Archbishop expels Americans from ecumenical groups: The Church of England Newspaper, June 11, 2010 p 3.

The Rev Canon Kenneth Kearon

First published in The Church of England Newspaper.

Five American Episcopalians have been expelled from the Anglican Communion’s ecumenical dialogue commissions, and its representative to the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (UFO) has been demoted from member to consultant, the Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council has announced.

The expulsions come in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s May 28 Pentecost letter to the Anglican Communion, which said that some “public marks of distance,” of discipline of those who defy the wider Church, “are unavoidable if our Communion bodies are not to be stripped of credibility and effectiveness.”

Dr Rowan Williams singled out the consecration of a ‘gay’ suffragan bishop in Los Angeles, and the promulgation of public same-sex blessings rites in the US and Canada, as well as the cross-border interventions in response to these innovations made by some Global South provinces for possible sanctions, including removal from the communion’s ecumenical dialogue teams and a reduced states on the UFO.

On June 7, the Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon announced that he had written to the American participants on the Anglican ecumenical dialogues on behalf of  Dr Williams “informing them that their membership of these [ecumenical] dialogues has been discontinued.”

The Rev. Dr. Thomas Ferguson, the Episcopal Church’s interim deputy for ecumenical and interreligious relations and the Assistant Bishop of North Carolina, the Rt. Rev. William Gregg, were removed from the Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue; the Bishop of Montana, the Rt. Rev. C. Franklin Brookhart was removed from the Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission; the Very Rev. William Petersen, professor of ecclesiastical and history at Bexley Hall seminary in Columbus, Ohio was removed from the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission; and the Rev. Carola von Wrangel, rector of Christ-the-King in Frankfurt, Germany, was removed from the Anglican-Old Catholic International Co-ordinating Council (AOCICC)

Canon Kearon stated that he had also written to the Rev. Dr. Katherine Grieb, professor of New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary, “withdrawing that person’s membership and inviting her to serve as a Consultant to that body.”

He further stated that he had written to Archbishop Fred Hiltz of Canada asking “whether its General Synod or House of Bishops has formally adopted policies that breach the second moratorium in the Windsor Report, authorising public rites of same-sex blessing.”  While a number of dioceses have authorized gay blessings, the Canadian church as a whole, has not.

In a surprise move, Canon Kearon said he had written only to the Primate of the Southern Cone, Presiding Bishop Gregory Venables of Argentina, “asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces.”

The Southern Cone had accepted temporary provincial oversight of the Dioceses of Recife in Brazil and the breakaway American dioceses of Quincy, San Joaquin, Fort Worth and Pittsburgh.  The American dioceses have since moved into the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) but retain varying degrees of membership in the Southern Cone, while Recife remains under the oversight of Bishop Venables.  The Bishop of Chile, the Rt. Rev. Tito Zavala is a member of the UFO.

Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda have members on the communion’s ecumenical dialogue commissions and the UFO and have also sponsored breakaway groups in the US.  However, Canon Kearon’s letter appears to indicate that he has accepted their statements that they have turned over their American missions to the oversight of the ACNA and are not currently crossing provincial lines to support breakaway groups.

The Province of Rwanda has retained ecclesiastical oversight of its American churches, the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA), but as it has no members on the UFO commission or on the dialogue groups, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s warnings of consequences for violating the moratoria on gay bishop and blessings, and cross border violations will have no affect on that church.