Here is the lengthy message Bishop Pierre Whalon distributed to his convocation, Episcopal Churches throughout Europe, concerning our Anglican and Episcopalian problems of the last few years and the U.S. House of BIshops statements from last month.
This is about 9 pages long, but is well done and gives a good overview of, well, everything.
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The Feast of John Keble, 2007
Dear sisters and brothers of the Convocation,
In the swirl of meetings and statements that have characterized this period in the life of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, it seems good to try to take stock of the situation at present. As you know, the House of Bishops met from March 16 to 21. We had before us a draft Covenant for the provinces of the Communion. We also have a disagreement between the American Bishops and the Primates’ Meeting, as expressed in our reply to their Communiqué.
We are our past…
The present crisis has its roots well into the past, of course. One could begin the story of the missionaries of the nineteenth century, who courageously evangelized people around the world. However, they did so not in the context of the local culture, but their own. They taught the Faith as if it were unchanging and unchangeable, not only in its doctrine but also in its moral teaching. As Roland Allen pointed out in his classic book, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, the missionaries changed their supposedly fixed morality from support of slavery to opposition to slavery. And it changed again, when birth control was allowed.
Until the mid-twentieth century, almost all the bishops in the Third World were Anglo-Saxons. When finally local Christians began taking charge of their churches, their Anglican moral heritage was already ambiguous, not only with the hangover of colonialist hypocrisy itself, but with uncertainty about the foundation of moral teaching.
My predecessor here in Europe, Bishop Stephen Bayne, led in calling together an Anglican Congress in Toronto in 1963. The Congress endorsed a manifesto written by Michael Ramsey then Archbishop of Canterbury, and the other seventeen primates of the day, significantly entitled “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence.” As Bishop Bayne remarked at the time, “Some will have to cease thinking of the Church as a memorial association for a deceased clergyman called Christ.” Indeed. The new energy for mission that this manifesto unleashed led to the doubling of the numbers of the Communion within forty years, from forty million to eighty, and growing from eighteen provinces to the thirty-eight we have today.
As time has gone on, the extraordinary growth of the Communion is the cause of some chaos, as the First World culture in which the missionaries encased the Gospel has itself continued to evolve, while the Third World has progressively sought to “inculturate” the Good News. In other words, they have begun to re-think the Faith in terms of their own local cultures, which are not by any means homogeneous. Among other issues to face has been the ambiguity of moral teaching, apparently immutable unless “the whites” decide to change it.

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