Five Meet Down in London

Just five primates of the Global South want the Anglican Communion to become a Church of a Church. They met in London (the cost of all those air fares!). They want:

to move the global Anglican Communion substantially and effectively forward, to be living and witnessing as a worthy and exemplary expression of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. The pastoral and missional needs for focused leadership and development, the deepening of collegial foundation and framework for the transformation and renewal of covenantal Anglicanism will be the focus of the 4th Global South Encounter, which by then should have a broadened representation.

The statement of a meeting between March 13 and 15 (even between Akinola, Venables, Kolini, Anis and Chewis) in part is a dance around that fact that some will go to Jordan with Israel and some will go to Lambeth and some will go to both. They go on again about the torn fabric of the communion and that consecrating Gene Robinson is a theological and ethical innovation and that boundary busting interventions are not to be treated equally with that.

So they want to centralise the Anglican Communion - but it is not one expression: it consists of many Churches, each of which is bound to show variation from another. The so called collegial framework beyond has been one of friendliness (well, we hope) and consultation. There is no such thing as "covenantal Anglicanism" and presumably the 4th Global South Encounter will consist of more than five primates. They seem to think that the St Andrews Draft will do the job:

The Global South remains committed and encourage all Provinces to actively participate in the study and requested feedback on the St Andrew’s Draft of the Anglican Covenant, its substance and spirit to be in line with our common classical Anglican heritage of biblical, historical and reformed formularies of faith and ecclesiology. In particular, we strongly urge the presentation of a definitive text to the Provinces by ACC 14th (May 2009) to begin the urgent and timely process of official adoption and ratification for the Communion.

Whereas, for others, it was a watering down other than for the tentative appendix (intended to do the disciplining), and it is not acceptable to many either. Perhaps (a section of) the Global South is set on its own path.

Meanwhile statements like this irritate me:

We are most grateful to our Lord for enabling us as members of the GS Primates Steering Committee to meet in the midst of busy commitments and schedules...

Enabled by the Holy Spirit, we were able to focus in unity on the original spirit, vision and vocation of the Global South in the Anglican Communion which had developed and deepened since the fateful event of November 2003.

They are rather sure of themselves, aren't they?

Just before this the air fares were also spent (some must have come early) on the GAFCON crew getting together in March 10 to 12 to produce a statement that says nothing but public relations speak. They do like to get in first, these GAFCON people!