Andrew Brown: The Anglican Communion is Dead

 Andrew Brown’s Guardian blog offers a provocatively titled essay, “It started as a split over gay clergy. But now the Anglican Communion is dead.” That title is a bit of an exaggeration; Brown’s point is better captured in his opening sentence: “What, you gave a schism and nobody came?” He argues that people in the Church of England—laypeople, anyway—are quite indifferent to GAFCON and the Anglican Mission in England.

I was particularly interested in this paragraph:

They [conservatives] feel they are part of the global, “orthodox” mainstream of Christianity. But almost the only decisive act of Rowan Williams’ time in office was the rejection, by a clear majority of committed churchgoers, of his “covenant”–a plan to bind the Church of England into the structures of the rest of the Anglican Communion. No one here wants to be told what to do by the Church of Nigeria, however many Anglicans there are there and however sincerely they seem to hate gay people.

From my vantage point in the United States, I cannot be sure that Brown is reading public opinion correctly, but I suspect he is. I certainly hope he is.