Anglican's future

"The biblical drama of sin, mercy, healing, salvation and liberation will reassert itself ."
National Post, February 22, 2007 - Father Raymond J. De Souza wrote,

It has been remarked for a long time that the centre of gravity in the Christian world is shifting from north to south, from North America and Europe to Africa and Asia. The meeting of Anglican Primates this past week in Tanzania might be marked as the moment when that shift made its first global impact.

The Anglican Communion has been facing an insurmountable challenge these past few years. The small and getting smaller Anglican churches in the United States and Canada have decided, for the most part, that homosexual acts should be judged morally licit, and even sacramental. The big and getting bigger Anglican churches in Africa have kept to the constant Christian teaching that such acts are sinful. Between the two, the Archbishop of Canterbury has valiantly attempted to fashion a compromise. But of course something cannot be both a sacrament and a sin, so matters had to be resolved one way or the other.

The plain meaning of the Tanzania meeting is that the leading Anglican archbishops have given the U.S. Episcopal Church a Sept. 30 deadline to recant of their approval of same-sex marriage and actively gay bishops. If they do not recant, the apparent consequence would be that the U.S. Episcopal Church will be expelled from the Anglican Communion, and those American Episcopalians who hold to the Christian heritage on such matters will be provided for in some other way -- likely to involve the same African archbishops who have insisted on calling the U.S. Episcopal Church to account. If that indeed happens in September, the Archbishop of Canterbury will have to finally decide whether to throw his lot in with the north or the south. If he opts for the north, he might find himself the last Archbishop of Canterbury to claim leadership of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Continued...