An Open Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington Regarding requests for alternative primatial oversight

Dear Archbishop Williams:

We write as members of The Episcopal Church to express our deep concern about the requests for "alternative primatial oversight" that have come from eight of our dioceses since the 2006 General Convention. Such a request is unprecedented, and we believe that granting any of these requests would pose a grave danger to the Anglican Communion. While we intend to publicize the contents, we are sending this to you in advance of publication in the hope you will have the opportunity to see it first.

An important aspect of our Anglican identity is our comprehensiveness as a reformed and catholic church in which our unity is expressed in common prayer rather than adherence to a formal confession of faith other than the Creeds.

Historically, Anglicans have been willing to live together with a wide spectrum of theological perspectives. As you remind us in your June 2006 statement "The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today," our distinctive Anglican inheritance includes "a reformed commitment to the absolute priority of the Bible for deciding doctrine, a catholic loyalty to the sacraments and the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and a habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility that does not seek to close down unexpected questions too quickly."

Drawing on these three components together, we are rooted in Christ, and our focus in Christ enables us to live with diverse and even at times conflicting points of view. Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane has recently commented: "It is because Jesus Christ, second person of the Trinity made flesh, is our goal, our end, our telos, the central focus and direction of our lives, that Anglicanism has found through the ages that we can afford to live with messiness, ambiguity and anomaly at the edges." the rest at the AAC blog