Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has told the Church of England to keep its hands off the Episcopal Church and not foster schism by entertaining ideas of endorsing the Anglican Church in North America.
“Schism is not a Christian act,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said on July 12 in response to questions from a reporter representing The Living Church concerning the private member’s motion that began circulating Friday among members of the General Synod meeting in York.
The motion has received the necessary 100 signatures from members of Synod to be laid before the committee for inclusion on the agenda in an upcoming session of the biannual meeting of the Church of England’s governing body. It asks “that this Synod express the desire that the Church of England be in communion with the Anglican Church in North America.”
Six bishops supported the amendment, including Beverly, Blackburn, Burnley, Europe, Rochester and Winchester.
The Rt. Rev. N.T. Wright also told Synod that the ACNA constitution and canons had been tabled before the House of Bishops Theology Committee for review in its coming meetings.
Bishop Jefferts Schori stated she was unaware of the contemporaneous developments at General Synod. “I’m afraid I’ve been tied up with things here,” she noted.
However, she stated he hoped the “Archbishop of Canterbury and other visitors from around the Communion” who had been guests of General Convention would have had the opportunity to hear from the Deputies and Bishops and “go home and talk about the pain of departures in church.”
The secessions of the ACNA had been a cause of pain, she said, pain for “many Episcopalians in several places of being shut out of their traditional worship spaces, and the broken relationships, the damaged relationships between people who have gone and people who have stayed.”
Were the Church of England to recognize the ACNA, it would “unfortunately only encourage more of that kind of behavior,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said.
(The Rev.) George Conger reporting from General Convention in Anaheim.
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3 Comments
How stridently supercilious our PB's remarks!
Power seems to corrupt, as she bites and she barks.
While +++Rowan was present, she seemed so nice and kind,
But the second he leaves, she's kicking him from behind.
Would she do that to Christ, if He came to her table?
If He came as a beggar, would she feed Him, if able?
What would she offer? More power and division?
Continued hellbent on some fracturing fission?
Where's the joining together, from our "cultural delusions,"
Drawn now into God's "agapeistic fusions?!"
Surely it is KJS and crew who have forces schism upon the international Anglican church! Anglicans need some legitimate branch in North America and it looks like the ACNA is the only possibility.
Pastor Rob
www.churchoftheword.net
Speaking from the UK, for all his faults, +++ Rowen Cantur has done his best to keep TEC within the Anglican Communion by the skin of its teeth. Regretably the time has come for action to discipline TEC for its actions and lack of consideration for those within TEC and without.
This GC and the ex cathedra pronouncements of KJS reproted here and others has been the watershed. The Scismatic has been demonstrated to be KJS and TEC, who have yet to repent for their actions to date.
I predict:
that ACNA will be recognised as the anglican expression of the 'one holy catholic and apostolic church' in the USA and Canada.
KJS will be be removed from the primates standing committee and TEC cast out of the anglican communion in short order.