A Response to Bishop Johnson's Pastoral Letter Concerning the AAC Memo
By The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Senior Fellow, The Anglican Communion Institute
The only thing surprising about Bishop Johnson's pastoral letter is the level of vituperative hostility; the content itself represents a consistent ignorance about the Anglican Communion and a willful denial about ECUSA's standing, externally and internally, with respect to its canonical legitimacy in the eyes of both that Communion and many of our own members.
As I have noted elsewhere, the outrage over this "leaked memo" of the AAC is either a sign of disingenuousness or of numbed consciousness. The basic outline of this "strategy" has been public for some months, largely because it represents the Proposal of the Primates of the Global South for disciplining ECUSA (and New Westminster) that was presented at the October Lambeth meeting (this proposal is available atanglicancommunioninstitute.org). In brief, the Proposal calls for the larger Communion, along a certain timetable, to withdraw its recognition of those bishops who consented to Robinson's election, participated in his consecration, or supported the local option resolutions regarding same-sex blessings; it also calls on the Communion to maintain its recognition of those bishops and others who opposed these measures as the legitimate representatives of the Episcopal Church. These recognized leaders would then be affirmed as those capable to acting by rights according the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church.
The AAC -- through its leaders and individual members, both present at Lambeth and subsequently -- have affirmed the thrust of this Proposal. We didn't need a publicity splash to know this.
In case Bishop Johnson and others hadn't noticed, even though the Proposal was not officially accepted by the Primates meeting as a whole, it has been put into place by individual Primates in their relationships with ECUSA already, albeit in an uncoordinated fashion. The process for deciding who is "the real Episcopal Church" is well underway; and thus far, the weight is stacking up in favor of the AAC's contention. This is a process that the larger Communion has set in motion quite independent of the AAC, and its implications and outcome are tied to the center, not the periphery, of ECUSA's leadership legitimacy.
If any of this comes as a surprise to bishops of ECUSA, it can only be because they have once again closed their eyes to what the majority of the Anglican Communion is actually saying, doing, and committed to being. Then again, such willful blindness no longer strikes people in the larger Communion as odd, since it seems to have characterized all the decisions and actions people like Bp. Johnson claim were done "publicly and above board": the public trashing of the Scriptures, of the historic faith and order of the Church, of our Constitution, of the previous commitments of the General Convention, of Communion teaching and agreements, of the bonds of our common life -- that this constitutes "established means" of peaceableness over against the "deceit" of those upholding the teaching and witness of our historical faith is damning statement of Bp. Johnson's own stunted moral vision.
In short, nothing new. The AAC is not an outlaw organization; membership in and support of its work is not a "breaking of communion" with ECUSA; no one should be frightened by Johnson's bluster.
