The Anglican Credibility Crunch

http://www.anglicanspread.org/?p=163

[SPREAD] 20 Mar 2009--Lord Turner, the recently appointed Chairman of the UK’s banking regulatory body, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has just announced proposals aimed at restoring confidence in Britain’s financial institutions and the FSA itself. Just as lack of banking discipline has led to the global credit crunch, so a lack of spiritual discipline has led to what we might term the Anglican Communion’s ‘credibility crunch’ - the growing realisation that, in its Lambeth form, it has ceased to be a body united around core doctrine and is taking on the nature of a religious debating society.

That is not to say that the Lambeth Communion lacks beliefs, just that they are the wrong ones. Interestingly, the BBC has borrowed theological language, reporting ‘Lord Turner said that too much faith had been put in the dogma that financial markets were always right and corrected themselves.’ It has become clear that this ideology lured the FSA into a false sense of security so that it seriously underestimated the massive pressures building up in the global banking system and contented itself with issues of process, of legal form rather than economic substance.

Does that not sound familiar? Misplaced faith in ecclesiastical institutions and the ideology that being Anglican is defined by relationship to the Archbishop of Canterbury have led the ‘instruments of unity’ to concentrate on legalistic form rather than spiritual substance, with disastrous results. With no effective restraint, a counterfeit Christianity has established itself within the Anglican Communion, pushing well beyond the boundaries of orthodox faith and morality in North America with the British Isles not far behind. Adherence to legal form means that ecclesiastical law can nonetheless be used aggressively to deprive orthodox congregations of their assets while those who encourage the law suits - some 60 in the United States alone - continue to participate in endless ‘conversation’.