Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies of The Episcopal Church, comprising 800+ clergy and lay deputies and meeting with the House of Bishops every three years at the General Convention, the Church’s governing body, has issued a statement in response to the Primates’ Communiqué.
Here is a couple statements that I find particularly poignant:

Their Communiqué, however, raises profound and serious issues regarding their authority to require any member Church to take the types of specific actions the Communiqué contemplates and whether they have authority to enforce consequences or penalties against any member Church that does not act in a way they desire. The type of authority for the Primates implicit in the Communiqué would change not only the Episcopal Church but the essence of the Anglican Communion.
All Anglicans must remember that the second Lambeth Conference in 1878 recommended that “the duly certified action of every national or particular Church, and of each ecclesiastical province (or diocese not included in a province), in the exercise of its own discipline, should be respected by all the other Churches, and by their individual members.”
This has been the tradition of the Anglican Communion. To demand strict uniformity of practice diminishes our Anglican traditions.

She used the word “recommended” rather than other words such as – “mandated,” “declared,” “established” – more in line with the Tradition of Anglicanism. Lambeth is not a body that establishes official doctrine for The Anglican Communion and all provincial Churches within it. It is not a “Curia” or a “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” This has been repeated over and over again as the factual and historical Tradition of Anglican governance, yet reactionaries against the decisions of the last two U.S. General Conventions keep pushing and pushing as if the bishops assembled at Lambeth had such power.
Of course, as their relentless drive to so establish Lambeth continues, it will become the de-facto decision making body with “authority” unless there are those with enough backbone to say, “NO, this is not what Anglicanism has been and this is not what Lambeth is!”

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