By Andrew Brown, The Guardian.
The archbishop of Canterbury is proposing to effectively dissolve the fractious and bitterly divided worldwide Anglican communion and replace it with a much looser grouping.
Justin Welby has summoned all of the 38 leaders of the national churches of the Anglican communion to a meeting in Canterbury next January, where he will propose that the communion be reorganized as a group of churches that are all linked to Canterbury but no longer necessarily to each other.
He believes that the communion – notionally the third largest Christian body in the world with 80 million members, after the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox – has become impossible to hold together due to arguments over power and sexuality and has for the last 20 years been completely dysfunctional.
A Lambeth Palace source said on Wednesday the archbishop felt he could not leave his eventual successor in the same position of “spending vast amounts of time trying to keep people in the boat and never actually rowing it anywhere”.
Welby believes that his proposal would allow him to maintain relations both with the liberal churches of North America, which recognize and encourage gay marriage, and the African churches, led by Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, who are agitating for the recriminalization of all homosexual activity in their countries.
Both will be able to call themselves “Anglican” but there will no longer be any pretense that this involves a common discipline or doctrine.
Asked whether this represented, if not a divorce, a legal separation, a Lambeth source said: “It’s more like sleeping in separate bedrooms.”
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“Instead, (Welby believes that) they may be able to cooperate on matters such as climate change and inter-religious violence, which are desperately important to many of the poorer churches. As well as the obvious religious tensions in the Middle East, 200 churches in south India were burned to the ground by Hindu extremists last year.”
Archbishop Welby’s priorities are misplaced. That there are spiritually dead men and women around them (and, indeed, in their midst) and that the Episcopal Church (among other so-called mainline Christian denominations) is doing nothing about it should be his top priority. Men and women will be judged for their sins and suffer eternal punishment for them, for want of true saving knowledge of the only Savior, Jesus Christ. This should be the first priority of every Christian, not these secondary issues that Welby identified as issues on which “conservatives” and “liberals” might “be able to cooperate”, howsoever pressing they might seem.