While I want to keep our attention focused on Mark Harris’ article The Vocation of the Episcopal Church, (which you can also find here in a form you can print out and pass around) I also want to give you a sense of what other writers are saying about the relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.
Our friend, the Rev. Bill Carroll, former faculty member at Sewanee, now a rector in the Diocese of Southern Ohio added the following in a comment over at Mark’s blog, Preludium:
“We should be seeking to de-centralize and de-colonialize the Anglican Communion. A more democratic and participatory process is called for, in which ALL voices are heard. Only a covenant that supports full provincial autonomy and liberty of conscience is a reasonable proposal for the Anglican future. Like the WR, the covenant design process is the last gasp of the British Empire. It may well be, given the overall make up of the committee, that no reasonable proposal is forthcoming. It will have to be amended beyond recognition by the provinces before they can adopt it by their own synods and conventions. It may well be that the Anglican Communion has outlived its purpose and that similar divisions will come to the fore in many other provinces.
“It is time to pull the veil off the combination of Anglo-Catholic fantasy and institutional self-preservation that leads anyone to think that these kind of documents are a good ideal. Our future should be defined by mission, not conciliarist dreams.”
Lionel Deimel has an essay in which he writes: Let me be perfectly clear: We have no hope of finding ourselves in a satisfactory Anglican Communion as long as we are unwilling to walk away from the Anglican Communion as it presently is.
And Marshall Scott, thoughtful keeper of Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside blog has written an essay worth reading in its entirety, and executed so smoothly it is difficult to pull out an extract, so read it all.