5/29/2008

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superceded by membership in FACA.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.

8 comments:

  1. My goodness! The Increasingly Reverend Venables has moved from Bishop of Bolivia to Presiding Bishop to Archbishop and now appears to be the Grand Metropolitan and Patriarch of All The Americas!

    I wonder why the Only Pure And True Anglicans™ didn't invite www.angelfire.com/biz/Southern/index.html to join their club?

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  2. I'm sorry, Mark. The link is The Southern Episcopal Church

    Can you edit my last comment and add this link? That is, if it meets with blog owner approval.

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  3. 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..."

    O Dios mio, Good Padre, that one sent me over the edge into paroxysms of laughter, or in blogspeak, ROFLMAO!

    I was coming to your same conclusions about a half second before I read them.

    ::still giggling::

    What I find interesting, (and I hope I can get this out of my head and into understandable English) is that for all these folks to eventually come together as the New Improved World-wide Anglican Church, would require that they extend to one another an openness of agreeing to disagree and look the other way, on so many issues to which they do not agree, that I think it would require a much larger measure of compromise than would have ever been required to remain in the Anglican Communion as now constituted.

    (Father Mark, you might want to read over and rework your next-to-last paragraph. To my ESL it is very jumbled.)

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  4. Oh Padre Mickey, where did they come from? Nashville!!!! It makes me proud to be from Tennessee.

    "We continue the faith and practice of the Episcopal Church that was established in this country when the country was first founded."

    Oh, and I like the fact that they 'have valid sacraments.'

    Lord save us all!

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  5. Interesting. Some of these "new rejectionists" split because of the Prayer Book Revision--and I think one of them was over the revision of 1928! (OCICBW, my memory isn't perfect). I wonder if the good bishop of Pittsburgh has simply gathered together enough constituents simply to get himself a primacy, only to watch the whole thing come apart all over again.

    Jeffri

    P.S. David, your English is always much better than my Spanish, and the above came out just fine.

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  6. Have you noticed how often the word "godly" turns up in these press releases and statements by these dissidents? It tells us a lot about how they perceive themselves. And I suspect it also reflects that they think those who do not think like them are "ungodly."

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  7. To whomever/whatever it may concern,

    My name is Archbishop and Grand Duke Vermillion Heppelwhite, III...I have been chosen by God and many others to lead you out of your confundery...I am the 4th in immediate and intimate succession to his holliness Garver Heppelwhite, Jr who was one of our illustrious founders as well as one of the "Original Three" Grandest Apostles of the Reformerized Faith Once Delivered to the "knowers of goodly and dispickers of bad"...it is my great commission, as whispered to me in exclusive prayer, to start charging a commission on all that we do to serve and help you, and others, both in and outside of the Marvel Holy Diocese of Greater Biloxi-Walla Walla-Gilroy and beyond...I have been "called" many things by those who would claim their insistantance and right of tainted mission but, we, in the Royal sense, know you won't buy that kind of baloney and remain focused on fuzzy men sharing half truths.

    Not one of us are perfect as we trudge along keeping our white edges out of the crick.

    I come to you in the ultimate days/daze of Mayo to call upon you to send large and passionate offerings of support in order for us to take our rightful place as great commissioners in East Tagucigalpa, West Mayagüez and the Southernmost shore of Lake Titicaca and beyond (we're considering a mission outreach in Ajijic, Mexico, where I was, as a impressionable youth, once approached).

    As a future apostle, I took it as a sign of things to come.

    It is time to say no to the almost non-existance of missionless missionaries who act plunderlessly amongst plunderers from the fabricated Archdiocese of Northern Cali, Wisconsin, somewhere near Kinosha.

    Make your checks payable to The Very Reverend, Doctor, Vulnerable Stevie Maynard Botz, II, Rural Route, I, Tri-Melony and Harp Cathedral, Teako, Washington.

    Always remember that not all news is good news when you write out your check.

    Our council of wisdom has been approached by the Common Partners of Anglicanism...we will pass at the moment as our plate is full.

    Cast your eyes upward as you fear downward.

    +++ Verm

    VH/lrcb-santo

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  8. Quite interesting!
    For the last one hundred years or so the Reformed Episcopal Church has managed very well without a primatial patron(?), thank you very much! As a matter of fact, they have their own Presiding Bishop. Is their move to avail themselves of the ministrations of the Presiding Bishop (and NOT Archbishop!) of the Southern Cone a theological innovation? Hmmm...

    Thomas+

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