News

Sydney welcomes new developments as U.S. splinter groups come together
By Market-Place
December 7, 2008
LEADER: Former Episcopal Church Diocese of Pittsburgh bishop and Common Cause Partnership moderator Robert Duncan . ENS PHOTO LEADER: Former Episcopal Church Diocese of Pittsburgh bishop and Common Cause Partnership moderator Robert Duncan . ENS PHOTO

From ENS, ENI and media reports

Sydney's Archbishop Peter Jensen is welcoming moves to form a new 'umbrella' denomination for disaffected Anglicans in the US and Canada.

Announcing the most concrete steps so far to bring a string of breakaway conservative Anglicans together, leaders of the group unveiled details of its new constitution 3 December at a non-Anglican evangelical church in suburban Chicago.

Calling itself the 'Common Cause Partnership', the group is claiming it will become a new Anglican province by the middle of next year.

"The public release of our draft constitution is an important concrete step toward the goal of a biblical, missionary and united Anglican Church in North America," the former Episcopal (Anglican) bishop of Pittsburgh, Bishop Robert Duncan, said.

Bishop Duncan was removed from his position as Pittsburgh's Anglican bishop in September for his "abandonment" of the US Episcopal denomination.

However, official recognition for the new 'province' is unlikely.

The archbishop of Canterbury was quick to play down suggestions the new organisation could become an official, non-geographical Anglican province covering both the US and Canada.

In a statement issued 4 December, a spokesman for the Archbishop made it clear there are specific steps that would need to be taken before a new Anglican province was created.

"Once begun, any of these processes will take years to complete," the statement said, and there had been no approach from the Chicago partnership.

"In relation to the recent announcement from the meeting of the Common Cause Partnership in Chicago, the process has not yet begun," the statement said.

But, in an interview with the New York Times December 3, Martyn Minns, a former Episcopal priest and a bishop of the breakaway Convocation of Anglicans in North America, disputed that formal recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury was crucial to the success of the new 'province'.

"One of the questions a number of the primates are asking is why do we still need to be operating under the rules of an English charity, which is what the Anglican Consultative Council does," Bishop Minns said. "Why is England still considered the center of the universe?"

The new Common Cause 'province' will include as many as 11 separate Anglican conservative evangelical and traditionalist organizations across the US and Canada.

It claims 100,000 church members and four U.S. dioceses, including Pittsburgh, which have left the U.S. Episcopal Church recently. (The mainstream Episcopal Church includes 7,600 congregations and claims 2.4 million Episcopalians as members.)

In an interview with the US-based Christian Science Monitor published the day of the announcement, Sydney's Archbishop Jensen argued forming the new 'province' could avoid a further split in the international Anglican Church.

"Better to have two Anglican jurisdictions rather than to have a shattered Communion," Archbishop Jensen said.

"Paradoxically, it may seem as though this step is a division, but it is really to help us not to divide by giving us more flexibility", he said.

Speaking to reporters at a media briefing in Chicago, Bishop Robert Duncan argued the new group stood in the tradition of the reformation, a period, he said which required Christians to reassert the power of revelation that some of their leaders had lost.

"The Lord is displacing the Episcopal Church," Duncan said, adding that "it's our anticipation" that the archbishops and the provinces representing what he called the majority of the Anglican Communion "will begin to recognize this province."

"We stand where the mainstream of Anglicanism stands," he said. "The question will of course be will the archbishop recognize those who stand where the mainstream of Anglicans -- or the mainstream of Christians -- stand, or not."

The Revd Charles Robertson, a spokesman for the Episcopal Church's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said: "There is room within The Episcopal Church for people with different views, and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ."

While details of the new constitution are still being assessed, leaders have confirmed that those member congregations which already have women priests will be allowed to continue that practice, while the development of women bishops will not be permitted.