Communion secretary general due to attend Executive Council meeting
Episcopal News Service -- Linthicum Heights, Maryland. June 16, 2010 [061610-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, is to speak to the Episcopal Church's Executive Council here on June 18.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told the council at its opening plenary session that Kearon would engage with the council in a question-and-answer session at 9 a.m. on the last day of the council's June 16-18 meeting at the Conference Center at the Maritime Institute.
His presence at the meeting will come 11 days after he announced that he had sent letters to five Episcopal Church members of the inter-Anglican ecumenical dialogues with the Lutheran, Methodist, Old Catholic and Orthodox churches "informing them that their membership on these dialogues has been discontinued." Kearon also said on June 7 that he had written to the Episcopal Church member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO), withdrawing her membership and inviting her to serve as a consultant to that body.
Kearon's move came in response to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' May 28 Pentecost letter in which he proposed that representatives serving on some of the Anglican Communion's ecumenical dialogues should resign their membership if they are from a province that has not complied with moratoria on same-gender blessings, cross-border interventions and the ordination of gay and lesbian people to the episcopate. He specifically referred to the May 15 consecration of Los Angeles Bishop Suffragan Mary Douglas Glasspool and the unauthorized incursions by Anglican leaders into other provinces. Glasspool is the Episcopal Church's second openly gay, partnered bishop.
On the same day Kearon announced that he had terminated the Episcopal Church memberships, he said after a speech to the Anglican Church of Canada's General Synod that "the archbishop did have to act" following Glasspool's consecration.
Kearon said in a post-address press conference that the actions taken were "fairly minimal."
"There's no doubt that the election and confirmation of Mary Glasspool is a full, well-thought out decision of the Episcopal Church and we must respect that fact," he said. However, he said the decision implies that the Episcopal Church does not "share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion…. [and so] they shouldn’t represent the communion on faith and order questions."
Kearon said that such questions are often a part of ecumenical dialogues, and "they ought to be discussed on the Anglican side by bodies who share that faith and order, at the very minimum to be honorable to our ecumenical partners, so that they know who they are in conversation with."
Similarly, he said those who do not share the faith and order of the Anglican Communion should not be making decisions on matters in the communion. "We've asked them to be consultants and we would hope that they would participate in the conversations and discussions," he added.
The Rev. Thomas Ferguson, the Episcopal Church's interim deputy for ecumenical and interreligious relations, and Diocese of North Carolina (Diocese of North Carolina) Assistant Bishop William Gregg were serving on the Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue.
Bishop C. Franklin Brookhart of Montana had been a member of the Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission and the Very Rev. William H. Petersen, professor of ecclesiastical and ecumenical history of Bexley Hall seminary, Columbus, was serving on the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission.
The Rev. Carola von Wrangel, rector of the Anglican/Episcopal Church of Christ the King in Frankfurt, Germany, a parish in the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, had served on the Anglican-Old Catholic International Coordinating Council.
The Rev. Katherine Grieb, an Episcopal priest and professor of New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary, was the IASCUFO member who has been invited to serve as a consultant.
The Executive Council carries out the programs and policies adopted by the General Convention, according to Canon I.4 (1)(a). The council is composed of 38 members, 20 of whom (four bishops, four priests or deacons and 12 lay people) are elected by General Convention and 18 (one clergy and one lay) by provincial synods for six-year terms, plus the presiding bishop and the president of the House of Deputies.