February 26, 2007
Colony
It’s time long overdue that our Anglican colleagues around the world come to Jesus on the subject that though we were once over here a colony, we aren’t anymore. Let some of them continue to walk the pontifical two-step all they wish, but we do it now different on this side of the pond.
In spite of this, we Anglican Episcopalians even with this tribal and only partially eccelsial way we identify ourselves, would remind our global fellows that we are all together the baptised people of God. These God-commissioned holy orders and the Covenant by which we keep them transcend all those lesser housekeeping solteriological orders we’ve created and have come to suggest are holier than thou.
Further, we’ve discovered a way we believe to access God’s grace through a collegial and intentionally non-pontifical system that honors that Covenant equally for all, above and beyond any other “covenant” so-called. It’s the way of the General Convention, and though it’s more often than not generally conventional, it’s what we’ve got, and it works for now quite well for us with a catholicity of its own.
I was recently reminded that forty years ago when the American church faced an urban and even deeper racial and ethnic crisis, Presiding Bishop John Hines called a special General Convention to face those issues. We didn’t think much then about all the baptised through their proper representatives being the church’s voice, but John Hines did. He did not ask only the House of Bishops to act. He was a better informed churchman than that. Rather did he call us all to act and properly so according to our polity through all four forms of our ministry.
It is said by historians that on the day the American Declaration of Independence was signed, old King George III entered into his journal that “nothing at all of much importance happened today.” As well, H L Mencken once defined an archbishop as a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Jesus. I suspect he was right.
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