Common Cause Partnership: Grasping at Straws.

According to a recent announcement by the Common Cause Partnership (http://www.united-anglicans.org/stream/2008/05/faca.html) a new group joining the CCP: The Federation of Anglican Churches in the Americas. The group consists of the following Anglican-like church structures: the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Anglican Province of America, the Diocese of the Holy Cross, the Episcopal Missionary Church, and the Reformed Episcopal Church.

Several are already members of the CCP, the new members are the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Province of America, the Diocese of the Holy Cross, the Episcopal Missionary Church. These new churches, not already part of the CCP, have entered into CCP with some reservations. Their web pages state,

" The autonomy of the individual Provinces, or Jurisdictions and their local parishes is in no way restricted or superceded by membership in FACA.

The Federation will seek to maintain the Patronage of orthodox Primates in the Anglican Communion. Such patronage is for advisory purposes in expanding fellowship with those in the Anglican Communion and working in concert with the godly projects and programs of the Archbishops primarily in the Global South.

Some of the member jurisdictions of the Federation are also members of the Common Cause Partners in North America. All deliberations and actions of the Federation will be executed with sensitivity to the godly goals and purposes of the Common Cause Partners to proclaim the Gospel and effect unity among faithful Anglicans in North America."

Supposedly some of those reservations are overcome by formally joining CCP. The CCP announcement of this new arrangement says this: "(FACA), at its semi-annual meeting in Summerville, S.C., voted to accept the Articles of the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) and also the Theological Statement of the Common Cause Partners. At its previous meeting in October 2007, FACA voted to become full partners of the Common Cause Partnership."

With this new group come 232 congregations, says CCP.

Also of interest is the fact that "The Most Rev. Gregory Venables, Archbishop of the Southern Cone, Anglican Communion, is the primatial patron of FACA."

So Bishop Venables, in addition to his oversight of various groups of people, congregations and bishops in the US and Canada, can now claim 232 new congregations part of the wider Southern Cone.

The Province of the Southern Cone now looks very much like all of the Western Hemisphere.

But the Common Cause Partnership looks more and more like a gathering of Anglican like bodies all suffering from an excessive amount of non-Anglican Communion characteristics. They are almost all made up of people who left Anglican Communion related Provinces or who never were part of such Provinces. Their episcopal leadership may share in Apostolic succession but they seldom share in being part of a synodical and historical episcopate related to a wider catholic fellowship. They are very marginal. More to the point, they are marginal to the life of the Anglican Communion. None of them are recognized elements, dioceses, provinces, or churches in the Anglican Communion.

The gamble, of course is that all these marginal groups will come together and no longer be marginal, but the core of a new and improved Anglican world wide Church.

Good luck. They will be most fortunate if they can get through any liturgical revision with out falling over into paroxysm of angst. As for the esteemed Primate, Bishop Venables, we can hope that the day is near at hand when he will be called to account for his blatant and wide disregard for Anglican polity.

He has already exercised this option once. It is too much to hope that the current Archbishop of Canterbury will do anything. Lambeth, which is not meant to be legislative can't do anything. The Primates seem unwilling to be accountable to one another. Perhaps the Anglican Consultative Council when it meets next will ask the representatives of the Southern Cone to withdraw from the meeting. The ACCACC might censure Bishop Venables, but perhaps that will not matter.

By then there may be a second Anglican Communion, filled with lemmings all chattering together as they go off the cliff into the ocean, "faith once delivered, faith once delivered, faith once delivered..." The rest of us will be about the business of being a fellowship of churches sharing mission and mutual regard.