I deeply regret Rowan Williams' continued attempts to sway this debate. His views are well known and will be given a far more respectable hearing than they deserve. My prayer for our bishops is that they will listen for the Spirit, hear the clear consensus of the deputies, and will follow the baptismal covenant, rather than the worries of Canterbury. Galatians 2:11ff. remains highly relevant reading for all concerned, especially when one considers the duplicity, injustice, hypocrisy, and evasion of missional imperative that Canturbury is still commending:

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?’

As a layman, I again raise the concern that this archbishop seems to at every turn want to cut out our participation in the councils of the Church, this time in the CofE. Anglicanism from its inception has had strong lay voices and leadership, and in our time, many of its churches do so through councils. I would suggest that in fact the archbishop of canterbury has a defective ecclesiology from an Anglican standpoint and that his concern that Anglicanism has an ecclesial deficit may be misplaced. We may have a deficit, but it at least in part, lies in an episcopate that overestimates itself to the point it needn't listen to laity. This is Roman Catholicism, not Anglicanism.

I find it 'interesting' that leaders in our church frequently insist that B033 was not a 'moratorium' while the Archbishop of Canterbury seems quite happy to use this term. Who is being more honest?

If the Archbishop is right that we are currently under a 'moratorium' then it seems to me that we must do much more than 'move beyond' B033. We need to revoke it, and get on with doing the right thing, the Archbishop's 'regret' not withstanding.

It is an astoundingly lovely day in south central Indiana - sunny but breezy, with a delicate lace of clouds over an intensely blue sky. I want to be outdoors so I AM TRYING REALLY HARD NOT TO OBSESS OVER THE FOAG/CCU LETTER linked to at the end of the above post.

Where to start. Its curiously numb usage of acronyms as the subject of sentences. Its expressions of distress that differing communions will not match. Its notion that the purpose of ecumenical cooperation is to resist change. Its reference to "basic Christian anthropology" - a distressing neologism,
apparently devised to give legitimacy to discrimination. Its overstatement of Lambeth's authority. Its reference to ecumenical dialogues' appropriate participants as "church officers." Its insistence on binding mutual agreement as a condition of Christian unity. Its generally cold, unfriendly and procedural tone.

I'm not a blogger, I'm a storyteller, and I don't want to spend any more time grinding my teeth about this. If the Church of England boogies out of Porvoo, well, shame on them. I'm going to take some deep calming breaths and go out and sand some furniture.

Pamela Grenfell Smith
Bloomington, Indiana

Thanks, Pamela. You made me feel better. If it helps to have a cross-Atlantic perspective, the most important part of the statement is the allegation that the Church of England maintains a critical distance from the state. This is sheer nonsense. The twenty-six most senior bishops sit in the upper house of the legislature!

I'm not a story-teller, I'm just a simple empirical positivist, and I find this kind of veiled threat to be really distasteful.

I'll follow your example re deep calming breaths. Thanks again.

Scot Peterson
Oxford, England