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A Plea to All ECUSA Members: "We are at a Crossroads"
From the Anglican Communion Institute
8/22/2005
As President, Executive Director, and Collegial Theologians of ACI, and on behalf of our co-workers, we want to express our thanks to all who have supported our work with prayer, counsel and financial gifts.
We believe we have made a significant contribution to the articulation of a Communion polity: a polity that is both fair to our global history and that also address the problems of finding a properly biblical discipline in this season of revision and threats to Communion life.
In many ways, we have simply sought to describe what the Anglican Communion is, in God's providence. That seems simple, but it is a task that has required constant re-examination, precisely because of the success of the Gospel's spread into wide and diverse regions across the globe. Anglicanism is a missionary locomotive with a polity caboose. Yet the time came for urgent attention to polity as a first-order affair if our beloved Communion was not to devolve into a federation of autonomous units, or worse.are at a crossroads.
We have worked with great sacrifice to our families, our 'day jobs', and our larger vocations as priests and teachers and authors. We have sought to avoid political short-cutting, have kept confidences, and have prayerfully tried to understand how the Instruments of Unity might remain focused on the tasks confronting them in this season. We have neither over-stipulated outcomes nor gotten ahead of the Holy Spirit's hard and painful work; or, we have tried not to. We have avoided the attractive and easier path of escape or removal to zones of purity or denominationalism.
A survey of our web-site will show the degree of our involvement, in terms of writing, research, and documentation. Our travel behind the scenes is not recorded there, but suffice it to say, we have been hard at work in places like Nassau, Nairobi, London, Oxford, Washington, and a variety of ECUSA diocesan venues.
We are writing because we believe we are now at a serious and unavoidable crossroads. Time-buying and subject-changing is no longer an option. The question facing ECUSA could not be clearer.
Does ECUSA mean to be a"national denomination" - an essentially "local church" -- or will it seek to be conformed to its own constitution, canons, and Prayer Book identity, declaring itself and acting as a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, in communion with the See of Canterbury? The terms of that conforming, in this specific instance, are the teaching of Lambeth 1.10 (1998) and The Windsor Report.
Will ECUSA at General Convention 2006 send a clear signal to the Instruments of Unity that it is in compliance with The Windsor Report and that it seeks, in the language of its final plea, to 'walk together'?
Our work at ACI has been about seeing that this question is front and center, and unavoidable. In that sense, the final, actual outcome is now out of our hands, and our work of theological construction and scriptural warrant with respect to our Communion is finished. Whatever else there may be to reflect upon in our church - and there is much - on this matter reflection has now given way to the imperative of decision.
We would therefore ask the general membership of ECUSA: will you seek to insure that General Convention 2006 makes this the chief business of ECUSA, that is, will ECUSA 'walk together' by complying with The Windsor Report and particularly with its clear affirmation that Lambeth 1.10 is the teaching of this church and our Communion?
We are at a crossroads. We at the Anglican Communion Institute desire that ECUSA's Bishops, as many as are able, will pledge to remain in the Anglican Communion, as that Communion has been and is now constituted for the sake of Christ's greater Church. We have worked for that goal. Please pledge your prayers and support for ECUSA remaining in the Anglican Communion and for its full, public compliance to The Windsor Report.
The Rev'd Christopher R Seitz, President
The Very Rev. Philip Turner Vice President
The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner Sr. Fellow
The Rev'd Donald Armstrong, Executive Director
--The Anglican Communion Institute, All Rights Reserved
