Canadian archbishop responds to defections: CEN 3.07.08 p 5. March 7, 2008
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Canada, Church of England Newspaper.trackback
The Primate of Canada has written a pastoral letter to the Church urging calm in the wake of over a dozen parish defections to the Province of the Southern Cone.
On Feb 28, Archbishop Fred Hiltz called the departures a “fracture in the body of Christ.”
While there had been a “huge amount of attention is given to those who are considering leaving the Anglican Church of Canada, there are a host of other people who continue to struggle over issues of sexuality and unity. They do that from both very conservative perspectives and very liberal perspectives, but it is so clear that they intend to remain loyal members of the Anglican Church of Canada.”
The capacity for a “breadth of theological perspective” was part of the Anglican “heritage that we continue to cherish, Archbishop Hiltz said.
However, defections were been driven by a desire to remain Anglican, the executive director of the Anglican Network in Canada tells The Church of England Newspaper.
“If we did not offer them an option by the end of the year,” Cheryl Chang told the CEN, many said the “would leave Anglicanism altogether.”
The timing of the parish secessions was dictated by the Canadian church’s practice of holding its annual meetings in February. The “congregations are taking this step now” of secession “because when the offer of Adequate Episcopal Oversight became available at the end of November” from the South American church “the parishes were asked to go through a period of discernment with their congregations to discuss the implications of the offer before taking such a vote.”
ANiC asked “all the parishes vote in this window of time so that we could stand together, to build the church and defend our ministry at the same time,” she explained.
“We had been contacted by many faithful Canadian Anglicans who were in distress after the General Synod in June, where they voted that same sex blessings were “not in conflict with” the core doctrine of the church,” Mrs. Chang said.
Traditionalists have “watched the Niagara, Ottawa and Montreal dioceses proceed to follow the diocese of New Westminster, with the support of the Primate and the [church] hierarchy” alter the Church’s traditional doctrine and disciple. The Southern Cone had offered traditionalists a “safe haven for these faithful people in order to help them remain fully Anglican and continue their orthodox Anglican witness.”
Protestations by Archbishop Fred Hiltz that the ‘Shared Episcopal Ministry’ scheme crafted by the Canadian House of Bishops would provide adequate protections for traditionalists were not persuasive Mrs. Chang said.
The Shared Episcopal Ministry programme envisioned the Church as a static entity that would only decline. It “does not allow for church planting,” allow congregations to hire new priests, and keeps the existing churches under the thumb of a “hostile bishop.”
“It forces congregations to financially support and have partnership with a church that is teaching a different gospel and that is in a broken relationship with the global Anglican Communion,” Mrs. Chang said.
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