GAFCON Primates Prepare Case for New Province

From The Living Church:

Posted on: January 16, 2009

The Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (Anglican), is involved in “an unanticipated series of consultations with the primates who originated the call” for a new Anglican province in North America, participants in an Anglican theology conference have been told.

Bishop Duncan had been scheduled to address “North American Anglicanism After GAFCON and Lambeth” at the Mere Anglicanism conference in Charleston, S.C. Instead, the Very Rev. William McKeachie, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke and St. Paul which is the conference location, read a letter from Bishop Duncan. He said that following consultations about the proposed new province between Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and members of the GAFCON primates’ steering committee in London last month, Archbishop Williams had asked that a paper be prepared setting out the situation and the hopes for a new structure. The Archbishop invited the primates to forward the case to the Anglican Consultative Council along with their comments.

Bishop Duncan said the GAFCON primates will present the paper and make the case for an alternate province during the primates’ meeting in Alexandria, Egypt, next month. He asked conference participants to “pray for our relationships with our Communion Partner friends…that our support for one another may outweigh the anxieties caused by our parallel approaches to the current crisis.”

The Mere Anglicanism conference has been held each January since 1997, sponsored by members of the Diocese of South Carolina. This year’s theme is “The Way, the Truth and the Life: Engaging Secularism and Islam with the Light of Incarnational, Trinitarian Christianity.” Attendance at this year’s event is the largest ever, according to conference organizers.

Steve Waring