From The Living Church via TitusOneNine:
Posted on: June 17, 2010
The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council began its spring meeting on June 16 by focusing on the church as a missionary society fostering both national and international partnerships, even amid inter-Anglican tensions.
“We don’t have [missionary societies]; we are one,” Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in her opening address, echoing comments she made to the United Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Swanwick, England, on June 9. She stressed the importance of the church’s work with Native Americans in the Navajoland Area Mission, with the “Haitian diaspora” of the Diocese of Haiti, and with Latinos.
Linda Watt, chief operating officer of the Episcopal Church, described a forthcoming church communications strategy designed to help identify what draws people — particularly mothers with young children, Latinos, and young adults — to the Episcopal Church. Ministry to Asian Americans, a November 2010 New Dawn conference designed to help Latinos “feel part of the mainstream of the Episcopal Church,” and a December 2010 leadership initiative for Sudanese members of the church are also crucial endeavors, she said.
House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson welcomed the Rev. Michael Pollesel, archdeacon in the Diocese of Ontario and General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada, to the council. Bishop Jefferts Schori delivered a plenary address to General Synod on June 8, asking that the two North American provinces deepen their partnership.
Council members’ connections with the emerging church movement were also in evidence. Sarah Dylan Breuer of Massachusetts reported to the world mission committee about attending the Amahoro Africa emerging church conference in Mombasa, Kenya, in May.
“We need Africans’ spiritual gifts to be the whole people of God and know the whole gospel,” she told The Living Church. “God is bringing the world to wholeness. God is calling the world to repentance. God is calling us to community.”
Executive Council is holding its three-day meeting at the Maritime Institute in Linthicum Heights, Md., at a time of tension for the Episcopal Church in relation to its larger place within the Anglican Communion. The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, is scheduled to engage in a question-and-answer session with the council on June 18.
Bishop Jefferts Schori said in her opening remarks that her June 13 homily at Southwark Cathedral in London, England, had been controversial. Later, in closed session, she revealed that Lambeth Palace had ordered her not to wear her mitre (because the Church of England is still debating the consecration of women bishops) and had required her to provide evidence of her ordination as deacon, priest, and bishop. Providing this evidence is a standard requirement for overseas clergy who apply to officiate in the United Kingdom.
Recent tensions have affected the way that the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations plans to address ecumenical relationships. At an afternoon meeting of the world mission committee, Breuer reported that the commission wants to maintain ecumenical conversations with other church bodies, “even if the Anglican Communion Office does not.”
The standing commission has proposed that approximately $15,000 should be taken from the Episcopal Church’s Anglican Communion Office funding to strengthen the Episcopal Church’s ecumenical relationships. Breuer said the intention would still be to work through the Anglican Communion Office “insofar as possible,” but that “We will not say [in our ecumenical conversations], ‘We have no need of you’ because the Anglican Communion Office says to us ‘We have no need of you.’”
The proposal to redirect funds met with some skepticism. “I think we’ll produce massive confusion if we say, ‘If we can’t do our international conversations one way, we’ll take the money from the Anglican Communion Office and do them another way,’” said the Rev. Canon Mark Harris of Delaware.
The committee did not take immediate action on the proposal.
Breuer also reported that the standing commission wants to begin dialogue with the United Church of Christ and that relationships with Reformed churches should be approached “in multilateral ways rather than bilateral ones.” She encouraged the world mission committee to use the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral as a basis for fostering relationships with other Anglican groups “as much as possible” and to ask Executive Council for funding to that end.
Scott Evenbeck of Indiana told The Living Church that the council’s first day involved “people trying to deal with tough issues in a really careful way.”
Canon Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine of the Virgin Islands, chair of the world mission committee, said the most important point of the day for her was discovering how “we’re continuing to do mission in spite of everything.”
Ralph Webb, in Linthicum Heights
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