ACI: Dublin Post-Mortem

Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Friday, February 4th, 2011
By:
The Reverend Canon Professor Christopher Seitz
The Reverend Dr. Philip Turner
The Reverend Dr. Ephraim Radner
Mark McCall, Esq.

Much has already been written about the Primates’ Meeting that concluded last Sunday. From our perspective, the most important evaluation of this gathering is one that assesses its place in the ecclesiology of the Anglican Communion that has been developed with considerable effort, thought and consensus over the last century. That ecclesiology can be summarized as defining the Anglican Communion as a communion of autonomous churches bound together by a common faith—in the words of TEC’s constitution, the “historic faith and order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer”—and linked institutionally by four “Instruments of Communion” that, in the words of the Covenant, “assist in the discernment, articulation and exercise of our shared faith and common life and mission.” Sadly, the Dublin meeting constituted a repudiation of this well developed Communion ecclesiology.

First, as we and others have already noted, the Dublin meeting represented only a small fraction of the Communion’s active members. Thus, from the very outset it lacked one of the defining criteria of a Communion Instrument, the ability to function as a body that “interprets and articulates the common faith of the Church’s members (consensus fidelium)”. (Covenant 3.1.4.) Last week, the consensus fidelium was to be found elsewhere with those who did not attend. the rest

We are left with a grouping—one can no longer say “communion”—of three dozen or so autonomous churches, many of whom are not in communion with others, without any effective Instruments of Communion to bind them together. This is made no less heartbreaking by being the Communion’s obvious trajectory for several years.

Tim Fountain+: Radical attendance drop shows Anglican Primates Mtg. in "disunity"
...So, a small, affluent, socially homogeneous inner circle of a very small denomination indulges its fancies at the cost of a diverse, global Christian fellowship - a fellowship whose leaders hung in with misrepresentations and broken commitments while trying to maintain bonds of affection. That is, until this 2011 Anglican Primates Meeting in Dublin.

Church Times: Impressions of ‘gracefulness’