Statement from the Anglican Communion in New Westminster

In response to the Canadian House of Bishop's Motions. posted November 18th, 2003

At its fall meeting in Toronto, the Canadian House of Bishops passed two motions designed to address the deepening crisis in the Diocese of New Westminster and the Anglican Church of Canada. One motion asks Bishop Terry Buckle to refrain from exercising Episcopal ministry for our parishes; it also asks Bishop Michael Ingham and Archbishop David Crawley to set aside their efforts to discipline Bishop Buckle and seven clergy of our parishes. The motion continues by asking for a mediator to be appointed to negotiate adequate Episcopal oversight, agreeable to both parties, while a task force works to recommend a more permanent model of adequate Episcopal oversight.

We have today responded to the Canadian Bishops, welcoming their efforts to recognize our need for adequate Episcopal oversight. We have cautious hope that this path will lead to the full support and protection of our parishes in the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Anglicans worldwide.

While there is some receptiveness to the Canadian Bishop’s motions, the Diocese of New Westminster has clearly not yet acknowledged the meaning and intent of the Primates’ statement on which the motions were based. Several reports indicate that the Diocese believes it has already offered adequate measures in the form of temporary “Episcopal Visitor”, even though this measure clearly falls far short of the Episcopal oversight envisaged by the Primates and indeed the Canadian Bishops. We have also become aware that the Bishop of New Westminster is publicly pressuring one coalition church to immediately accept his authority, in advance of the process requested by the Canadian House, adding that their funding “could” be restored if they do.

Naturally, it is very difficult for meaningful discussions towards “adequate Episcopal oversight” to take place in the context of these pressures and mis-statements. These actions call into question the good faith intentions of the Diocese of New Westminster, and their willingness to respect the meaning and intent of the Primates’ statement on which the Canadian House built its motions.

Accordingly, in our letter to the Canadian House of Bishops, we have asked for a number of provisions to be granted, in an effort to ensure that this process is fair and transparent. We have requested that the Bishop of New Westminster directly acknowledge the Primates’ call for true Episcopal oversight for parishes such as ours. To ensure that we are not left without Episcopal leadership for an extended length of time, we have asked that an interim Bishop acceptable to the ACiNW parishes be given permission to oversee our parishes in the short term while a solution is sought. And to ensure that we can participate in this process without the spectre of legal action, we have asked that all legal proceedings and other oppressive actions against our clergy and churches – including St. Martin’s and Holy Cross Abbotsford – be dropped entirely.

We believe these requests and clarifications are reasonable and necessary steps to ensure this process is fair and equitable, and we pray that the House of Bishops and all parties involved would recognize and honour the necessity of a fair and equitable process in resolving the current situation and accordingly endorse these requests.

The issue you mention: the difference between those denominations which maintain the historical order of the Church and those which operate along radical (in the sense of post-reformation only existance, influenced by 'post-enlightenment' philosophy) 'congregational' organizational patterns does indeed exemplify the difference between those of us who saw the Protestant reformation as merely a means of correcting a few accreted errors in Catholic theology (Anglicans, and to some extent some conservative Lutherans) and those who largely chose to throw the baby out with the bathwater and attempt to start over from scratch, ignoring 1500 years of Church history (Presbyterians, various other Calvinists, Anabaptists, and so on). Of course that statement is written from a radically Anglican perspective which does not reflect as much of the Calvinist influence present in some parts of Anglicanism.

As you may have noticed in an earlier thread today, when a group of conservative Presbyterians (by definition existing in post-reformation, post-enlightement influenced congregational organizations which include such radical steps as throwing out the Historical Catholic definition of Presbyter and reinterpretting it based solely on reformation theology without proper regard for the Early Church Fathers, or the traditions of the Church) attempted to claim their form of polity to be clearly superior, they conveniently ignored the fact that the largest such (presbyterian) group in the United States - the PCUSA is also the most heretical. In the same manner also we can see that the largely congregationally oriented ELCA [Lutheran], the mostly congregationally oriented UMC [Methodist], and of course the denomination which subsumes the original group which called itself "Congregationalists" the UCC [known in some circles as Unitarians Considering Christ] are all heavily infiltrated by, and in fact many times dominated by new age gnostic heretics of the same types as those currently running amok in portions of ecusa.

That being the case, congregationalist orientated organizations might at best be seen as providing a bit of firewall insulation for individual parishes, at the cost of discarding the majority of the traditions of the Church... somehow that doesn't seem worth it, at least from where I'm standing.

[and now, I'd best go find my nomex long-johns... :-)]

Well, that was sort of what I was thinking of. I was really referring to the tone of "dependency" that I was sensing in the push for Epsicopal oversight.

It reminds me of a man in my congregation in Yreka, CA. His business forced him to travel some, and at times he would need to be in another city for several months. In those cases, he would transfer his church membership to a church in that city. It was almost an "umbilical cord" kind of thing. I thought it was a bit weird.

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