“People and parishes prepared for irregular action” Reform Chairman
The Church of England Newspaper reports:
THE new chairman of an Anglican traditionalist network seeking to uphold orthodox teaching in the Church of England warned that it may be forced to carry out irregular ordinations in the future. The Rev Rod Thomas, chairman of the Reform network after replacing the Rev David Banting, was due to say in his speech at the group’s national conference in London this week that as the ‘liberal threat’ in the Church of England increases, ‘people and parishes will have to be prepared for irregular action in response’. He was due to add: “Increasingly, parishes will want to distance themselves from those bishops whose teaching is unbiblical and divisive. “This may amount no more to an unwillingness to join such bishops around the Communion table. “But as we’ve seen in Chelmsford, even these actions can be costly when a bishop refuses to ordain bona fide candidates.”
Speaking to The Church of England Newspaper prior to the Conference, Mr Thomas explained that they would consider turning to foreign bishops to carry out ordinations as a last resort. He said: “As the Church gets more fractured maybe bishops or retired bishops will be able to help out so we can find an ‘English solution’, but if not we may have to look overseas. “This is not what we’re looking for but as the pressure from liberals increases it becomes more likely. “This would be a last resort but you can see this happening more frequently as the liberal threat increases and we need to plan ahead to maintain our role of reforming the Church.”
He confirmed that they would not be seeking to leave the Church of England but rather reform it from within. Mr Thomas was also to mention in his speech that the Anglican Communion had effectively split, but said it was not too late for the Archbishop of Canterbury to save the body, if he rescinded the invitations to American bishops to Lambeth, but failure to do this would ‘seal the division of the Communion’ and ‘rapidly spread fractures through the Church of England’.
More than 200 delegates were due to attend the two-day conference in central London whichwas a record number. Mr Thomas also highlighted the need for Reform to set up funding initiatives to support their work in the future.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
