Briefly, I wish I could in good conscience restore the link to the TAC (& thereby to the ACA), but that would require evidence that they have an interest in pursuing unity within the Continuing Anglican Church. At this time they are looking Romeward instead. Everything, including the Deerfield Beach matter, belongs to the past, and the past can be forgiven. This is my view, and it is shared by the Metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church. He expressed this clearly in an open letter that has been on the ACC website for years. The response has not come. But, perhaps the hand held out will not continue to go unnoticed by some in the TAC.
When individuals go wrong it is much easier to repent and to return to a right path, but when a group goes wrong it is much harder to return to doing the right thing. There is too much looking over ones shoulder and wondering what so and so are thinking and what they will do in response to any effort to get things back to right.
ReplyDeleteThose of us who knew that the march to Deerfield Beach was a wrong go, knew because we saw who was involved and how they treated not only others, but also the promises which they had made at ordination. They were intent not on restoring and reviving classical Anglicanism but creating a new thing, a fantasy which when measured against Holy Scripture and the classical formularies of Anglicanism was to have no center. They were willing to call it Anglican, but the model on which it was built from the beginning was Roman and post-Tridentine. For some, and here I am thinking of the laity, there was no other choice because there too frequently was simply no other choice of a place or a group with which to worship which had anything of the old prayer book about it. They were and probably are stuck.
It is, certainly, a huge human tragedy, but one entirely evident the day those doors opened at Denver and three of the candidates for the office of bishop walked through them in vestments reflecting an internal rejection of Anglicanism and the embrace and establishment of an essentially papalist model for the Continuum. Unfortunately more than one pope at the same time simply doesn't work so it should surprise no one that we shortly had the ACC, APCK and the UECNA.
I have no idea what is going to happen with the ACA/TAC, but I hope that those (and especially the clergy) who realize that they do not want to become second class papists return with a new knowledge of the value and tradition of genuine Anglicanism. It will help to make all of us far more truly evangelical without diminishing our true Catholicity one whit. And we should welcome them with all the joy which the Father in our Lord's parable welcomed the prodigal son.
And then, perhaps, we can get about the work of truly continuing Anglicanism instead of creating a replacement which some of us like better.
Veriword: roveye (I kid you not.)
2nd word:conses