Thinking Anglicans

Jesmond's episcopal consecration: more links

Updated Saturday evening

The Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of S.A. has issued this Statement on the Jesmond Consecration.

The Anglican Church League has issued this statement: The Jesmond Consecration and Mark Thompson of _Moore Theological College in Sydney has written thjs about The Jesmond Consecration.

Andy Walton has written: Why now? The deeply strange timing of the renegade conservative Anglicans.

Ian Paul wrote: Should evangelicals be embarrassed by Newcastle?

Philip Jones writes about A Rogue Bishop. He thinks that the Monarch has to be involved to create a bishop in England.

The local newspaper the Newcastle Chronicle has a report: Newcastle priest could start split in Church of England over issue of homosexuality.

Harry Farley reports that: Justin Welby is a heretic, say breakaway conservative Anglicans.

Update
Andrew Goddard has published a detailed analysis of this event, which is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand what has being going on. Strongly recommended. “Order! Order!”: Reflections on The Jesmond Consecration.

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Susannah Clark
6 years ago

From the REACH statement: “The consecration by the REACH-SA bishops took place in response to a personal request from the Jesmond Parish Church leadership.” If this is true, I’m afraid that is an act of ‘exodus’ from the Church of England, and departure from its authority. As such, the Jesmond Parish Church leadership has to understand that such an exodus includes an exodus from the Church of England’s structures and properties, and it is inevitable that the Church of England must clarify this, because the churches of the Church of England, as a national Church, are a resource for all… Read more »

Susannah Clark
6 years ago

All the main office bearers of the ‘Anglican Church League’ are male, as are 35 out of 37 vice-presidents.

So… yeah… very inclusive.

Or in this day and age, bizarre.

And that’s before you even get to LGBT which to them is of course anathema.

crs
crs
6 years ago

Susannah, as I think most realise, a JPC Bishop isn’t assuming he won’t be disciplined for holding a license and acting thus. But JPC also know it will be very hard to have that happen if the CofE isn’t to do the same with those holding licenses and being at odds with church canons re marriage.

Susannah Clark
6 years ago

Mark Thompson: “We must not copy the tactics of coercion used by others and insist on a uniformity of opinion.” Yet that is precisely what conservative evangelicals have been wanting – uniformity of opinion. That principle has been pursued, not by liberal/progressives but by more conservative evangelicals: The Anglican Covenant. The Primate’s Statement. The marginalising of the Episcopal Church in the US. That has all been a desire to impose a uniformity. And when ‘unity in diversity’ has been proposed, it has been repudiated. The intransigence (and the repeated threats to ‘leave’) – they have come from conservative evangelical sources… Read more »

Jeremy
Jeremy
6 years ago

crs wrote: “JPC also know it will be very hard to have that happen if the CofE isn’t to do the same with those holding licenses and being at odds with church canons re marriage.”

I’m sure JPC hope this, but that doesn’t make it true.

Synod’s refusal to “take note” suggests that the CofE has had enough of discrimination.

Froghole
Froghole
6 years ago

Mark Thompson: “…for decades the structures of the Church of England have proven resistant to reform in the light of the Scriptures. Unbelief and immorality are not challenged but excused and, more recently, embraced. When the faithful are attacked for seeking to live out the same quiet, biblical faith as the sovereign, they find little support from the hierarchy of the Church of England, and whatever support they do receive is heavily qualified. The leadership is powerless or unwilling to act. When the faithful have cried out for protection against the predatory liberalism within the Church of England, which masquerades… Read more »

robert ian williams
robert ian williams
6 years ago

Very few of the thousand people attending Jesmond actually live in the parish. Some are not even confirmed members of the Anglican Communion and some do not even have their children baptized.

Richard Ashby
Richard Ashby
6 years ago

Isn’t it a bit premature to compare Mr Pryke to Martin Luther?

Peter Mullins
Peter Mullins
6 years ago

The Martin Luther bit is really important. This isn’t a group saying ‘return to our denominational purity’ (such groups exist in every denomination from Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice to the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing)). It is an essentially Puritan group saying we need a new re-formation. See, for example, how far its own definition of faith in scripture (‘…in their intended literal sense as the inspired and unerring Word of God, the sole sufficient and perspicuous rule of Christian faith and practice…’) differs from even the XXXIX Articles (‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever… Read more »

Perry Butler
Perry Butler
6 years ago

Perhaps pace Mark Thompson above ( quoted by froghole) this site should be renamed “Predatory Liberals”!

Susannah Clark
6 years ago

Yeah, as a transgender female my predatory liberalism really stalks the street when I go out. No wonder I get shouted at, threatened, jostled. Sheesh! I am such a predator! I should be ashamed of myself. And when a hospital chaplain who is kind and helpful to sick people gets fired, well why not? He’s a predatory liberal, wanting to love his partner like that. Got to protect the patients, you know? Froghole identifies the paranoia… the besieged stockade mentality… of the ‘faithful remnant’… or is it a cultural cul-de-sac and an entrenched dogmatism… with the whole world orchestrating against… Read more »

Jeremy
Jeremy
6 years ago

Re: Thompson . . . three things: 1. Thompson: “the same quiet, biblical faith as the sovereign”? Really? Does Her Majesty have a view on same-sex marriage in the Church of England? Or on women’s ordination? The Queen certainly seems to be appointing women as bishops. 2. More generally: Good catches by Froghole and Perry Butler. With them, I think we need to call out Thompson’s use of language. “Stranglehold of unbelief” is a murderous metaphor. Similarly, the word “predatory,” as applied to people, is usually used only in certain criminal contexts. Thompson’s use of “predatory” to justify the JPC… Read more »

crs
crs
6 years ago

Happy to be corrected but weren’t there a lot of black clergy in CESA? Like the Reformed Episcopal Church in the USA as well.

Cynthia
Cynthia
6 years ago

What is “the Reformed Episcopal Church in the USA?” The AME churches? Which are predominantly black?

robert ian williams
robert ian williams
6 years ago

REACH…has a revised prayer Book which has taken the word Catholic out of the creeds, any whiff of baptismal regeneration and you would choke if you read their revision of the prayer of humble access. The Church sanctions lay presidency.
They spent a hundred years fighting the CPSA in the courts ..sound familiar?

Jeremy
Jeremy
6 years ago

“weren’t there a lot of black clergy in CESA?”

When?

“Retief and CESA were small in number but showed considerable growth as conservative whites left the Anglican Church and flocked to them when the Anglican hierarchy publicly joined the struggle against apartheid. They became an ideological haven for whites trying to escape or resist the processes of change.”

From Terence O. Ranger, ed., Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa, at p. 219 (Oxford UP)

crs
crs
6 years ago

Cynthia, As I get older I am surprised what basic church history people don’t know. The Reformed Episcopal Church emerged from the debate over tractarianism — hence the comparison with the situation in South Africa. One of its hallmarks was evangelisation and in that spirit it was concerned to have ordained african-american clergy. PECUSA did not permit this at the time. The majority of congregations were in SC and LA and were predominantly african-american. Their main seminary, Cummins, is in SC. Their BCP is essentially the 1928. Another way to put it is that they were like most american episcopalians… Read more »

Malcolm Dixon
Malcolm Dixon
6 years ago

Harry Farley’s report of the talk at the Jesmond Conference beggars belief. If these people really think that Abps Welby and Sentamu are heretics because they are not homophobic enough, then they are so far beyond the reach of reason as to make one despair of any hope of an accommodation with them. All the evidence suggests that both Abps are personally deeply opposed to any change in their church’s attitude to same-sex relationships, but have reluctantly had to display a slightly less hard-line attitude because of pressure from the wider church. What has happened here is, as Philip Jones… Read more »

Caelius Spinator
Caelius Spinator
6 years ago

The Reformed Episcopal Church is a denomination that split from the Episcopal Church in the 1870s because of two major disputes. First, the REC founders disagreed with the drift in the Episcopal Church toward more catholic practices and insistence on catholic theological views in the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church. Second, the REC founders wanted to engage more effectively in mission with evangelicals in other Protestant denominations. The refusal to accommodate this second view is regretted by some leaders of The Episcopal Church today. These days, the REC is part of the ACNA. The REC had early success… Read more »

Kurt Hill
Kurt Hill
6 years ago

While Caelius Spinator has given a generally good thumbnail of the origins of the REC, the Evangelicals of that era were challenging more than “the drift in the Episcopal Church toward more catholic practices” in ceremony and doctrine. They were challenging the historical ethos of Anglicanism as such. British historian Nigel Yates has pointed out that the complaints of these Evangelicals “were on weak ground. Many of the principles that they wished to defend had been rejected by the leadership of the Church of England in the early seventeenth century.” (See: Nigel Yates, “Chapter 9. Walsingham and Interwar Anglo-Catholicism” in… Read more »

Marshall Scott
6 years ago

I appreciated Andrew Goddard’s recognition of the consecrations that led to AMiA in 2000 (in which, in addition to the Primates of Southeast Asia and Rwanda, two retired bishops of the Episcopal Church participated – which still didn’t lead to acceptance by the Episcopal Church). I would, though, go back further. In the early 1980’s, after acceptance of ordination of women as priests (1976) and revision of the American Book of Common Prayer, a number of small and relatively isolated groups formed, including the first group to call itself the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA, but not related to… Read more »

Mary Clara
Mary Clara
6 years ago

Cynthia, the AME churches (African Methodist Episcopal) are Methodists rather than Anglicans. Wikipedia has an informative page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Methodist_Episcopal_Church

Peter Mullins
Peter Mullins
6 years ago

“Many of the principles that they wished to defend had been rejected by the leadership of the Church of England in the early seventeenth century” (quoted by Kurt Hill in relation to CESA) is close to what I was thinking about the Jesmond group (“an essentially Puritan group”). There is, and will always be, genuine tension, discussion, disagreement, impaired Communion and division within any denomination exploring its foundation principles in relation to new situations and insights (“Thinking Anglicans” is predicated on this!). But the Jesmond development shouldn’t be confused with this process – and what it teaches about scripture and… Read more »

Cynthia
Cynthia
6 years ago

Thanks Mary, I do know what the AME churches are. I’d never heard of the Reformed church and wondered if they were the same, which I now know that they aren’t.

Even having taken EFM (Education for Ministry), we never covered the Reformed Episcopal Church. We did cover AME and Absalom Jones.

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