Liberal US Anglican Leadership draws line in the sand

Steve Waring is reporting the following over at Living Church:

Executive Council today approved resolutions rejecting the primates’ proposed pastoral scheme and another declaring that diocesan government is subordinate to the will of General Convention.

The actions came during a morning plenary on the gathering’s final day. Council has been meeting since June at a hotel convention center in Parsippany, N.J.

“We have received from the House of Bishops of our church a request to decline to participate in the proposed pastoral scheme; with an explanation for the reasons our bishops believe that the scheme is ill-advised,” stated the draft of a document accompanying the resolutions on the pastoral council scheme. “We agree with the bishops’ assessment including the conclusion that to participate in the scheme would violate our Constitution and Canons. We thus decline to participate in the pastoral scheme, and respectfully ask our Presiding Bishop not to take any of the actions asked of her by this scheme. We affirm the pledge of our bishops to ‘continue to work to find ways of meeting the pastoral concerns of the primates that are compatible with our own polity and canons’.”

Let me help you understand that. What the Executive Council are saying is that what the Primates proposed in Tanzania, a model of alternative oversight that would try to keep orthodox dioceses in the US within TEC while giving them orthodox Primatial oversight, they’re not going to allow that model. But it gets better:

In other news, council approved a resolution declaring “null and void” attempts by a number of dioceses to revise their constitution to qualify their accession to the Constitution and Canons of the General Convention.

“Any amendment to a diocesan constitution that purports in any way to limit or lessen an unqualified accession to the constitution of The Episcopal Church is null and void, and be it further resolved that the amendments passed to the constitutions of the dioceses of Pittsburgh, Fort Worth, Quincy and San Joaquin, which purport to limit or lessen the unqualified accession to the constitution of The Episcopal Church are accordingly null and void and the constitutions of those dioceses shall be as they were as if such amendments had not been passed,” council stated in Resolution NAC-023.

Translation : Any orthodox diocese that tries to leave TEC because TEC has become so liberal that Spong looks like a Calvinist in comparison, that diocese ain’t going to be allowed. Can you hear the sound of ecclesiastical lawyers preparing their statements of account? And why are we waiting for the September 30th deadline? Do we really think TEC will agree?