” by Bishop Jack Iker in his newsletter to the Diocese, is about over. Considerable energy has gone in to knowing just who was at the meeting and Stand Firm, in spite of its somewhat snotty remark accompanying the collecting of names, has done us a service in getting the names for us.

Stand Firm may be please to know that my bishop, Bishop Wright, was with a small clergy bible study group talking about his recent visit to Dover Air Force Base chaplains, those who daily receive the bodies of those who have died in Iraq. Bishop Wright was tending to the business of the church’s life, his clergy, and the community rather than the caustically witty things Stand Firm thinks “reappraiser” bishops do.

The Living Church reported, that “According to an online report, Bishop Wimberly characterized the meeting as including “a growing number of bishops from across the United States” when he wrote to diocesan clergy about the meeting last month.” Bishop Wimberly as over optimistic. There were twenty one Americans in attendance, including the bishop elect of South Carolina, Fr. Lawrence.

As to who specifically attended, see the Stand Firm list. Four new persons are attending, and five who were at the first are not attending the second.

Interestingly, Bishop Mark McDonald of Alaska, a late arrival at the first meeting is not in attendance, and just today the Living Church announced that he will become the “Anglican Church of Canada’s first National Indigenous Bishop with oversight over Canada’s first nation people.” He will continue to have oversight of Navaholand, which leads to an interesting question: to whose house of bishops will he belong? Bishop McDonald is a fine bishop and I wish him the best in his new work.

Archbishop Drexel Gomez, Primate of the Church of the West Indies, and Archbishop Donald Mtetemela, Primate of the Church of Tanzania, were present, as were the Bishop of Winchester, Michael Scott-Joynt and Bishop Tony Burton of Canada.

It appears then that the so called “Windsor Bishops” do not seem to be growing in number.

Fr. Jake has his usual excellent commentary on the meeting, and The Episcopal Majority has published a paper by The Rev. James Stockton, “A Texas Priest Responds” that is very helpful.

One of the interesting questions to be raised is this: Has the size of the realignment gang peaked?

The so called Windsor Bishops group is not getting larger; the Anglican Communion Network is not talking as much about its growth; the congregations that are now leaving are beginning to coalesce into groups that look like ‘continuing’ churches. The effort to realign the American church may become a fractured movement in which the end result is simply more continuing churches here in the US.

The Moderator of the Network was clearly concerned about this when he stated at Nashotah House, “The competitive denominationalism that characterized the Christian Church for most of the last five centuries could as easily come to characterize intra-Anglican relationships, particularly in North America. But North American rivalries and conflicts are soon enough transported to the rest of the Anglican world. The Anglican Communion Network has striven to avoid this outcome, but whether its labors will finally succeed is still to be played out… Whether we shall permanently live in Anglican silos labeled AMiA or Kenya or Anglican Province in America or Windsor or fill-in-the-blank remains to be seen. Will we choose the common good when push comes to shove? The future of Anglicanism will depend on our answer, both individually and corporately. Forty years of domestic Balkanization among conservative Anglicans point to the tremendous change of heart that must overtake us.”

For the moment Balkanization seems to be winning the day. One example concerns the congregations in the Diocese of Olympia that have come under the direction of the Anglican Diocese of Recife. (Remember that the Anglican Diocese of Recife is an external diocese in the Province of the Southern Cone, not the Diocese of Recife, part of the Episcopal Church of Brazil. According to Virtueonline,

“Recently Bishop Cavalcanti made Clark the archdeacon of the North American Recife churches of which there are presently five congregations. St Charles has four priests for the nearly 200 member congregation, plus two deacons - one a transfer from TEC and one from a continuing tradition church.”

The Anglican Diocese of Recife is an anomaly; it is an overlay on an existing diocese, supported by another Province. It is the worse possible solution to conflicting interests in a particular jurisdiction. Now this anomaly has an archdeacon in the diocese of Olympia who is, as yet, a priest of the Episcopal Church and who is charged with oversight for a group of congregations that have left the Episcopal Church. The only way this mess can hold together is by maintaining the position that these parishes are included in another diocese. They become yet another continuing church body. Balkanization comes about as a survival technique from which churches withdraw at considerable peril.

Another part of the Balkanized world of Anglican (but not in Communion with Canterbury) churches is the Anglican Mission in America. AMiA is having its conclave January 17-20 in Jacksonville, Florida, and at that conference as many as eight primates have been predicted to attend. On the 19^th, there is “time with the Archbishops” on the schedule. It will be of some interest to know just who attends and what further conversations they may have. Remember that AMiA is part of the wider Common Cause Partnership of the Anglican Network.

It appears that the Primate’s Meeting in February is going to be an occasion that will test many possibilities. There is a great deal at risk and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and not a few clenched smiles. Here are some of the elements in this strange mix:

• The Archbishop of Canterbury has invited the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as he ought to have.
• The Archbishop of Uganda says that some Primates (himself so declaring) will not sit at the table with her.
• The Archbishop of Tanzania, who was just at the so called Windsor Bishop’s meeting, has explicitly disallowed any relationship with a bishop who has supported, voted of, condoned, or otherwise encouraged the ministry of gay or lesbian persons. That of course includes our Presiding Bishop. Tanzania is the host of the Primate’s Meeting.
• The Archbishop of Canterbury is proposing to “invite two or three other contributors from that Province for a session to take place before the rest of our formal business” http://blog.edow.org/weblog/2006/12/blue_christmas.html#more Just who these will be is of some interest. In all likelihood this will include Bishop Duncan of the Network, but who else? Will there again be no one from the progressive community present? For some reason the Archbishop or his advisors seem to think that the elected leadership of the Episcopal Church IS representative of our progressive community. It is not necessarily so. More importantly, this meeting of the primates will be all about bishops and bishops plus. Very few of them are competent, by reason of non engagement with gay and lesbian persons, to speak to many of the issues at stake. But God forbid that Archbishop Akinola might have to flee the room because a gay person were invited as a “contributor” to meet with the Primates.
• Bishop Schofield is awaiting the directions of the Primates Meeting, as per his agreement with the Global South Bishops in Washington in December not to act further on diocesan level disengagement from the Episcopal Church until after the Primates Meeting.
• The Global South Primates have put on hold their full support of Lambeth until they hear who will be invited, who not, and what the agenda will include.
• And today, the Living Church has revealed that the Primates Meeting will receive a report from the Covenant Design Group, a group headed by Archbishop Gomez, lately attending the Windsor Bishops meeting. Here he is again. The Living Church “has learned that in addition to the Design Group’s chairman, Archbishop Drexel Gomez of the West Indies, a second primate, Archbishop John Chew of Southeast Asia, will be part of the team comprised of scholars, bishops and church leaders drawn from the United States, Africa, Britain and Singapore.” So the Design Team has two bishops who are part of the Global South Steering Committee, bishops who have met with the realignment folk in Washington in November.

This lastest news further stacks the deck: Archbishops Gomez and Chew will no doubt overlap with the AMiA primates, and have (in Gomez) with the Windsor Bishops, and will in other configurations with the Network. How does the Archbishop of Canterbury propose that any good can come from such knitting together of various conservative factions all at once? More, how can there be any voice for progressives heard in this context?

The Primates Meeting promises to be a disaster. I hope I am proved wrong. Nothing would be more delightful than to say that all went well. But it looks like a time for crash test dummies, high stakes gambling and wreckage.

Lent will be a welcome relief.