The Same old Petition Still Hangs On....

The meeting of the American Mission in America taking place in Florida, with its gathering of Primates, has my attention for the moment. It is billed as a forward looking gathering of what is now a full blown church under the Provincial oversight of the Archbishop of Rwanda. They are set on getting on with mission, and insofar as that is the agenda of the meeting well and good.

But of course AMiA is also connected by way of the Common Cause Partners to the Anglican Communion Network. And the Partners are about fulfilling a vision articulated in a petition immediately following Lambeth 1998. The attending folk at this gathering in Florida may be about the business of local startups, new mission, etc, but the big boys in the back room are, I am sure, planning for the next round of struggle for the seat reserved for the church acknowledged as the constituent member of the Anglican Communion from the United States.

Before AMiA came into being, but following Lambeth 1998, a group called “The Association of Anglican Congregations on Mission” submitted a petition to the Primates Meeting following Lambeth. It gives form to what becomes the guiding vision for AMiA, for the American Anglican Council and for the Anglican Communion Network. One of the ‘threads’ playing through all this is the Moderator of the Network. It was an odd piece: it assumed the Primates could act with authority in the life of a particular Province; it was written as a quasi-legal brief; it was an extended legalistic rant. It based its claims on the sexuality resolutions of Lambeth 1998, but it was more about earlier problems - bishops with bad theology (Spong); bishops who were women (Harris); revisionism on the march.

Here is what the petition asked for: (I have highlighted several sections.)

The Association of Anglican Congregations on Mission ("Petitioner") hereby respectfully petitions that the Primates' Meeting of the Anglican Communion, and its members in their individual capacities as Archbishops and/or Primates of the Church, take action to resolve a case of exceptional emergency in The Episcopal Church of the United States of America ("ECUSA").

As will be more fully set forth below, the exceptional emergency consists of members of ECUSA being led astray from the true Gospel, and deterred from bringing people to Christ, by unorthodox ("revisionist") bishops and other leaders of ECUSA who have rejected the sovereign authority of Scripture. The revisionists have supplanted Scripture with human experience to fashion a new religion and code of moral standards that are irreconcilably contrary to historic, orthodox Anglican faith and practice. They are imposing their new religion and morals throughout ECUSA, all in violation of Resolutions I.10, II.8, III.1, III.5 and III.6 adopted by the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops.

The emergency cannot be resolved within ECUSA itself. The revisionists control ECUSA's national governing bodies and most of its major dioceses. They cannot be persuaded to change their teachings or be dislodged from their positions of power by the orthodox minority within ECUSA. The emergency can be resolved only by the Primates' Meeting, or its individual members, causing the reformation of ECUSA or the replacement of it with a continuing Episcopal Church as the province of the Anglican Communion in the United States.

Petitioner prays that the Primates' Meeting take the actions asked of it by the 1998 Lambeth Resolution III.6, as well as any other actions necessary or appropriate to commence the reformation of ECUSA by, inter alia, causing: (1) ECUSA's revisionist bishops and other leaders to immediately cease violating 1998 Lambeth Resolutions I.10, II.8, III.1, III.5 and III.6; and (2) ECUSA's national legislative body, General Convention, at the meeting thereof to be held in July, 2000, to adopt such resolutions and canons and take such other action as will bring ECUSA into compliance with those Lambeth Resolutions.

Petitioner also prays that if ECUSA, its General Convention, and its bishops and other leaders do not heed the actions of the Primates' Meeting, but continue to violate Resolutions I.10, II.8, III.1, III.5 and III.6, the Primates' Meeting assist in the formation of a continuing Episcopal Church that submits to the sovereign authority of Scripture and is loyal to our Anglican tradition and formularies, and recognize it to replace ECUSA as the province of the Anglican Communion in the United States. Petitioner further prays that, if the Primates' Meeting fails to cause ECUSA to be so reformed or replaced, the individual Primates exercise their individual powers to that end.

The document (which is quite long) is signed off by the then Very Rev. John H. Rodgers, Jr., Th.D., General Secretary of AACOM and Member of ECUSA and the Anglican Communion, December, 1998. Dean Rogers is now Bishop Rogers of AMiA. He is of course no longer a member of the Episcopal Church.

The essentials of this strange and tortuous petition are still with us. Inaction by people who should have known better has meant that AMiA, unrecognized by the Archbishop of Canterbury, has snuck in via its being a subset of the Province of Rwanda. The proposition that the Episcopal Church can be replaced by some other entity either directly or indirectly by way of a Province willing to include them has, until recently, gone unchallenged and Rwanda has never been rebuked by the Primates or the ACC for having taken AMiA under its wing.

This is why I am very concerned about these eight current and two retired Archbishops getting together in Florida, with Bishop Duncan, Moderator of the ACN and Bishop Frank Lyons, bishop of Bolivia - but in fact bishop of a much larger group of parishes in the US than he has in Bolivia. I don’t believe for a moment that they have not found time to strategize and recall the heady days of their petition to the Primates in 1998.

The fat is in the fire for sure, and the rot is in the tree.