WELCOME, WELCOME, FOCA!

Richard Chartres, Bishop of London

At an evening gathering of over 500 Anglicans in the Emmanuel Centre, Westminster, on Thursday 26 April, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (UK and Ireland) hosted scores of senior Anglican leaders from 30 countries who arrived from conference at St Mark’s, Battersea Rise, in a fleet of red double decker buses. They were welcomed by the Bishop of London who encouraged them in evangelism. They also heard of Christian witness amid the terrorism in Nigeria and countries of Central Asia.

I'd say to Bishop Chartres, "Careful, this welcome and encouragement to the FoCA folks to evangelize may come back to bite you."  But what do I know?

Names!  I want names of the 'senior Anglican leaders from 30 countries' in attendance.  Not that I can kick ass after I take names.  I just want to know.

“The Primates of the FCA have assured us that, through instruments now available in this country, including the panel of bishops of the Anglican Mission in England and the FCA UK, those who might otherwise have been under pressure to leave the Church of England can remain within the family of global Anglicanism and be recognized by that body as faithful to the Church of England itself.”

There you have it.

The photo is a still from the video of the bishop's sermon at the royal wedding of Kate and William.

FOCA - COUP, SCHISM, OR SOMETHING ELSE?

FoCA Conference, London

Paul Bagshaw at Not the Same Stream explains for us what happened at the recent conference in London of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.  Here's a snippet, but do read the entire post.

The epistemic divide is clear. FCA members have objective criteria (both biblical and from within traditional church teaching, though the former is definitive) by which to critique both secular society and Christian praxis.

In particular history in the sense of legitimating and identity-forming narratives is replaced by salvation history: judgement by objective biblical and theological criteria.

Our own (or is he?) +Mark Lawrence attended the London conference and, according to Simon Sarmiento at Thinking Anglicans, he was invited by The Guildford Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship to give a talk in Surrey, before he headed home to Charleston, South Carolina.  If you'd like, you can listen to +Mark's talk at Baby Blue Online. 

I wonder if +Mark will attend General Convention of TEC this year.  GC09 left him feeling quite dyspeptic.  Few would be greatly surprised if the bishop bolted from TEC.

Photo from Baby Blue.