ECUSA to slow- but not stop - 'liberal' agenda

ECUSA to slow liberal agenda @ Church Times, UK

By George Conger

THE Episcopal Church in the United States should slow but not halt its push for gay bishops and blessings, a report from a special commission recommends. The report prepared by the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion offered 11 resolutions for consideration in response to the recommendations of the Windsor Report and the Primates’ Dromantine Communiqué.

It recommended the Church “exercise very considerable caution” in electing bishops “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church,” but stopped short of the moratorium on gay bishops demanded by overseas and traditionalist church leaders. The Commission also recommended that the Church not permit public liturgies for the blessing of same-sex unions. However the current practice of private unofficial ceremonies would be permitted under its guidelines through the rubric of offering appropriate “individual pastoral care for gay and lesbian Christians”.

The Church should also proffer its “sincerest apology and repentance for having breached the bonds of affection in the Anglican Communion”. However, the language proposed by the Commission stated the apology was not for having been in error for affirming the election of a non-celibate homosexual priest as bishop, but for a “failure to consult adequately with our Anglican partners” before it authorized the election of Gene Robinson. In the report’s covering letter, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and President of the General Convention’s House of Deputies, Dean George Werner stated the report was “intended to start the conversation and not conclude” it. The commission had been charged with “considering how to maintain the highest degree of communion within the Anglican Communion given the different perspectives held with regard to the place of homosexual persons in the life of the Church.”

A legislative committee appointed by the two Church leaders will review the report and prepare legislation for action by the Church’s General Convention, which meets June 13-21 in Columbus, Ohio. Reaction to the report by leaders of the various factions of the fractious Episcopal Church has been less voluble than in the past, due to the preliminary nature of the recommendations, and the need to build political coalitions to respond to the report. The specter of the election of a new bishop for California on May 6 also looms large. Three of the seven candidates nominated for the post of Bishop of California are partnered gay or lesbian priests. The election of one of these three priests to the episcopate would shift the political fight away from the report, as General Convention must affirm the election before the bishop-elect is consecrated. Traditionalists welcomed the preliminary work done by the Commission but cautioned against accepting the proposals as written.

The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner of the conservative think-tank the Anglican Communion Institute noted the recommendations would merely paper over the cracks within the Church. “Expedience in overt agreement will be grasped at over the necessity of deeper agreement in faith and morals, the lack of which is the cause of our current crisis” he cautioned.