Out of Egypt

Gerald Bray
Date 2010/9/29

On 30 January 2010 Bishop Mouneer Anis of Egypt announced that he was resigning from the standing committee of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC).

The ACC is a little-known body that seeks to co-ordinate the activities of the Anglican Communion, and it wields considerable influence behind the scenes, setting much of the stage (and in effect, the agenda) for the Primates' Meetings, the Lambeth Conference, and so on. Since the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, it is one of the bodies where the continuing presence of American representatives has been questioned, especially by churches from the developing world who see it as a means of disciplining member churches of the Communion that have stepped out of line.

No church has gone farther in that direction than the American Episcopal one, and its continuing participation in the ACC, which includes having Ms Schori, their presiding bishop, on the standing committee, is widely regarded as anomalous (to put it mildly). Many churches have given up on the ACC already and formed their own network of communication, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA). The FCA is not an exact parallel to the ACC, because anyone can join it and make a contribution to the ongoing development of orthodox Anglicanism. It may have its faults, but at least nobody can accuse it of being a closed body of church bureaucrats, which is what the ACC all too often appears to be. the rest at Virtueonline image

Bishop Mouneer could easily have camouflaged his resignation [from the ACC] in the way that people often do. He could have pleaded the burdens of office or the dangers of stress and ill health. He might even have said that it was time for someone else to take his place, and pretended that he was stepping down in order to give others a chance. He did none of those things.

Instead, he told the truth. He made it as clear as anyone could that he was leaving because he had been marginalised and because the ACC was drifting inexorably in a liberal direction. Its pleas for a period of 'listening' to other people's points of view were nothing more than a desire to give the Episcopal church enough breathing space within the Anglican Communion to commit further outrages against it. Of course it had always been suspected that the 'listening' was going to be in one direction only.