Anglican Mission Winter Conference ends

The Anglican Mission closed their winter conference Saturday, January 14 in Houston. Amid the context of morning worship, Bishops Phil Jones and TJ Johnson drew summaries for those in attendance from their own times of doubt and uncertainty. The conference theme was the Work of the Holy Spirit. The final encouragement was to embrace the Spirit and follow the work he has already begun. To read more, click here.

In response to this article, I posted the following comment, which is awaiting moderation.

Cheryl,

One part of your article puzzled me:

“Some priests and parishes in the Mission will decide that they have to have classical catholic/Anglican structures and certainty of authority; hierarchy, if you will. They will be released to other jurisdictions.”

The Anglican Mission already has a very hierarchical structure with Chairman Chuck Murphy at the top of the hierarchy, the Council of Bishops under him, and the network leaders under the bishops. The Anglican has no equivalent of a synod involving clergy and laity at any of these levels. I would think that folks would want to leave the Anglican Mission because it is too hierarchical. The local mission networks do not determine what mission propjects they undertake. They submit proposals to the Board of Directors at Anglican Mission national headquarters and the Chairman and the Board of Directors determine whether or not the mission project is funded. The funding does not come from the local mission networks but from Anglican Mission national headquarters. To my knowledge there has been no proposals for changes in this structure.

The major proposed change is that the Anglican Mission would no longer be accountable to an Anglican province but would be wholly independent with the three retired Primates serving as a College of Consultors, that is, as an advisory body to the Chairman. In an organizational chart of the Anglican Mission, the College of Consultors would be a lateral structure, not above the Chairman in the hierarchy of the organization.

Something to which very little attention has been drawn is that The Episcopal Church as a legal entity is a missionary society–The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. In morphing the Anglican Mission into an independent missionary society, Bishop Murphy and the Anglican Mission Leadership Council is essentially morphing the Anglican Mission into a new denomination–Anglican in name but arguably not Anglican in its commitment to the classic formularies and historic Anglicanism. It is certainly not Anglican in its structure. Its structure is a hybrid of organizational elements taken from the Roman Catholic Church and corporate America.