Ephraim Radner and David Reed: Canada is not the United States

http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/8109/#more

[TitusOneNine] 4 Dec 2007--In 2003, after TEC’s General Convention gave consent to Gene Robinson’s episcopal election, some conservatives began to use the term “realignment” with respect to the Anglican Communion. At the time, it seemed to refer to a movement – not yet fully en route – to forge a common witness to the Scriptural commitments of Anglicanism, that would draw together the Communion’s organs of discipline and mission in a newly integrated manner. This would, some hoped, isolate the Episcopal Church’s own wayward developments from the rest of the Communion, offer godly pressures for reform, and provide conservative Episcopalians with a clearly defined Communion basis for their own local witness. “Realignment” was, in what seems to have been the Archbishop of Canterbury’s suggestive understanding, a “confessional” movement within the Communion.

The term “realignment” has taken on a new meaning, however, over the past few years. It now seems to denote for many the erection of new hierarchical structures among Anglicans, separate from, independent of accountability to, and out of communion with a range of other existing Communion entities and persons. Instead, these structures claim a more local or individualized form of accountability, as in a congregational polity now lifted into an ‘episcopal’ frame of reference. These new structures of “realignment” are ones through which provincial, episcopal, and local oversight is offered, through which ministry is ordered, through which discipline is effected, and through which resources are shared, apart from the Anglican Communion’s already established organs of ecclesial life, including, in some cases. Some have called this “realignment” a “new Reformation”; others (rather contradictorily) have seen it as a step to reunion with Rome; others have stressed its provisional nature (though without explaining how the erection of new orders of ministry and discipline can, in the nature of the case, be provisional).