Wednesday 28 April 2010

Post-Crisis Consequences in the Anglican Communion: Archbishop Peter Jensen on the Global South Encounter

UPDATE: Oops! Thanks "Anon" for pointing out my error is calling the Archbishop Jenkins rather than Jensen.

Comment from Sydney's Archbishop Peter Jensen, General Secretary of GAFCON/FCA, on the recent Anglican Global South Encounter and the Anglican "crisis":
The crisis moment has now passed. Many of the Global South provinces have given up on the official North American Anglicans (TEC and the Canadian Church) and regard themselves as being out of communion with them. They renew the call for repentance but can see that, failing something like the Great Awakening, it will not occur. 
I am saddened to know that my church helped to precipitate the crisis that is now past. Jensen believes that the Anglican Communion is now living out the consequences of that crisis.

On the Anglican Covenant—he writes about a discovery in the small group to which he was assigned:
We were discussing covenants, and the issue of the Anglican covenant emerged. Very gently but firmly the group let me into a secret. It was all very well to have a covenant, but what if the people have different ideas as to what a covenant may mean? What if you were in covenanting with westerners, whose word could not be relied on? Of what use is a covenant then? Look at the state of marriage in the west. Consider the western capacity to use slippery words. What would a covenant be worth?
Not only do they see the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) as body that caused the crisis, but they see us as unreliable "slippery" talkers.

Jensen has a challenge for we orthodox who remain in the western churches like the ACoC:
Right action demands that we understand our own times accurately. If I am correct, that we now belong to the post-crisis phase, we need to know what such a moment requires. Action in this phase is no less demanding. One thing is for sure: those who wait and do nothing will be playing into the hands of ideologues who have had such a triumph in the west. This is especially so for the orthodox in those churches in the west which have yet to come into their moment of truth. For them there can no longer be, ‘A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest…’ (Proverbs 24:33). Instead they must wield, ‘The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (Ephesians 6:17), if they wish to survive. This is at the heart of what I observed in Singapore, and it is in this, as in the communiqué, that I believe that Global South, like GAFCON/FCA, is pointing to the Anglican future.
All here. H/T Anglican Down Under.

1 comment:

  1. The Archbishop of Sydney's name is Jensen, not Jenkins . Please correct

    ReplyDelete