Anglicans Clash Over Anglo-Catholic Priest’s Disinvitation from Mere Anglican Conference

Jan 26, 2024 by Dave Doveton

By David Virtue, Virtueonline.

Like John the Baptist 2000 years ago, the Rev. Calvin Robinson got his head handed to him. At this year’s Mere Anglicanism conference in Charleston, SC he went off-script in a presentation: “Critical Theories are Antithetical to the Gospel.” Robinson tied women’s ordination to the cascading downfall of the Anglican faith.

As the [mostly] Anglican media portray it, Robinson, was the victim of the organizer because he spoke about something not on the agenda. Brushing aside his perhaps unfortunate comments about Luther and the Reformation, “I am not a brown face for hire to speak about race,” he said.

No one asked him to be. One absurd commentator made the observation that “Calvin was just being Calvin.” Really, in that case Judas was just being Judas.

First of all, he was not disinvited from the conference. He gave his speech and was only disinvited to a final round table. He got fully paid and probably won’t get another invitation back again. And he shouldn’t. If the conveners had wanted to have conference on the place of women in ministry, then that would have been another matter. It was not. The conference centered around apologetics not the ordination of women.

Robinson was not cancelled for his faithfulness to the gospel, he got disinvited because he went off script, which probably got him the very publicity he was seeking.

One observer noted that: “I do think he addressed critical theory pretty extensively. The issue was he didn’t get into Critical Race Theory.”

The host of the conference, the Rev. Jeff Miller, Rector of St Philip’s Church, in Charleston tried to defuse the situation, by removing Robinson from the remainder of the conference, but said Robinson would be fully paid.

The Anglican Bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina, the Rt. Rev. Chip Edgar weighed in and said that Robinson was not “cancelled” due to his position on Women in Holy Orders. “I write to correct that notion, and to tell you that he was removed from the final panel because his talk was deemed to have veered substantively from the topic he was asked to address. Instead, he took advantage of the opportunity and opined on what he considers the exceeding evil of women in Holy Orders. Most importantly, he did so in a way which was inexcusably provocative, and completely lacking in charity and pastoral consideration of the people in attendance–especially the many women clergy both of our diocese and others who attended.”

Read here.