Meet the FoCAs
Jul 07
On Monday I, along with some other staff members from my church went to Westminster Central Hall for the launch of FCA UK (Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans)…
Lots of people spoke… letters read from Bishops in Nigera and Rwanda, news from the church in Sudan, Baroness Cox, Jim Packer, Bob Duncan, John Hind, Wallace Benn, Vaughan Roberts, Michael Nazir-Ali… and lots more.
While this was an exciting, potentially history-making day and event, it was possibly the most dull Christian conference I’ve ever been to! The content was great, but the presentation was lacking, a poor advert for the church really.
Highlights included a rousing address from Peter Jensen, practical thoughts from Vaughan Roberts, and video/in person interviews of the encouragments and discouragements of mission, ministry, church planting and partnership across the UK, including a vox pop with Champ Marko. You should be able to watch some highlights on the Anglican TV site.
Here’s some questions I have in light of FCA:
- Are we standing with Anglo-Catholics (Forward in Faith) because we are in fellowship with them, or simply because they don’t like the liberals either?
- Some ministers talk big about witholding parish share and alike – my question is do they still expect a pension, and for the central church to pay for training of ordinands?
- My Bishop was at FCA, he spoke, and seems supportive, Wallace Benn is an area Bishop in the diocese, at least 25 parishes were represented on the day… while I support those in untenable situations, I am happy to continue to work within my dioceson structures… (that was a statement rather than a question?)
Anyway… the big question still remains… “So what now?” - which still seems unclear. A key event could be coming up in the General Synod…
The Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod, could be asked to indicate whether it supports the new traditionalist movement after a lay member from Chichester, Lorna Ashworth, put down a Private Members’ Motion on the topic.
Should it receive more than 100 signatures, a future meeting of the Synod will be asked to vote on the proposition: “This Synod wishes to be in communion with the ACNA.”
I fear that the motion will be rejected, and this could speed up things here. But I hope the Synod will support the ACNA.
Don’t really understand your last bullet…perhaps you need to educate an independent?
Speaking as independent, this alliance with the Catholic wing feels a little too Packer-esque to be comfortable at all….perhaps I am missing something? There is a difference between organisational joining and theological joining – OK, I grant that. But this feels more like the latter than the former…
Neither do I… I think my point is that within the Diocesan structure there is a certain amount of independence from the CofE as a whole. This is why you get differences in the way things are done between dioceses.
So for me with a supportive Bishop, should I leave what is in fact a good structure, one that works, in order to support those for whom the situation is not so good…? There is nothing wrong with the system, but with the people in it…
With the Catholic thing… I too am uneasy, but that’s because I don’t really know what ‘Forward in Faith’ believe…
I don’t see a problem with a ‘theological joining’ – we are uniting around the gospel and around scripture – if someone can affirm the Jerusalem Declaration (http://fca.net/dec_s.html) why shouldn’t I stand with them? Their churchmanship may be different, we may have differences on secondary issues… but I don’t think we differ on the essentials, I saw that cautiously because I don’t know for sure