The Living Church brings news that:
“The primates of four provinces in the Anglican Communion have offered to meet in November with the bishops, chancellors and standing committee presidents from the eight Episcopal dioceses that petitioned Archbishop Rowan Williams last July for alternative primatial oversight.
The Most Rev. Peter Akinola, Primate of Nigeria; the Most Rev. Drexel Gomez, Primate of the West Indies; the Most Rev. Benjamin Nzimbi, Primate of Kenya; and the Most Rev. Justice Akrofi, Primate of West Africa, have told the seven bishops and eight dioceses that the Nov. 15 meeting, to be held at The Falls Church in Falls Church, Va., will not preempt whatever is decided at the Feb. 14-19 primates’ meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Instead, the November meeting is intended to allow the American dioceses to express their needs directly to Global South leaders.”
My question is, what would be so bad about allowing the parishes in the Network diocese that want to join one of these gentleman’s provinces to join that province? From that point we could negotiate property settlements, gather the parishes that don’t want to follow the Network leadership and re-establish Episcopal dioceses in those areas.
If allowing provincial leaders to cross provincial boundaries to minister to theological minorities is the cost of keeping the Communion together so that is members can cooperate in mission, I don’t think that is too high a price to pay–assuming that other provinces were willing to acknowledge that they had theological minorities. We’d need guidelines that don’t yet exist to govern this process so it didn’t disintegrate into sheep-stealing and property grabbing, but it seems to me that those could be worked out.
George Conger’s story mentions that these four primates are trustees of the Anglican Relief and Development Fund “an organization chartered by the Anglican Communion Network in 2004 to support the Church in the developing world.”
After two year’s in existence, the ARDF doesn’t seem to have filed yet for independent status as a 501.c.3, organization, at least not as far as I can tell from poking around a bit on the IRS’s Publication 78 Web site. That is probably not a big deal to the majority of its contributors who have an implicit trust in the Anglican Communion Network, which administers the fund. But it is something on which organizations that formulate standards of transparency and accountability place a premium.