"Rather than pray for their enemies or do good to them, most of the primates have attempted an unrelenting scourge of all who do not conform to them.

"The primates have been meeting for only 32 years and would do the world a favor if they disbanded. Their collective gathering has obviously fallen apart in spitefulness and mutual distrust," concluded Crew.

The Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, Sr. President and CEO, American Anglican Council, had a different perspective and responded to Crew's tirade saying, "I would strongly advise the orthodox Primates to 1) organize before the Primates' meeting, and 2) attend and remove by force of numbers the Presiding Bishop of the American Episcopal Church (not physically, but by either voting her off the "island," or recessing to another room and not letting her in). The meeting is a place to gather and potentially to settle some of the issues that are pulling the Anglican Communion apart, and to begin to restore health to a most wonderful communion.

"In the above case, if Dr. Williams did not go along with Jefferts Schori's exclusion, then I would suggest having the next-door-meeting without him. I just don't believe staying home from the field of battle helps win a war over the truth and nature of Christianity within Anglicanism. The Christian Church needs a spiritually strong and muscular Anglicanism to re-evangelize the West; are we willing to make the sacrifices in order for this to happen?"

A Nigerian bishop, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Samuel Kelechi, Bishop of Ukwa, wrote in response to Crew saying, somewhat sarcastically, "So we need to call the primates to repentance, don't we? A teenage child goes wayward and becomes wasteful to the chagrin of one of the parents, while she has the sympathy of the other parent. Apparently she becomes a constant source of quarrel between the parents as one of them is bent on defending the child's actions to the disgust of the other parent. While we should call these quarreling parents to order and ask them to remember their first love and uphold their marriage, do we have anything to say to the teenage child who is the source of the parent's recent quarrels? Does she not need to change her ways?"

Crew replied, "The best model for the child is for the parents to behave maturely. It is not effective to treat a son or daughter as a child when the son or daughter is middle-aged or older. Loving grown-up sons and daughters will patiently wait out the parents' temper tantrum."

Let us untangle all this.

No Instrument of Unity has done more to isolate, damage and disenfranchise orthodox Primates than the Anglican Consultative Council AKA the Anglican Communion Office. It has not been the primates, not by a long shot . Under ACC Secretary General John Peterson, orthodox primates were isolated and marginalized at primatial gatherings, their cell phones taken from them, and no press/media access was allowed. This was done to satisfy his American paymasters. Over time, the Primates got wind of this manipulation. It ended when Canon Kenneth Kearon replaced Peterson and Frank Griswold was replaced by Jefferts Schori.

For the past 10 years, the Primates meetings have been consumed with one major agenda item - homosexuality. The man pushing the agenda was Frank Griswold, not the Global South Primates. I have attended most, if not all of these meetings, and can attest that to be true.

The ethos of the Primates meetings changed when tough-minded Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola refused to roll over to Griswold or the Archbishop of Canterbury. He found allies in Henry Orombi (Uganda), Emmanuel Kolini (Rwanda), Benjamin Nzimbi (Kenya), Moses Tay and later Yong Ping Chung (SE Asia) and Greg Venables (Southern Cone).

With this coalition, the jig was up and the secretary general could no longer manipulate the orthodox bishops. Simultaneously, the media gained better access to the primates.

Crew talks about "bonds of law." What exactly is he talking about? The law as it is found in the Ten Commandments, or the law written on our hearts (Jer. 31:33)? No, what Crew is complaining about is not about "law" but legalism, and here he is dead wrong. The Primates only wish to uphold timely Biblical standards of morality which Crew and TEC's bishops and pansexualists have twisted to justify their own bizarre behaviors and Crew wants to blame the primates.

Crew talks about Primates who "have prodigally wasted precious and limited resources by flying across the world time and time again to address not the world's major needs, but their own private and personal meanness. They continue to snarl at each other over territory and power."

There are two fallacies here. The majority of the primates hate spending money travelling the globe to attend primatial gatherings that always devolved into loud raucous arguments about homosexuality instigated by Frank Griswold. They hated going to primates meetings where Griswold would whine one more time about the need to broker sodomy into the church to satisfy people like Crew and later V. Gene Robinson.

As far as border crossings are concerned, the truth needs to be spoken. No Primate ever came to US shores uninvited. Most of them came reluctantly at the pleas of orthodox TEC clergy and bishops who, according to ACNA Archbishop Robert Duncan, would have been exterminated by revisionists if they had not come. Duncan said so in South Africa recently at an Anglican meeting of the Lausanne Congress on world evangelization.

Orthodox Episcopal priests and bishops would have been pushed into ecclesiastical gas ovens, stripped of their ministry, churches and pensions for daring to go against the prevailing sexual zeitgeist. That Southeast Asia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and the Southern Cone came to their rescue is what any brother would do if they saw their fellow brethren being persecuted and hounded out of the church. They may have to do it again when Mark Lawrence, the Bishop of South Carolina, faces the inevitable wrath of Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Now the orthodox primates are saying they won't attend the Dublin Primates meeting. What about that does Crew not understand? Furthermore, these orthodox primates represent 80% or more of the Anglican Communion. They are telling Dr. Rowan Williams they are done being seen in the same room as Mrs. Jefferts Schori and the primates of the Anglican Church of Canada. They will no longer go for his shuttle diplomacy between large rooms in the hopes that some Hegelian synthesis can be worked out. It won't happen. Rowan can consort with the liberals all on his own, but the orthodox will be no shows at his primatial party.

The "posturing" as Crew puts it, has been all on the part of Jefferts Schori and the liberal Primates. She and her predecessor have put the orthodox Primates on the defensive over homosexuality for more than a dozen primatial gatherings to the point that the African bishops have grown sick and tired of the whole subject. If I had any doubt about this before, Alexandria, Egypt, sealed the deal. The orthodox primates left totally dispirited. They would never go through that ordeal again or ever sit down with Jefferts Schori.

The military metaphor of Bishop Anderson to go fully armed is a good idea and has scriptural warrant based on the fact that we are in a spiritual battle. The number of orthodox archbishops (22 out of 38) looks like a majority but in fact it is not. Regrettably, the number of Primates who once refused to take Holy Communion with Jefferts Schori has gone from 22 to 7 (this happened in Alexandria) drawing a gleeful response from Colin Coward of Changing Attitude that "we are slowly winning."

The Great Lie that, "most of the primates have attempted an unrelenting scourge" on the Anglican Communion is just that, a lie. They are praying for the repentance of Jefferts Schori, and what they are demanding is conformity not to themselves but to Holy Scripture.

The most important thing to remember in all this is that Scripture considers sex outside of heterosexual marriage to be a sin. Global South leaders will not deviate from that. It is the chief reason why orthodox Episcopalians in North America have separated themselves from TEC. You cannot endorse sexual sin and offer salvation if you don't believe sexual sin has been committed.

The liberals and revisionists have changed the ground rules demanding inclusivity and its cousin diversity. The "come as you are stay as you are" gospel violates Scripture, history and tradition which says come as you are, but be prepared to change because the gospel demands it. Orthodox and revisionist primates are on an unstoppable collision course.

END