Anglican Mission In England is a game-changer
by Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden
www.anglicanmissioninengland.org
September 16, 2011
The ordinations of three young Englishmen by the Archbishop of Kenya in June and the launch of the Anglican Mission in England was a “game-changer”. It marked a turning point after four and a half years of discussions with and proposals to Lambeth Palace.
These discussions were to seek a way of providing effective Episcopal oversight to those for whom this had become problematic in the Church of England. The launch of AMIE and the establishment of its panel of bishops indicated that we would no longer play the game of Church of England politics as defined by the Church of England Establishment. The rules of the Establishment are premised on the fact that they have the luxury of time. They hold all the cards. All they have to do is to sit where they are.
Their main tactic is to weaken the orthodox ranks in two ways: by co-opting some of the orthodox into their number and second by suggesting that there is such a significant divergence of views among the orthodox that they have neither coherence nor cohesion.
This divergence is provoked in the same way that TV News reports on a major event, and gives equal space to the small number of people protesting at the event “in order to provide a balanced report.” Our response to this wall of silence from the Establishment often starts by being fragmentary.
We take on matters issue by issue – homosexual practice, women bishops, heterodox bishops, the need for freedom to church plant, difficulty in securing ordinations. The problems are disaggregated and our response is therefore fragmented. We can learn here from the Arab Spring for there are many parallels. The Arab Spring was started by few people, as few as seven in Egypt, who were provoked by the suicide of a market trader in Tunisia and by the murder by police of a blogger in Cairo.
In the CofE, following years of similar problems, a bishop refused to say he would teach that homosexual practice was a sin and thus young men were unable to accept ordination from him. In the Arab Spring, those seeking change made straight for the central square, the focus of national life and identity and occupied it. They were claiming it belonged to them, not to the tyrant who had usurped their nation for himself. They did not say that they were forming another nation. They did not say that they would emigrate. They went to the central public space and occupied it in order to state clearly that the square and what it stands for was theirs. They stood together in a way that the authorities could not control to claim their heritage.
In the same way AMIE is a standing together that demonstrates a different way of doing things. It has a different view of mission through planting churches and organizing for growth rather than seeking power and influence in the present system. It has a different view of being Anglican which embraces a global Anglican identity based on the Bible rather than a technical institutional identity. It has a different view of episcopacy that is not prelatical or monarchical but missional, accountable and focused on service.
It has a different view of women in ministry that does not seek to compete as though it is a matter of power and status. It has a different view of marriage and sexuality which is not based on the interchangeability of the genders. AMIE resists the disaggregation of the issues as though they are all separate. It analyses the current malaise as a gradual process of destabilizing biblically faithful Anglican witness and ministry. AMIE is first about enabling orthodox biblical mission through the Church of England which has been frustrated in a number of ways.
This includes recovering a biblical view of episcopacy that enhances mission through its panel of bishops particularly for those who find the current system has excluded, ignored, marginalized or compromised them. Oversight is to be seen not primarily as a legal requirement of an accountability to an appointing authority but as supporting the ministry and calling which both presbyter and bishop share. It is about episcope not primarily as exercising power in a territory but about collaborative ministry in expressing and serving the calling to mission wherever God leads.
AMIE also resists the playbook of senior civil servants who always respond to challenges by pointing out questions to which answers have not yet been given. AMIE is about collective action that all support whether or not all are particularly involved; it is about a refusal to be fragmented or to deal with the issues in a fragmented way. AMIE and its action has been welcomed by Anglo-Catholics as having done what they would like to have done. It has also crucially been supported and encouraged by the GAFCON Primates Council in its actions. The summer ordinations in Kenya were part of the process of saying that we will remain Anglican but not on the current terms of the CofE establishment.
The process of welcoming the ordinands, launching the AMIE and now expanding its membership is a process of moving to the public square of Church of England life and saying: “We will not be robbed of our Anglican identity. We will not be marginalized. You are the usurpers. We will not allow you to deprive us of our Anglican heritage of faithfulness to the Bible. We will find a way of being faithfully Anglican in being true to the Bible which does not depend on you.”
______________________________________________________________ The two Church of England clergy named on the by-line of this article posted by so-called virtueonline (ACNA-friendly) web-site, are known rebels in the Church of England. Sugden is – or maybe was – on General Synod of the C.of E., but it doesn’t stop him burrowing down under its defences – especially on the subject of Women and Gays in ministry. He is a spokeperson for another oddly named splinter group – ‘Anglican Mainstream‘. Anything further from the concept of mainstream Anglicanism could hardly be imagined.
The alliance of Vinay Samuel and Mr Sugden with the dissident ‘Anglican Mission in England’ marks out their intentional agenda – to displace authentic Anglicanism in the Church of England with a brand of Calvinistic obscurantism presently being embraced by certain prelates of the Global South, calling themselves the ‘GAFCON’. While ‘gaffe’ and ‘con’ are words most Anglicans are aware of, they seem not be awake to what is at the heart of the A.M.i.E. movement , which is designed to infiltrate the Mother Church with homophobic and misogynous missionaries from the GAFCON parent organisation.
The fact that the first 3 ‘ministers’ have been ordained by the Archbishop of Kenya – without permission from either Canterbury or York – to provide quasi-Anglican ministry in the British Isles is beyond credibility, and one wonders what the English hierarchy will actually do about this obvious breech of privilege and protocol. But then, the absence of ++Kenya from the last Primates’ Meeting of the Anglican Communion might be a fact that speaks louder than words.
The sheer hubris of ‘Anglican Mainstream’ setting itself up as a conduit for a mission to provide alternative ‘Anglican’ structures for the Church in England – through the machinations of GAFCON, Sugden and Samuels, almost defies the mind’s ability to reason. If Sugden still believes himself to be a member in good standing of the Church of England, then perhaps he needs to have a talk with his local bishop. This sort of lack of discipline can surely lead to none other than congregational warfare between the historic parish churches and the ‘missionary’ predation of a rival (foreign) community.
This invasion of the Church of England is nothing less than an imitation of the GAFCON churches’ forays into the USA and Canada – with the intent of undermining the ministry and credibility of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. And the same culprits are to blame – none other than the self-righteous promoters of homophobia and misogyny in those Churhes of the Anglican Communion that are hell-bent on opposing any attempt to up-date the message of the Gospel to the marginalised and disenfranchised.
Maybe the Church of England will now have to suffer the same depredations as TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada – or make a stand, right from the start, to quell the invasion.
Father Ron Smith, Christchurch, new Zealand
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