8 Responses to Concordat Videos

1. Timothy Graham says:

   Tuesday, 10 October, 2017 at 10:51 pm

   I’m interested to know what kind of proportion of continuing Anglicans the four groups represent, and who is still outside the concordat.

   Reply
   • William Tighe says:

     Wednesday, 11 October, 2017 at 4:41 am

     If we are speaking of “Continuing Anglicans,” properly speaking, groups that emerged in the wake of, and in reaction to, the ordination of women in “Canterbury Communion” Anglican churches, and not bodies such as the (earlier emerging, as a reaction in the 1870s by Evangelicals to the growing influence of Anglo-Catholicism) Reformed Episcopal Church or the (later emerging, in reaction to sexuality issues) Anglican Church in North America, then the four jurisdictions that signed the Concordat are among the most significant. While there may be as many as 40+ “Continuing Anglican” churches of one sort or another in the United States alone, the only significant CA bodies that were not involved in the synod are (1) the Anglican Province of Christ the King (which has long pursued a semi-isolationist policy, and is currently [recovering?] from a major scandal which resulted in the removal of its archbishop a year or two ago), (2) the United Episcopal Church (which may be described as “Old High-Church Protestant” and not Anglo-Catholic), and (3) the Episcopal Missionary Church (which appears to have had a degree of “leadership instability” in recent years). The last of these three has, however, expressed an interest in joining in the Concordat.

     Reply
     • Fr Anthony Chadwick says:

       Wednesday, 11 October, 2017 at 8:09 am

       This is an interesting comment, and indicative of the central problem in Anglicanism, whether it is:
       – a kind of “English Gallicanism” with the Church’s authority vested in the monarch and the episcopate rather than Rome, but continuing the essentials of medieval Catholicism with the Sacraments and the liturgy,
       – Protestantism with an Episcopate and doctrine that is more Arminian than Calvinist, with concessions to the medieval liturgy via the Prayer Book.

       The four Churches that have just united are Anglo-Catholic (as distinct from “Anglo-Papalist”) and base their doctrinal position on the Affirmation of Saint Louis rather than the Thirty-nine Articles in the Book of Common Prayer. Can there be compromise for the sake of visible unity as under the British Crown? – but Continuing Anglicanism is “non conformist” and independent. What about comprehensiveness? That was an issue (or an excuse?) in the Bishops’ Brawl of 1997. The position of the ACC, at least, has been a moderate comprehensiveness and an emulation of “Henrican” Catholicism as distinct from something like Old Catholicism which was a German and Swiss Liberal reaction against Pius IX in the 19th century.

       It seems better to unite the main easily-unitable Anglo-Catholic jurisdictions, and then dialogue with the APCK and Archbishop Robinson’s UEC on a friendly basis and work through the theological issues at a high academic level.
     • William Tighe says:

       Thursday, 12 October, 2017 at 1:59 pm

       I do not believe that there are any “theological issues,” properly speaking, between the four bodies which signed the Concordat, and the APCK and the EMC, although with the UEC there may well be some. The four bodies which signed the Concordat are all basically Anglo-Catholic (with the ACC being the most clearly and prescriptively so), but all four of them have a certain number of “low church” (at least in terms of liturgical preferences) congregations within them. The same is true of the APCK. I am less knowledgeable about the situation at the congregational level in the EMC, but it has been, at the episcopal level, more definitely Anglo-Catholic than at least one of the bodies that signed the Covenant.

       I seem to recall that Archbishop Robinson of the UEC demurred, two or three years ago, at the insistence of the ACC in particular that Continuing Anglican churches should not only (a) not practice the “ordination” of women and (b) have no communicatio in sacris with any bodies that purport to ordain women, but (c) have no communicatio in sacris with any bodies which, while not ordaining women themselves, have such communicatio in sacris with bodies which do so. (An example of the last would be the “affiliate membership” of the Anglican Church of North America – which leaves to individual bishops and dioceses the decision about ordaining women to the presbyterate and diaconate, while ruling out their ordination to the episcopate – as non-geographical “convocations” of the Reformed Episcopal Church and of Forward-in-Faith/North America, as well as of the three “seceded dioceses” of the Episcopal Church [Fort Worth, Quincy, and San Joaquin]; interestingly, Bishop Iker of Fort Worth was present for a day at the joint synods meeting.) It would appear that the insistence of the ACC on this issue has been accepted, at least tacitly, by the four bodies which signed the Concordat (although one of them, the APA, was briefly “affiliated” with the ACNA at the latter’s origins, and for some years pursued the project of an organic merger with the Reformed Episcopal Church).
2. Fr. David Marriott SSC says:

   Thursday, 12 October, 2017 at 7:51 pm

   Please note that the ACC in North America is already in communion with the APCK and the UECNA: it remains to be seen what will develop as further discussions develop: and, as was said at the signing of this Concordat, it is hoped that, in years to come, the “G4” will become the “G5” and “G6” and onwards…

   Reply
3. David Llewellyn Dodds says:

   Thursday, 12 October, 2017 at 10:36 pm

   Without giving undue weight to the matter, I would be interested in knowing the membership/average attendance numbers of the seven Continuing Churches being discussed, should they be available.

   Reply
   • William Tighe says:

     Saturday, 14 October, 2017 at 12:34 am

     I have no real statistical information, but a total membership figure of about 20,000 for the United States would be my guess.

     Reply
     • David Llewellyn Dodds says:

       Sunday, 15 October, 2017 at 10:35 pm

       Thank you!

       All in all, this seems an impressive reunion of orthodox Anglicans. I think I have met the expression “Anglican ecumenism” on the ACC website: it will be good to see how that continues, internationally, hereafter.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of new comments via email.

Δ