A Paper Province or a Proper Province?

“Unavoidable Avoidance”, “Compelled to Resist”, “The Temporal/Spiritual Divide”, “Impaired Communion”, “Broken Gospel-Partnership”, “Visible Differentiation”, “Shadow Structures” “Principled Irregularity”, “Virtual Diocese”, “Broken Fellowship”, “Structural Provision” – they’ve all had their moment in the sun.

Portentous sounding phrases that have proved vacuous because, ultimately, they’ve amounted to next to nothing in practical terms. Some say their primary achievement has been to maintain the influence and authority of the same organisations, conferences, networks and ‘leaders’ in the hope that the latest catchphrase might actually amount to ‘a plan’. Time and again people have been marched to the top of the hill by these people (preferably “shoulder to shoulder”) only to be left to find their own way back down again. It has been a repeated exercise in hope over experience.

And it has been damaging – it has been performative – the illusion of militancy which has been an expensive distraction from the hard yards, financial planning and time needed to develop an actual workable strategy and to earn extensive buy in to it. What is more, the credibility of the orthodox as genuinely capable of proportionate militant action has been repeatedly undermined by what has been little more than tub thumping.

And now there is a new concept, a “parallel Province”, proposed in a recent letter from “The Alliance” of various evangelical groupings – including those who have generated the previous phrases.

To be precise what is advanced is a, “…de facto parallel Province within the Church of England”.

Read here