Reporters went to GAFCON smelling schism in the third largest religious fellowship. Did the editors get the big story they were promised? For some reporters the story is the lack of story.
TIME’s David Van Biema sums it up this way:
[T]he secession it threatened to bring to the 78 million-member Anglican Communion looks like a confused bust.
This all comes as a bit of surprise to the press, which — with ample encouragement from the Church’s right — had been framing GAFcon as a decisive step toward schism….
GAFcon seems to be falling apart on several fronts. First came the venue problems: the conference ping-ponged embarrassingly at the last minute from Jerusalem to Jordan and back to Jerusalem.
Then there was attendance. The clerics at GAFcon were really supposed to sit out the Communion’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in July. But it turns out several key conservatives did not even show up at GAFcon (or simply made brief appearances) and will go on to the church-wide meeting in Canterbury in July. Meanwhile, conservative Southeast Asian bishops have fallen out with some GAFcon leaders. …
GAFcon’s message was scrambled from the get-go.
Of course you’ve heard it all here first from our very own Jim Naughton. Not surprisingly that caught Van Biema’s attention. But he also interviewed Kendall Harmon: “Harmon agrees that GAFcon will not have the impact some had hoped for, and that barring a surprise conservative rebellion at the Lambeth conference, the big blow-up around homosexuality many had expected this summer will be deferred. Anglicans, says Harmon ruefully, are incrementalists, and “that has continued through this season.””
Read it all here.
The Guardian’s Riazat Butt writes:
Bishop Bill Attwood, an American missionary bishop from the Anglican church of Kenya, gave a little more, but not much more, information about the much vaunted Flying Communion, a term that sounds more exciting than other descriptions: church-within-a-church or structure-within-a-structure.
The term he used was “voluntary associations” to discern who they should collaborate with and on what basis; they would be a spiritual haven for traditionalists and he used a rather strangled metaphor of stars and constellations to explain how these associations would guide defecting Anglicans through unchartered territory.
In all of these there is no timeline, no budget or sense of who might oversee this activity, although the smooth and savvy Peter Jensen, Anglican archbishop of Sydney, is being lined up as the frontman for any such association because he can interpret the Africans for a western audience. Ouch.
One would think that 10-years worth of accumulated grievance would lead to a plan, with slightly more flesh on the bones than the carcass we’re presented with. Many of the GAFCON leadership team have been fulminating over the ‘decline’ of the Anglican Communion for more than a decade and it’s a little odd that the £2.5m budget could not have been spent more wisely.
(Emphasis added.) In other words, old wine in old skins — the same conclusion Van Biema comes to.
Tuesday Butt wrote: “Talk of betrayal, disappointment and disagreement threatens to sour the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon)….”
Ruth Gledhill today wrote “Africans … have been distressed to learn how many of the US conservative bishops are in the end going to Lambeth when their own Martyn Minns has not been invited. [But] most of them really do not want to walk away. Where this leaves the US conservatives is uncertain. And quite what I am going to write for the newspaper, now the schism story is receding, is also not yet clear.”
While there may be distress over the number of US conservative bishops who are in the end going to Lambeth, Kendall Harmon’s principle of incrementalism continues. Today the BBC reports “The latest to join the boycott [of Lambeth] is the Bishop of Lewes, Wallace Benn.”