Liveblogging the Martyn Minns Installation Service

http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=19196

[titusonenine] 7 May 2007--The atmosphere coming into the event is hard to describe accurately. On the one hand, given the statement of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and some reappraising blogs seemingly howling in protest over the matter, it seems like a big deal.

But it isn’t in one sense. The entire province of Nigeria in Synod voted to set up CANA a long while ago. Martyn Minns went over to Nigeria last summer to be consecrated a missionary Bishop. One didn’t hear many protests or concerns then (hmmm–wonder why not?). So why now? All this is is the period at the end of a sentence which was written almost entirely by the previous two events.

Also, as a commenter below observes, numerous steps were taken that did not need to be to ensure it was even less provocative. It is not in an Episcopal Church but in a neutral site. Archbishop Akinola is not preaching–Martyn Minns is. There will be no press conference by Archbishop Akinola (though I am sure the press who are here will try as hard as they can to get a comment from him). All of this is part of a decision on the part of those in leadership to be careful and quiet, relatively speaking.

True, Archbishop Akinola is clearly the second most powerful person in the Anglican Communion and so simply his presence here (or anywhere apparently) receives notice and response. But there is response and then there is overresponse. The right way to understand the Presiding Bishop’s response is to say “methinks she doth protest too much” (both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times observed that she was angry). Ditto the Bishop of Viriginia. Jim Naughton is trying hard to spin away the overrecognition of the service today, but it isn’t working.

So why the overreaction especially relative to the other two far more important events related to the starting of CANA? Surely a fuller answer to this will need to wait for some time since when one is in the midst of something, one rarely sees its full dimensions or significance clearly.
But this much is clear now: it is because it is here in America. Immediately somehow there is a threat to the Anglican franchise which the TEC establishment seems to assume is theirs by divine right in perpetuity (one can’t help thinking of Jeremiah’s Temple sermon in Jeremiah 7 in this regard). Immediately there is an incursion into the air space which TEC leadership in a bizarre way somehow claims as its own (newsflash to Mark Harris: “the Diocese of Virginia and…the Province of The Episcopal Church” does not include Hylton Chapel).

Yet even this does not do justice to what is taking place, there is some depth that is being touched upon causing surprise when the action is anticlimactic and anything but a surprise.
From where I sit, I believe the answer is this: the TEC leadership does not believe their actions will have real consequences. Their gamble is simple: they will embrace the new theology and put it into practice faster than the Anglican Communion will evolve effective mechanisms of discipline to deal with it. At the end of the day, they did not believe the Primates would act. We know from earlier Primates meetings that Frank Griswold said that he believed the global South leadership was simply talk but their would be no action. The October 2003 meeting was after all just a meeting which issued a statement. One could make similar observations about other Primates meetings, which, although they have now included specific proposals and dealines, still have not specified any concrete consequences for TEC.

Archbishop Akinola, no matter what you say about him, is a leader. He says he will do something and then he does it.He did it twice in Nigeria and there was little recognition or response but TEC did not feel the consequences. Now there is a sense that there might be real consequences and that explains the strength of the overreaction.

As Archbishop Akinola made clear in his letter, he would be the first to step back from this ministry if the Episcopal Church does what the Anglican Communion leadership has asked it to do. But they have already rejected the proposed Dar Es Alaam pastoral scheme making some kind of pastoral provision even more necessary in his mind. It is an unusal step. It can be a temporary step. But what it signals is tangible consequences which TEC leaders in denial simply are unwilling to face.