Tuesday, April 24, 2012

A Global communion for the twenty-first Century


The unprecedented challenges to Anglican identity forced upon us by the revisionist scriptural interpretation have in the mercy of God, given us an historic opportunity to rediscover the distinctive reformed catholicity of our Communion as shaped so profoundly by the witness of the sixteenth century Anglican Reformers.

Our aim of a renewed, reformed Anglican Communion will not be sustained if we are unwilling to support and encourage those who are gifted to do the training and the theological heavy lifting so essential to give depth and penetration to our vision both within the Church and beyond it. We need to recover the vision of the Anglican Reformers, of ordinary believers knowing scriptures and being nourished by biblical teaching. Equally we need leaders, lay and ordained, able to give a robust defense of apostolic faith in the global public square. If we do not, secular ideologies which have so powerfully shaped liberal and revisionist Christianity in the Communion will tighten the grip. The Lord our God cannot allow it. He calls us to move on. Read more

View a video of Archbishop Wabakula's opening address
Unfortunately Archbishop Wabukala fails to explain what he means by "reformed catholicity." To Anglo-Catholics it means one thing; to Reformed-Evangelicals, another. Did Archbishop Wabakula have in mind the GAFCON Theological Resource Group's explanation of "reformed catholicism" in The Way, the Truth, and the Life, with its emphasis upon the three historic Creeds and the Protestant Confessions, including the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion? Or something else?

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