Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans: Is it real? (revised)

An invitation to join the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA) can be found on the GAFCON pages.

"We invite individuals, churches, dioceses, provinces and parachurch organisations who assent to the Jerusalem Declaration to signify their desire to become members of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. To express your initial interest, please send full details via email or write to the GAFCON Secretariat, PO Box Q190, QVB Post Office, NSW, Australia, 1230"

Please note: The Secretariat is in Australia, which makes good sense. The Secretary of GAFCON, Archbishop Bishop Peter Jenson, is there. The head of communications, The Rev. Dro Arne H. Fjeldstad, GAFCON is Head of Communications, and he seems to be at the Oxford Study Center in England. The site is located in Australia.

Thinking Anglicans pointed us to a new website run by Anglican Mainstream South Africa that claims to be the website for the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. You can find it HERE.  The site name is fcasa.wordpress.com. "fcasa" seems to stand for fellowship of confessing anglicans, south africa.

Their most recent post is the now apparently incorrect article by Ruth Gledhill on action being taken against Bishop Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone. It was posted by a certain frgavin who it appears is a priest in South Africa. The Anglican Mainstream SA site says this about FCASA:

"There is a growing group of Anglicans in Southern Africa who wish to be associated with the GAFCON movement." It then invites the reader to go to the fcasa page.

Apparently this site is not an "official" site of the GAFCON Secretariat. It has reproduced the GAFCON logo (poorly I might add) with an overlay of Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans language.

What is most interesting about all this is that GAFCON pages give no indication as to how many people are interested in FOCA. In the several months since GAFCON there has been only silence concerning the size and shape of FOCA, this from a group that is always ready to tell us when there are thousands and millions of committed GAFCON people.

What we have here is a minor version of the MAN BEHIND THE CURTAN, one practiced by GAFCON leadership in general. The MBC idea is that if you just say it is real, and do so with enought bombast, it is. It doesn't work. See the following:

It seems that the GAFCON leadership is talking louder than they have any business doing. The GAFCON primates group has not grown beyond its initial size. The FOCA whateveritis has not gotten going and this effort by some people related to Anglican Mainstream SA seems an unofficial effort by friends of GAFCON.

When GAFCON Primates come to the Primates Meeting in February they will of course present what they will for discussion. When they trot out the numbers, who can they count on?

Following my posting of this, Graham Kings noted that "According to the new Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) web site set up by Anglican Mainstream South Africa,http://fcasa.wordpress.com/ the membership of FCA is being managed by Anglican Mainstream South Africa. The domain address is FCASA and it has copied the above Reform report in full. The links between the Diocese of Sydney and the Church of England in South Africa (CESA), which is not part of the Anglican Communion, are significant, as are the links between CESA and the irregular ordinations in the Diocese of Southwark."

All I can say is the hole into which GAFCON and FCA / SA et all are digging is getting deeper and deeper.  Pluralist Speaks has something more to say on GAFCON and the current blither going on in England about the Jersualem Declaration, GAFCON, FOCA, etc.  Pop over and read what the Pluralist has to say HERE. I have to say I can't make much sense of the whole thing except to say that people on the radical right are making strange bedfellows and there is probably something biblically wrong about that.