Church of Uganda still part of Anglican Communion
The Anglican Communion News Service is carrying a correction of recent news reports from the Church of Uganda.
“The Church of Uganda is not seceding from the Anglican Communion,” said Revd Canon Aaron Mwesigye, church spokesperson. “Some press stories have misrepresented our position.”“The plain fact is that we are simply not attending the Lambeth Conference in July 2008, but we are still very much a part of the Anglican Communion.”
The Church of Uganda broke communion with the Episcopal Church in the United States of America in 2003 after they elected and consecrated as Bishop Gene Robinson, a divorced man living in a same-sex relationship. But, the Church of Uganda has remained a consistently active member of the Anglican Communion.
Read the press release here.
So the fuller article explains that Uganda hasn't seceded from the communion, the American Episcopal Church has, and the evidence Mwesigye offers is that the American church 'doesn't believe what Anglicans believe.' This 'process' seems to give every church in the communion the authority to declare itself the standard for who is in. There's no logical difference between what Mwesigye says and a spokesperson for our Presiding Bishop declaring Uganda has left by unilaterally excommunicating us, refusing to attend Lambeth and declaring itself a free-standing standard of Anglicanism. I'm glad we don't go there.
When I became an Episcopalian almost forty years ago, I was initially exasperated by my new church's unwillingness to be pinned down on points of doctrine or discipline. Time has made me grateful for Elizabeth I's amazing vision - what makes us one isn't that we agree about everything, it's that we're willing to pray together and share sacrament while we acknowledge profound and sometimes troubling disagreements.
In Elizabeth's time there were plenty of church leaders on the European continent who were ready to say who was in and who was out, who was Christian and who was not, who was orthodox Protestant or Catholic and who was not and enforce their clear definition by warfare and executions. It's not like the disagreements in England were less drastic - Elizabeth's different vision was of communion in Christ making us uncomfortably and sometimes impatiently one. She could enforce the peace by law, and we call it the Elizabethan settlement. But from the Scottish and American church's separations from that legal jurisdcition, it's been our holy habit and tradition of patient tolerance that has sustained a sometimes confusing, sometimes astonishingly creative respect for difference. We've stayed together and learned that God's embrace is bigger than ours and God's work is sometimes mysterious to us.
Excommunicating one another by fiat looks to me like the opposite of being Anglican. In fact, I think if our church worldwide exists at all, it IS a communion in a listening process.
Posted by Donald Schell![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
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February 19, 2008 1:02 PM
Is the Revd Canon Aaron Mwesigye saying he was misquoted in earlier reports?
Here's how Mwesigye was quoted by the AP:
"Anglicanism is just an identity and if they abuse it, we shall secede. We shall remain Christians, but not in the same Anglican Communion," Church of Uganda spokesman Aron Mwesigye said."
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/18/news/Uganda-Anglicans.php
Misquote? Misspeak? Corrected by superiors? Rethink?
All these seem possible. Misrepresentation by the press strikes me as an overstatement.
It is Mwesigye who proceeds to deal in fantasy.
Posted by John B. Chilton![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
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February 19, 2008 1:59 PM