Now that that dance is over...

Mark Harris writes: “I believe that GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, held in Jerusalem in June 2008 marked a turning point. Prior to GAFCON the church division issues may have been about bad theology and bad practice on an Episcopal level - about Spong and Robinson and all the controversy for which they were the focal points. The bad dancers were in the West, and in the "older" churches. It was the US and Canada and even England that were to blame. Occasionally New Zealand would get a hit for outrageous prayer book language, or parts of Australia for thinking about lay presidency of the Eucharist, but mostly it was the North Americans who were the bad dancers.

After GAFCON the division is between some variation of Calvinism as interpreted by primarily English Evangelicals in an odd partnership with its opposite, a form of catholic ecclesiology in which conciliar and synodical structures and customs effectively negate the role of lay people, women, and other undesirables, on the one side and most of mainstream Anglicanism on the other.”

 

More here.