Leaders of Anglican churches around the world will be gathering in Canterbury next week. It’s a so-called “primates meeting,” named because each is the chief bishop in his—and they are all men—church. The last of these meetings was held in January 2016. Here are some of the things I’ll want to learn as this meeting […]
Preparing for the Primates Read More »
Yet at the same time we have this fixation on bishops: who they are, what they do, what they say. We develop fancy ways of referring to them. We struggle to call them by their first names. We surround their visits with a kind of aura. The result of all this is that we are developing this unstated assumption that the only things that matter in the church are what bishops say.
One bishop without a home, and one bishop with two Read More »
The 16th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council comes to a close in Lusaka, Zambia today. Many worthy topics have been discussed and there has been good coverage from a handful of Episcopal/Anglican news organizations. But it’s easy to let meetings like this slide by. I wasn’t there but here are a few things I noticed from
3 things you might have missed at #ACCLusaka Read More »
The Archbishop of Canterbury today addressed General Synod, reporting on his travels in the last 18 months to visit with every primate (senior bishop) of the Anglican Communion. It is a good address and he highlights several central issues to the future of the Communion: the opportunity and threat of instantaneous communication, the suffering of
96 days of travel, 14 trips, and 11 days in airplanes Read More »
Six primates of the Anglican Communion and a handful of other bishops recently met in New York City for several days and, at the end of their gathering, expressed their “fervent and urgent hope that another Anglican Congress might be held in the next two years.” (The full statement is here.) To which I say:
Lambeth Conference? How about a Lambeth Congress instead? Read More »
It was only this morning that I realized that the anniversary of D-Day coincides with the church’s commemoration of Ini Kopuria, founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood. It is, I think, an apt coincidence. The Melanesian Brotherhood is a religious order in the South Pacific—you can read more on Wikipedia—that entered Anglican consciousness perhaps most forcefully
Remembering the Melanesian Brotherhood on D-Day Read More »
Two stories in the Church Times in the last two weeks highlight the challenges facing the Anglican Communion. The first, from the current week’s issue, was reporter Madeleine Davis’ commendable effort to track down South Sudanese bishops and ask them what they thought about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent comments on same-sex marriage. She also spoke to some people in
A rejected visa application and the future of the Anglican Communion Read More »
The Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut has kindly posted a video of my keynote address to the diocese’s annual mission conference in early March. It’s adapted from my book, Backpacking through the Anglican Communion. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWt59WqS00I] Some excerpts: [iPhones are] an honest description of the world we live in. On the one hand, we have globalization, those
Does Giles Fraser use an iPhone? He’s clearly a Mac user but based on his recent column, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Writing for The Guardian, Giles Fraser captures a common view of the Anglican Communion: All this means that the bishops won’t be able to do a damn thing about their clergy having
Does Giles Fraser use an iPhone? Read More »
On Wednesday, the archbishops of Canterbury and York wrote a letter in which they “recalled the common mind” of the Primates of the Anglican Communion to say that it wasn’t right to support anti-gay legislation in places like Nigeria and Uganda. It’s hard to argue with the message, but it is interesting how they chose
Well, that was fast… or, how Anglican communiques become cudgels Read More »
