Wednesday, May 06, 2009

WCG, CPF, CCP, ACNA & provincial boundaries

From the Report to the Anglican Consultive Council by the Windsor Continuation Group:

"WCG believes that the advent of schemes such as the Communion Partners Fellowship and the Episcopal Visitors scheme instituted by the Presiding Bishop in the United States should be sufficient to provide for the care of those alienated within the Episcopal Church from recent developments."

This is really wishful thinking. First, the CPF is a fellowship of bishops and priests. There are no CPF parishes, nor does it provide fellowship for laypersons.
This group likes to talk about incoherence on the part of those who have left pecusa to come under the oversight of non-pecusa Anglican bishops, but the CPF has little coherent structure at this point. As the former ABC George Carey said to this group at a recent conference, pecusa is currently working to rid herself of conservatives. What is the response of the CPF to this? Oh, it's God's will for us to be tied to this [heretical and apostate] church.

Meanwhile, the Common Cause Partnership is growing and it is moving toward provincial status, although pecusa is fighting this and will fight it to their last dying breath. Who knows when that last breath will be since pecusa continues to lose tens of thousands of members every year. pecusa was once over 3 and a half million members strong. The most honest (and optimistic) figure these days is 2.1 million members and shrinking fast.

Little old naive me thought for a while that border crossings would stop being an issue once North America had a sufficient number of CCP bishops. As it has been explained to me, no, when a bishop from the Convocation of Anglicans in North America makes a visitation to St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Vestal he has crossed into the Diocese of Central NY. Never mind that we have left the DCNY (including leaving all the buildings that we bought and paid for), the DCNY has an exclusive franchise on Vestal, NY.

Well, as John Wesley said, the world is my parish. Wesley, an Anglican priest who never left the Church of England was not deterred by diocesan or national boundaries. Neither were the apostles. The reconciliation that everyone hopes for in the Anglican Communion will come when pecusa returns to the biblical norms of the Anglican Communion. Until that time you can expect the Anglican Church in North America to be recognized by more and more primates and provinces and pecusa to continue to use ungodly means to seek to destroy this new work of God. Where will this leave the CPF? Well, at least this group of bishops and priests will have nice pensions.

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