The irony should not be missed. An Archbishop says to an audience in Africa "You know very well, dear brothers and sisters, what it means to have doors locked in your faces by those who claim the name of Christians and Anglicans" while he stood to the side as thousands of orthodox Anglicans in North America had the same experience. He tells his audience in Harare that "Day by day, you have to face injustice and the arrogance of 'false brethren' as St Paul would call them", but would St. Paul find any difference between those who lock doors in Harare and those who lock doors in TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada? Are the Zimbabweans false brethren simply because they intimidate with a fist rather than a writ?

It would be a great tragedy if the reframing of Anglicanism that we are seeing take hold in Africa and the Global South was to be subverted by Lambeth rebranding, wrote Raven.

A recent gathering of eleven orthodox Anglican archbishops in China to which Dr. Williams was not invited reveals again how deep the growing divide is between Canterbury and the ever-expanding Global South.

A communiqué released by the archbishops at the end of their China visit in September spoke volumes. It roundly repudiated both Dr. Williams' own theology and the Anglican Communion's "Instruments of Unity" insisting that secular pressure to allow unacceptable practices in the name of human rights and equality is wrong.

They further blasted what they said was "the undermining of Scriptural authority and two millennia of church tradition, the erosion of orthodoxy has gone as far as the ordination and consecration of active gay and lesbian clergy and bishops, and the development of liturgies for same-sex marriage."

Without mentioning names, it was clear they had bishops Katharine Jefferts Schori, Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool in mind.

The archbishops described existing Communion instruments as "dysfunctional". Their withdrawal from all ecclesial structures now seems permanent unless full repentance is forthcoming. That seems most unlikely. They said there is no proper moral or spiritual authority in the communion.

Furthermore, the Anglican Communion Covenant has failed to ignite either the Global South bishops or several Western provinces like TEC and Canada because, from an orthodox perspective, the four instruments still have a central place. The pansexual western provinces will not accept any form of discipline. If discipline is forthcoming, it will be meaningless and everyone knows it.

In China, the Global South Primates reiterated the transformation of the Communion stating that the majority of Anglicans are no longer found in the west, but in churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America "that are firmly committed to our historic faith and order."

It is regrettable, they said, that the Lambeth Conference 2008 was designed not to make any resolutions that would have helped to resolve the crisis facing the Communion. (There has been no enforcement of Resolution 1:10 issuing forth from the 1998 Lambeth Conference.)

Dr. Williams' duplicity and prevarications among orthodox Episcopalians has lost him credibility here in the U.S. as well as among orthodox Episcopalians and newly minted Anglicans who are not in communion with him.

It was Williams who privately encouraged the Communion Partner bishops and then publically pulled the rug out from under them. He encouraged the primates to call for moratoria and then when TEC did not follow his (he thought) brilliant suggestions, he marginalized them in New Orleans and later Dublin. The Global South bishops offered to take the heat and call for Katharine Jefferts Schori to stay away. He used the excuse that he was working with the American Communion Partner bishops to resolve the issue when he was doing no such thing.

He told the Compass Rose people that he was exploring retirement options. He then sent a representative to Quito, Ecuador, to tell TEC bishops that rumors about his imminent retirement are unfounded.

All the things he said he wanted to avoid (a confederation, a two-tier Communion, for TEC not to consecrate active homosexuals, etc.) are coming to pass by his dithering, deceitfulness, and double-dealing. He has consistently kicked the can down the road in the hope that the "community," a much over worked word used repeatedly by Frank Griswold when he was PB, would somehow resolve the Communion's self contradictions.

More recently he told one of the most revisionist bishops in North America - Michael Ingham of New Westminster - that he would help him find a replacement for the godly evangelical Canon David Short of St. John's Shaughnessy who took the largest congregation in Canada and left the buildings because he would not compromise the gospel. Apparently Williams is.

Is it any wonder that the Global South no longer trusts him. They believe one's yes should be yes and one's nay, nay. They believe the straightforward (and very simple) message of the Gospel that Williams finds so hard to articulate. They believe that sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is wrong and has salvific consequences.

GAFCON/FCA

It is not simply abroad that Dr. Williams faces a crisis in his authority. The Windsor Report is in shambles and a Covenant is being universally and almost unanimously rejected by large sections of the Anglican Communion. Just this week the Diocese of Sydney rejected it. Williams himself, Lambeth Palace and the Church of England are all under siege.

The recent announcement of a GAFCON/FCA office in London headed up by CANA Bishop Martyn Minns, a Brit (who has lived in the US for many years), is giving Lambeth Palace officials a headache. Minns' boss is the head of the largest province in the Anglican Communion - Nigeria - with more than 20 million practicing Anglicans. While Primate Okoh is respectful of the office of the See of Canterbury, there is little love lost between him and Dr. Williams.

As events have transpired, Okoh is turning out to be as tough or even tougher than his predecessor, Peter Akinola. Consider his most recent statement, "What is being known now as gay and homosexuality is contrary to God's plan for human sexuality and procreation. It is against the will of God, and nobody should encourage it, and those who do will earn for themselves the damnation of the Almighty." Hardly in the spirit of The Body's Grace by Dr. Williams.

When Okoh visited Lambeth Palace, recently, he asked Williams if his fellow Nigerian Anglican brothers and sisters living in England could worship in their style in English parochial churches. In response, Williams invited him to write a letter of request. To date Okoh has had no response from Williams.

A Global Anglican Futures Conference office, the brainchild of Anglican archbishops Henry Luke Orombi, Gregory Venables, and Peter Akinola among others, is now firmly planted on UK soil. They have opened an office in London which will be headed up by CANA/ACNA Bishop Martyn Minns. It will serve as a daily reminder that Global South Anglicanism has come to England and there is nothing Williams can do about it except to huff and puff about collegiality and crossing boundaries.

But Williams has further problems from within the Church of England.

AMIE

The recent formation of the Anglican Mission in England (AMIE) - not to be confused with the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA) -- is again another tank parked facing Lambeth Palace gates.

The ordinations of three young Englishmen by the Archbishop of Kenya in June and the launch of the Anglican Mission in England is a "game-changer".

It marked a turning point after four and a half years of discussions with and proposals to Lambeth Palace. These discussions were to seek a way of providing effective Episcopal oversight to those for whom this had become problematic in the Church of England.

The launch of AMIE and the establishment of its panel of bishops indicated that they would no longer play the game of Church of England politics as defined by the Church of England Establishment.

The rules of the Establishment are premised on the fact that they have the luxury of time.

They hold all the cards. All they have to do is to sit where they are.

Their main tactic is to weaken the orthodox ranks in two ways: by co-opting some of the orthodox into their number and, second, by suggesting that there is such a significant divergence of views among the orthodox that they have neither coherence nor cohesion.

The AMIE has analyzed the current malaise as a gradual process of destabilizing biblically faithful Anglican witness and ministry.

AMIE is first about enabling orthodox biblical mission through the Church of England that has been frustrated in a number of ways.

This includes recovering a biblical view of episcopacy that enhances mission through its panel of bishops, particularly for those who find the current system has excluded, ignored, marginalized or compromised them.

The summer ordinations in Kenya were part of the process of saying that they will remain Anglican, but not on the current terms of the CofE establishment.

The process of welcoming the ordinands, launching the AMIE and expanding its membership is a process of moving to the public square in Church of England life saying, "We will not be robbed of our Anglican identity.

"We will not be marginalized. You are the usurpers. We will not allow you to deprive us of our Anglican heritage of faithfulness to the Bible."

With this kind of in-your-face attitude by usually acquiescent British clergy, Williams ought to be worried.

ORDINARIATE

When the whole idea of an Ordinariate was first offered by the Pope to gather in Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England and later around the world, Williams huffed and puffed and said he had been blind-sided by the Pope. Perhaps, but it should have been a wake-up call that the British establishment and the Church of England are vulnerable to spiritual attack. While the Ordinariate has not gathered in the multitudes as was first thought, the inevitability of women bishops might force a coalescence of Evangelicals and remaining Anglo-Catholics that could threaten to destabilize the entire Church of England especially if Evangelicals withhold the money the C of E needs to keep the lights on.

CHALLENGES TO WILLIAMS

The primary responsibility of the church that is heir to Nicaea is to safeguard the truth. Her foremost heroes are those confessors of the faith who assert Orthodox doctrine and counter heresies in the face of new trends and theological and political innovations, wrote Metropolitan and bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, Hilarion Alfeyev.

He notes by contrast the avoidance of "heresy" in today's "politically correct theology," which has characterized Rowan Williams. How is it, Your Grace, he is saying, you can detect heresy in the third century and not in the twenty-first? Hilarion acknowledges the existence of "indifferent matters" (adiaphora), quoting St. Paul (1 Cor 11:19). He adds, these acceptable differences were "certainly not those which concerned the essence of faith, church order or Christian morals. For in these matters, there is only one truth and any deviation from it is none other than heresy."

The Rev. Charles F. Raven in his book Shadow Gospel: Rowan Williams and the Anglican Communion Crisis excoriates Williams over the nature of truth. He charts the problems Dr Williams' Hegelian theological approach has posed for the Anglican Communion: his 'The Body's Grace' lecture in 1989 which became a seminal text for gay religious activists, through his championing of the attempt to water down the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10 affirming biblical orthodoxy, through the impact of his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, up to recent events in 2010.

NEW CENTER OF ANGLICAN GRAVITY

Is it any wonder that the new center of spiritual gravity for the Anglican Communion is no longer Canterbury but Abuja? It is no longer a rapidly dying liberal, revisionist Western Church, which has compromised its soul over such basic issues as human sexuality, abortion and the abandonment of the Great Commission, even the very understanding of salvation itself that is holding the communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury together. The numerical and spiritual center of gravity is orthodox and it is firmly embedded in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

On any level of understanding, the widening gap between Williams and the Global South is irreversible despite repeated efforts by him and US Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori to influence poor Global South provinces with visits, schmoozing, ribbon cuttings, financial goodies and personnel offers. These tactics will ultimately not work. His recent visit to Zimbabwe reveals how deeply divided the communion really is.

As time progresses, one sees the Archbishop of Canterbury as an increasingly impotent and lonely figure, overtaken by events. Word of his resignation, a decade before he needs to retire, might be true, but if it is not, his staying will only see an increasingly polarized, fractured communion with meaningless Primates' meetings with the Western church embracing every sexuality known to man or woman in the name of freedom and justice, while the Global South continues to grow and expand with the very gospel the West and, it would seem, Rowan Williams has rejected.

END