Dear sionnsar,
I find this confusing.
Are these people still part of the Anglican Communion?
Can Bishop Griswold in some way inhibit their communion with the Anglican Communion?
To me, it seems that, whatever its current difficulties, ECUSA is the current holder of the "exclusive franchise," if you will, of Anglicanism in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the United States. Although ECUSA's position is precarious, it has seemed that it is the final arbiter of who does and doesn't belong to the Anglican Communion in the US, at least for now.
But if these people declare themselves out of communion with ECUSA, while simultaneously putting themselves under the Province of Uganda... I have a headache.
Any light you can shed on this would be MUCH APPRECIATED.
sitetest
In short: Yes, these people are still part of the Anglican Communion, albeit under "Alternative Episcopal Oversight."
ECUSA has been dragging its feet in not acting on the petitions of many parishes who have asked the panel of reference for just this thing. When a parish has a disagreement with the bishop, the people and the vestry (elected governing board) can ask for alternative oversight. The priest would essentially transfer his allegiance to another bishop whose views/standards are more in keeping with the gospel. Frank Griswold must have legal grounds on which to inhibit any priest - but as we have seen elsewhere (CT six) any bishop can just trample on the canons and seize church property, fire the vestry and inhibit the priest. There are no due process guarantees in the Episcopal Church, and precious little respect for its own law.
African bishops and archbishops have been receiving numerous requests for affiliation from bewildered and beleaguered Episcopal parished for several years. Many parishes have been accepted long before the Windsor Report was drafted.
Personally, I would prefer to be out of communion with heresy, wouldn't you?
But remember that there is *no* over-arching authority in the wwAC. The Archbishop of Canterbury is simply "first among equals"; as the leader of "Mother Church" he is accorded special respect.
This is a system that works only if all members voluntarily stay within the guidelines they have set for themselves. ECUSA was the first to violate the guidelines. And here is where Anglicanism's history works against it -- we are well accustomed to living together despite differences, thanks to our history (the Elizabethan Compromise). So we are less sensitive to the rise of heresy than the Orthodox, and slower and much more hesitant to act.
With ECUSA and others having broken some of the agreements, the rest are effectively broken too. Thus you have churches affiliating with Nigeria, Uganda, Colombia, and so on, not to mention the African mission of AMiA. If the people in another country cry out for aid because their national church has become willfully apostate and in violation of the agreements, should one abandon them? The Global South has said no.
Neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA have any say, any longer, about who is in the wwAC and who isn't.
But all this muddies the definition of "communion." In the wwAC these days, it is being redefined as "association" by the self-professed "inclusives." For obvious reasons. For the more orthodox, the sense of communion is being heavily strained by the effort to repair the breach -- is a cloth torn in two when the rip has gone only halfway? What if the ripping is still in progress with the separating forces still on it? The situation is temporary and will resolve itself.
The question of communion with ECUSA via Uganda is a good one, and one that has been raised. Perhaps the best answer is that some on one side of the ripping cloth have severed their ties to their original side (Global North) and attached to the other (Global South). They have declared where they will be when it is all done.