Canterbury is Only as Helpful as He is Faithful
by Canon Phil Ashey, AAC:
So the Archbishop of Canterbury has called for yet another meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion for October, 2017. As if this meeting could cure the wound that has been made even more incurable by his own personal failure to uphold the recommendations of the meeting he called in January of this year—failures that I documented several weeks ago in “At this point, why should we care about the Anglican Communion?”.
When I last wrote about this, I emphasized the Archbishop’s failure to defend the special role of Bishops to guard the doctrine, discipline and order of the Church. This is precisely the authority that the Chair of the Anglican Consultative Council specifically repudiated. That repudiation proved two things:
(1) The existing “Instruments of Unity” (the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Bishops Conference, Primates meetings and Anglican Consultative Council) are not only irrevocably broken, they are at odds with each other, and
(2) the Archbishop of Canterbury has, by his silence and passivity, made things worse
So whatever role the Archbishop of Canterbury may wish to play in any future meetings of the Primates, his credibility has been severely damaged by his actions. Why should anyone expect this Archbishop of Canterbury to help fix the mess when he allowed the ACC-16 meeting in Lusaka to negate the January 2016 Primates “relational consequences” for The Episcopal Church (TEC) in less than four months—a record that beats the year it took his predecessor, Archbishop Rowan Williams, to unravel the consequences the Primates placed on TEC in their 2007 Communique from Dar es Salaam.
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