Convocation of Churches in Europe Moves Towards Formation of Diocese
Episcopal News Service. June 30, 1999 [99-091]
(ENS) A consultation of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe has advocated formation of its eight parishes and five mission congregations into a diocese -- and expressed determination to work with other Anglicans in Europe to form a new province of the Anglican Communion.
The May 7-9 consultation in Nice, France, also developed a mission plan that includes training centers for lay and ordained ministries, a youth ministry, additional mission churches and an effort to create multi-cultural European forms of Anglicanism.
In his letter of invitation to the Mission 2000 Consultation, Bishop Jeffery Rowthorn described the event as a sign of a "new missionary awareness" emerging in the parishes.
Last summer's Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican bishops encouraged efforts to establish a new province in partnership with Anglicans in Spain and Portugal as a "multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-cultural Anglican fellowship within the New Europe."
The convocation originated with parishes in several European cities catering to wealthy American expatriates, many of them chaplaincies. The American church provided a suffragan bishop to serve the loosely organized Convocation.
That ministry has broadened in recent years as people with mixed cultural and religious backgrounds have found a home under the broad tent of Anglicanism -- including refugees and local Christians. Worship is now offered in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese, as well as English. And the role of bishop has also expanded so that it is now a full-time position, still tied to the American church. (Rowthorn has announced his intention to resign, telling Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold in his letter of resignation that he and his wife Anne "have been exhilarated by the new missionary challenges and ecumenical opportunities which present themselves daily in the New Europe.")
In his keynote address to the consultation, Prof. Ian Douglas of the Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts spoke of the need for Anglicanism to find an authentic European expression -- not in order to advance Anglicanism itself, "but rather for the sake of restoring all people to unity with God and each other in Christ."
In his own address to the consultation, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester in the Church of England addressed the "shape of the church to come." In examining the various forms the church has taken over the centuries, he agreed with Douglas that Anglicanism should find a distinctive European form to express its catholicity in an authentic way.
In its Statement of Mission Intent, the consultation said that the time is ripe for the "re-evangelization of Europe," calling on the participation of all Christians. "We do not seek to convert Christians who are already faithful in another church, but rather to join with them in their witness to the power of the Gospel in modern societies which are dominantly secular and pluralistic," the statement said.