BISHOP LAWRENCE 

NOT INVITED TO LAMBETH;

ARCHBISHOP BEACH 

SAYS HE IS INSULTED

It's official:  Bishop Mark Lawrence will not be invited to the Lambeth Conference next year.  In my blog posting of 23 February 2019, I asked, "Will Bishop Lawrence be Invited to the Lambeth Conference?" Find it here . Now we know the answer for sure. No.

Why was Lawrence not invited? The answer is simple. He is not in the Anglican Communion. Only bishops of the Anglican Communion get invited to the Lambeth Conference. 

The official word from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the invitations came in an Anglican News Service announcement posted on the Internet on 26 April 2019. Find it here . The Archbishop of Canterbury invited other Christian churches to send observers to the Lambeth Conference next year. Included in the article was this paragraph:

In addition to leaders of Churches in Communion and ecumenical partners, representatives from Churches formed by people who left the Anglican Communion are also being invited to send observers. These churches---the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the Anglican Church of Brazil and the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa (REACH-SA)---are not formally part of the Anglican Communion but are recognized to different extents by some of the Communion's provinces.

The operative phrases here are:  "people who left the Anglican Communion," and "are not formally part of the Anglican Communion." This makes it absolutely clear that the Anglican Church in North America is not in the Anglican Communion. Likewise, the Diocese of South Carolina, as part of the ACNA, is not in the Anglican Communion. Therefore, the 50-odd bishops of the ACNA, including Lawrence, were not invited to the Lambeth Conference. They were invited to send observers, that is, to send representatives to watch, but not participate, in the Conference.

Foley Beach, the archbishop of ACNA, and chairman of ACNA's parent, GAFCON (Global Anglican Futures Conference), declared the Archbishop of Canterbury's non-invitation to ACNA to be an insult. He wrote a response that was promptly posted on Anglican Ink. Find it here . Beach declared:

I have never left the Anglican Communion, and have no intention of doing so.

I did transfer out of a revisionist body that had left the teaching of the Scriptures and the Anglican Communion and I became canonically resident in another province of the Anglican Communion. I have never left. For the Anglican Church in North America to be treated as mere "observers" is an insult to both our bishops, many of whom have made costly stands for the Gospel, and the majority of Anglicans around the world who have stood with us as a province of the Anglican Communion.

Au contraire, cher archevêque. You left the Anglican Communion when you left the Episcopal Church, the only province of the Anglican Communion in the United States. Moreover, the ACNA is not "another province of the Anglican Communion." The Anglican Communion is composed of 40 independent provinces, or member churches, around the world. The ACNA is not one of them, never has been.

Could ACNA become a province of the Anglican Communion? Possible, but extremely unlikely. Two problems with this. In one, to be an Anglican one has to be in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The present ABC, Justin Welby, has made it perfectly clear that he is not in communion with the ANCA. Thus, on this ground alone, the ACNA is not Anglican. Moreover, to gain admission to the Anglican Communion as the 41st province, the ACNA would have to win approval of the Anglican Consultative Council, one of the Four Instruments of Communion (Unity) (1-ABC, 2-Lambeth Conference, 3-primates' meeting, 4-ACC). The ACC meets every three years. In fact, it is meeting today in Hong Kong. Since ACNA's beginning, in 2009, the ACC has met four times. The ACNA has not applied for admission to the Anglican Communion in any of these ACC sessions. Why has ACNA not applied for admission to the AC? My best guess is that they do not want the humiliation of a rejection, that would almost certainly occur. If they believed they would be admitted they would have applied. They know they would be denied admission.

But wait, has not GAFCON "recognized" ACNA as a province of the Anglican Communion? Yes. The problem with this is that GAFCON is not an official body of the Anglican Communion. It has no authority at all to declare anyone in or out of the Anglican Communion. Only the ABC and the ACC can do that. What GAFCON has done is to incorporate ACNA as a part of GAFCON, not of the Anglican Communion, big difference. GAFCON is a self-created coalition of fundamentalist Anglicans based in equatorial Africa, committed to opposition of rights for and inclusion of women and open homosexuals in the life of the church. The fact that the members of GAFCON are all Anglicans does not confer any official status on this body or on its decisions and actions. The assertion that it represents the majority of Anglicans in the world is dubious. All of its assemblies since its formation in 2008 have been minorities of the bishops of the Anglican Communion. No conference of GAFCON has ever assembled a majority of the bishops of the Anglican Communion. In fact, apparently only the hard-liner primates, as Uganda, Nigeria, and Rwanda have announced a boycott of next year's Lambeth Conference. Well over half of the 800-odd bishops of the Anglican Communion have already accepted their invitations to attend the Conference. 

Meanwhile, Bishop Lawrence says he is an Anglican bishop and the Diocese of South Carolina insists it is in the Anglican Communion. Let us look at the DSC first. On its website, it repeats the word "Anglican" or its forms, countless times as if repetition makes truth. It does not. For instance, in its "Statement of Faith," of Oct. 6, 2015, the words Anglican and Anglicanism appear six times while the word Episcopal appears only once, in the official title of the diocese. Too, as I pointed out in my 23 February blog posting, some parishes declare on their websites that they, and the DSC, are in the Anglican Communion. This is flatly false. DSC and all of its congregations are not in the Anglican Communion.

Then there is the question, Is Mark Lawrence a bishop? This one is more complicated. He is not a bishop of the Episcopal Church and therefore not a bishop of the Anglican Communion. This is why he was not invited to Lambeth next year. 

But, is he a bishop? He was "released and removed" as a bishop in the Episcopal Church by direction of the Presiding Bishop of TEC on Dec. 5, 2012. She did this because Lawrence had publicly refused his ordination vow to respect the discipline of the Episcopal Church. On Oct. 15, 2012, when the PB placed a "restriction" on Bishop Lawrence, he ignored the restriction, and the diocesan leadership declared the diocese independent of TEC. This was finalized in a majority vote of the diocesan convention on Nov. 19, 2012. However, Lawrence did not submit a letter of resignation as a bishop and was not deposed as a bishop by the House of Bishops, the way two earlier secessionist bishops (Scofield and Duncan) had been. Where this leaves him legally, a canonical scholar would have to tell us. My best guess is, he is still technically a bishop but cannot presently function as a bishop of the Episcopal Church; and he could be restored to authority by agreement with the Presiding Bishop. Since he has not been formally deposed as a bishop by the HOB, the door is open for Lawrence to return to TEC as a bishop but this would be up to the Presiding Bishop. At least, this is my take on it.

I have continued to use the term "bishop" when referring to Mark Lawrence as a courtesy to him and his followers because that is what they claim. The fact is, the institution that conferred the title of bishop on him removed him from exercising the authority of a bishop. I do not see how one can leave an institution and take with him the office conferred by that institution. Nevertheless, he, DSC, ACNA, and GAFCON all call him Bishop Lawrence. The Archbishop of Canterbury does not regard him as an Anglican Communion bishop. If he had, Lawrence would have been invited to Lambeth. He was not.

So, in what sense is DSC Anglican? It is part of a fundamentalist off-split of classical Anglicanism that developed in the late Twentieth Century. This was a coalition of anti-feminist and anti-homosexual equatorial African Anglican primates and anti-feminist and anti-homosexual American Episcopalians. They were galvanized particularly by TEC's approval of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. Rigid and intolerant fundamentalism is a perversion of classical Anglicanism which is based on inclusion, tolerance, and reason (the three legged stool: Scripture, tradition, and reason). GAFCON is an attempt to remake classical Anglicanism into a new fundamentalism or to break up the Anglican Communion and keep the majority in the new fundamentalism. The Archbishop of Canterbury, and the majority of Anglican bishops, are holding the Communion together against this counter-revolutionary assault. It is the biggest threat to classical Anglicanism since the Catholic/Evangelical splits of the mid-Nineteenth Century. This is serious business and should not be taken lightly.

Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the secretary general of the Anglican Communion, recently criticized GAFCON for disunity in the Communion. Read the Church Times article about this here . Its title speaks for itself, "ACC-17: GAFCON are not behaving as Anglicans, says Idowu-Fearon." See also the informative article about this by Mary Frances Schjonberg, for Episcopal News Service, here . 

I expect classical Anglicanism will survive but I imagine it is likely to do so without some of its largest provinces which seem resolved to preserve their deeply embedded social conventions as expressions of their Anglicanism. Several equatorial African primates have indicated they had rather go their own way. They are, after all, independent churches. If they cannot impose their will on the rest of the Anglican Communion, they appear ready to separate from the whole. In fact, GAFCON is a manifestation of this attitude even though it is still identifies as Anglican. This is the test of the Anglican Communion today. Will it too see schism?

The ABC and the Lambeth Conference are fighting to protect classical Anglicanism and the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church is playing its part in this. The leaders of the Diocese of South Carolina have chosen a different path.