It's a No Then

Henry Luke Orombi says no to the Lambeth 2008 proposal for a Pastoral Forum, along with a no to the Archbishop of Canterbury being leader of the Anglican Communion. The Pastoral Forum is to be set up quickly and do the work of the Covenant before the Covenant even appears. It will provide international action to 'protect' ecclesiastical minorities and decide when Anglican Churches are acting outside the imposed boundaries of the Communion. However, Orombi said, to Anglican TV:

"It seems to me that the functions proposed for the Pastoral Forum are exactly what the Primates of the Communion have been charged to do. The 1988 Lambeth Conference urged the Primates' Meeting to "exercise an enhanced responsibility in offering guidance on doctrinal, moral and pastoral matters" and the 1998 Lambeth Conference reaffirmed this. Are not Primates, duly elected from the various Provinces, in a better position than a "Commission" or "Forum"? We do not need the proliferation of more groups, committees, commissions, etc. to resolve this crisis. What we need is the enforcement/implementation of matters that have already been widely agreed."

In other words, the GAFCON Primates Council will do this Pastoral Forum job anyway. If he says that no more groups and forums are needed, then presumably the new Primates Council is not an additional group, which it is, unless it usurps the Primates Meeting.

So the Primates Council represents the power-grab that it is, and if the Americans and Canadians are (to name but two) concerned that this Pastoral Forum will soon work without any proper authority to intervene, they will most definitely not accept interventions from GAFCON and its taken-to-itself authority.

Graham Kings's supposed "intensification" of the Communion (via Robert Pigott - who somehow in his reducing down of the issues never seems to quite get it) means nothing against the different power centres in the Communion area, that have weight of their own and for which the Archbishop of Canterbury's attempts at centralisation towards his model of a Catholic Church is therefore but one of many different intensifications. Perhaps Graham Kings is carrying the same unity-forging illusion as the one ringmaster of the Communion.