Competing Anglican Fellowships

Peter Carrell writes at Anglican Down Under:

Arguably, when I pronounced, possibly prematurely, the death of the Anglican Communion a few posts ago, I should have talked instead about this being the worst period in the history of the Anglican Communion. We do not quite have Three Popes but we do have Three Anglican Fellowships, each (effectively) competing for the role of “pope” as in a unifying force for global Anglicanism:

• the Anglican Communion itself (but we cannot get all 38 churches to meet together in the same place at the same time for the one eucharistic service);
• GAFCON (roughly, the most conservative Anglicans of the Communion, as well as ACNA); and
• Global South (roughly, Anglicans from across Communion provinces in Africa, Asia, and two Oceania provinces, with warm welcome to observers from Australasia and North America, including ACNA, and recently offering oversight to the no-longer-with-TEC Diocese of South Carolina).

What might happen when we come out of this worst period?

Read the rest.

Image: Bishops and others at the Lambeth Conference, 2008.