The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion

http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/2667/

[Stand Firm] 27 Mar 2007--Anyone looking on the American Episcopal Church situation will bound to be confused about the office of Bishop – and one need not be a Presbyterian or Baptist for this to be the case. Bishops appear to have a role within their own dioceses that they reserve to themselves, independently of clergy or laity or other Bishops; Bishops then say they cannot act because General Convention inhabits a unique US polity, and they must defer to that; Bishops are concerned that their Presiding Bishop must attend the primates meeting as a full member, and when she does so, and returns to the US having agreed in some way to the plenary communiqué, she appears unable or unwilling to use the strength of an office others have defended for her in a way consistent with the claims of the same office, to prosecute what the plenary statement requests.

The danger is real that in defending a special polity and deferring to that when difficulties arise the Episcopal Church will find it inhabits a ‘polity’ that is sui generis and idiosyncratic in ways that question altogether what it means to be a Communion church with Catholic Bishops. The claim to national identity and specific polity has something of Lutheran World Federation aspects; the claim to independence, spiritual endowments and new truth has aspects of ‘always reforming’ Presbyterianism, or even American Mormonism; the claim to rule over a diocese in ways that cannot be constrained when it comes to blessing things or giving pastoral direction is congregationalism without the usual high involvement of laity and committees assuring full participation precisely because the office of Bishop is unbiblical or not commended of God.

Many Bishops in TEC, upon seeing what the Communion was asking, responded immediately that they preferred to go it alone and to inhabit an Episcopal Church ‘come of age’ and not necessarily like anything else, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, congregational, or otherwise -- a church without affiliative tissue of any kind accept in prior historical, or more notional, terms.