Despite threat of boycott, Anglican Communion Primates will meet in Dublin, Ireland (Jan 25-31)

from BabyBlueOnline by BabyBlue

No one is served by such a boycott and I hope at this late hour the primates will listen to Archbishop Josiah of Nigeria and reconsider. It's not too late. We watched the Sudanese people show up to vote, despite the risks - they showed up. They are inspiring.

If one is elected or appointed a leader, a major portion of the job is to show up - one way or the other (and there are many ways to show up, by the way). If we don't like what is happening in the room, then we say so. Yes, much of the earlier meetings have been ignored, undermined, or overturned. That is nature of the conflict - that is what happens on a battlefield, any battlefield. Soldiers do not boycott. They show up. God is going to show up after all - so why don't we?

From the Church of England Newspaper via email and here:

THE PRIMATES’ Meeting in Dublin will go ahead this month, despite a quarter of the leaders claiming to boycott it.

Ten primates say they will not attend. They are: the Primates of the Indian Ocean, Jerusalem and the Middle East, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South East Asia, the Southern Cone of Latin America, Tanzania, Uganda, and West Africa. But Jan Butter, director of communications for the Anglican Communion, said that the meeting would go ahead and that he still hopes all primates will attend. “We are still waiting for all the responses to come in. We certainly welcome all the primates, it’s their meeting,” he said.

However, he was more confident about their attendance than was Canon Kenneth Kearon who acknowledged that some primates were not coming. “We won’t know how many primates are coming until pretty close to the time because the primates make their own travel arrangements, but I think that less than 10 will decide not to come,” he told The Sunday Business Post.

Those primates planning not to attend say that it is over failed promises in the past. The Primates’ Council of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans said: “As we have made clear in numerous communiqués and meetings those who have abandoned the historic teaching of the Church have torn the fabric of our life together at its deepest level. “We have made repeated attempts to bring repentance and restoration and yet these efforts have been rejected. We grieve for those who have walked apart and earnestly pray for them and the people under their care."

Canon Chris Sugden, writing in an article to be published in next month’s Evangelicals Now, said that the boycott called into question the Archbishop of Canterbury’s leadership. “This refusal of his invitation calls into question the ability of the Archbishop of Canterbury to fulfil his role as gatherer of the Communion,” he writes. Archbishop of Kaduna, Nigeria, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, however, has published a plea that the primates do attend the Ireland meeting.

He argues that although Christians have suffered because of the Episcopal Church and its leadership the primates should still meet up to dialogue with those who have grieved them. Sugden writes: “The real problem is that all the decisions made at previous meetings, have been ignored, undermined or overturned.”

Read it all here.