ANGLICAN LEADERS will be rebuked by the Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Alan Harper today, as the crisis within worldwide Anglicanism deepens over scriptural authority, women bishops and gay clergy.
Archbishop Harper will tell a conference in England today that scant heed is being paid to key principles of Anglicanism in the debates raging within the communion. He will also stress the importance Anglicans attach to science and human knowledge as additional tools in understanding and appreciating the work of God.
The divisions within Anglicanism intensified with the declaration last Sunday in Jerusalem by the self-styled Global Anglican Future Conference that they no longer accepted that “Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury”.
The conference gathering took place just over two weeks ahead of the Lambeth conference when leaders of the Anglican Communion worldwide will gather at Canterbury.
Participants at the Jerusalem conference called for the creation of a new council of Anglican primates committed to biblical Anglicanism and for a new structure of accountability. They described this as “a move of most of the world’s practising Anglicans into a post-colonial reality, where the Archbishop of Canterbury is recognised for his historic role, but not as the only arbiter of what it means to be Anglican”.
The new primates’ council is to be formed initially by the six Anglican primates who took part in the conference, from Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, west Africa, and the southern region of South America.
The Anglican Church of Tanzania awaits the endorsement of its house of bishops before its primate may join the council.
The conference indicated that it intended to recognise like-minded Anglicans in north America as part of the new council.
“Instead of continuing to rely solely on the colonial structures that have served the Anglican Communion so poorly during the present crisis . . . the movement’s intent to accept all those as Anglicans who affirm the Anglican standard of faith,” they said.
The Anglican Communion “should and will be reformed around the biblical gospel and mandate to go into all the world and present Christ to the nations”.
Speaking this morning at the annual conference of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Swanwick, Derbyshire, Archbishop Harper will point out that the recovery of key Anglican principles would do much to inform a mature discussion and analysis among Anglicans.
He will call for a proper application of methods forged by Richard Hooker, a key figure of Anglican theology in the 16th century, whose analysis of the role of reason in approaching Holy Scripture had not, he will say, been given the consideration it deserved in present controversies.
On the tone of the current controversy, he will refer to Hooker’s view that “there will come a time when three words uttered with charity and meekness shall receive a far more blessed reward than three thousand volumes written with disdainfulness of wit”.
