The Anglican Church of Canada participated in “gatherings [to] facilitate learning about each other’s contexts and finding pathways for healing and reconciliation.” What more could each side possibly need to know about each other’s “context”? The African approach is to interpret their “context” in the light of Biblical principles, Western Anglicans do the reverse.
Read it all here:
The fifth meeting of the Consultation of Anglican Bishops in Dialogue takes place in Coventry, England from May 22 to 25, 2014. The Consultation brings together Anglican bishops from Africa and North America in hopes of building common understanding and respect.
Beginning in 2010, a rotating group of approximately two-dozen bishops from Canada, the United States, and a number of African countries, have met annually at locales around the world. Their gatherings facilitate learning about each other’s contexts and finding pathways for healing and reconciliation. Their time together in Coventry focuses specifically on “Reconciliation in the Anglican Communion.”
This intentional dialogue was developed in response to theological controversies that strained relationships across the Anglican Communion in the early 2000s. These included issues relating to human sexuality and the blessing of same-sex marriages. In the face of pain and division arising from these controversies, Archbishop Colin Johnson of the Diocese of Toronto and the Rev. Canon Dr. Isaac Kawuki Mukasa, now Africa Relations Coordinator, spearheaded this important dialogue.
The bishops report this time together as one of powerful transformation and reconciliation. Kawuki Mukasa says that many at the table have grown tired of the tone of past discourse and that there is sincere interest in carving a new, respectful way forward. “There’s growing appetite for conciliatory voices in the Anglican Communion,” he says. There is also deepening appreciation that all who form this unique group carry out their lives and ministries as faithfully as they can in their contexts.
This is nothing less than an attempt to endorse the worship of “political correctness” – a deceptive term in itself. The only reconciliation required is to affirm the Gospel – something the so-called liberals, more properly called apostates – need to understand. Being a bishop requires one to be in full agreement with the authority of Scripture and also to be true to the vows made both at his/her ordination and consecration. Being a bishop is more than wearing a purple shirt and white collar. Tragically many so-called bishops throughout the Communion should resign or step down until they are ready to truly follow the Gospel.
Purple Shirt and White Collar would be an excellent name for a rock band.
“The African approach is to interpret their “context” in the light of Biblical principles,
Western Anglican do the reverse.”
Exactly. Thus Western “conversations”,especially via commissions, with ‘Grandma’ invariably issue in, “My, what anti-Scriptural teeth you have!”
VIde The Church of Scotland’s May 21, 2014,doctrinal debacle for the most current example of this: THE Church amang all others whose Sola constitutive element once had been “context” in light of Biblical principles.
In the past the Church of the West sent missionaries to the rest of the world. Today, perhaps missionaries from Africa and Asia should be sent to the rest of the world.