Why the Ordinations in Abbotsford Are Valid

http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/index.php/2007/12/18/why-the-ordinations-in-abbotsford-are-valid/#more-2590

[Anglican Mainstream] 19 Dec 2007--In most of our cases (certainly mine) the same families have built successively on our church sites for generations. In my case it was a tent first, serving the natives and the fur trappers, then a log church built on land donated by the Hudson’s Bay Company, then a clapboard church, then a cinderblock and concrete building. Generations of work and emotional investment have gone into those buildings, and the history is recent enough to still be relatively current in the stories of the community. To walk away from all that is undeniably difficult because these buildings are not just deposits of institutional history, but of very personal history, and given the significant proportion of elderly among my congregation it is perhaps unreasonable to expect the community to walk away, or to divide. They don’t and won’t accept the ACoC position on matters, but neither will they leave their building and the pew they have sat in for the whole of their lives or abandon old Mrs. Soenso whose grandfather chopped the logs for the church, whose uncle sawed the lumber, whose husband helped build the church. Trying to uphold the validity and jurisdictional appropriateness of the leadership and ministry of Bishops Harvey and Harding seems important to me, given these considerations. It’s not just a matter of theology, or of politics, but of helping to make clear the claims on our richer, deeper Anglican heritage.