Third Female "Bishop" Consecrated in GAFCON

https://anglican.ink/2021/09/12/third-woman-bishop-for-gafcon-consecrated/

Has a statement been released by Archbishop Beach? Will the ACNA protest? Does this confirm what many have said: that once females can be ordained as priests it logically follows that they should be allowed to be consecrated as Bishops?

An interesting statement from the Archbishop:
“She is now the Rt Rev Rose Okeno. I congratulate her for rising above cultural norms and her courage that saw her battle it out with men for this position and make history as the first woman ACK bishop,” the archbishop told the congregation.


Open letter against the consecration:
https://www.apologiaanglicana.com/p...-the-consecration-of-female-bishops-in-gafcon

 

I have already signed the petition

 

Good for her. (It looks like one of the punctuation buttons was randomly stuck in the title of the thread.) Makes me proud to be an Anglican.

 

Very sad. It looks like the Church of Kenya is not willing to remain in communion with the rest of the Church, especially now that they've violated the norm three times.

They have willfully violated it, with no acknowledgment of Anglican tradition, the Church, or sacred Scripture, all of whom they repudiate in this act.

St. Paul has warned them and now what's left are the admonition before their expulsion from communion altogether. What does God have in common with Mammon?

 

The ACK is in no danger of being expelled from the Anglican Communion. If GAFCON wants to shrink itself, that is certainly up to them.

 

It has to logically follow. I do not believe women should be ordained. However, I also believe that if you are going to ordain women then all three degrees of holy orders (bishop, priest, deacon) must be open to them. I dearly wish my church, the Church of England, had not ordained women. However, it did but I think the way it was done was appalling. First, they said women could be ordained as deacons but we'll wait and see what happens before they can be priests. Eventually they were permitted to be ordained as priests but still denied the episcopate. In the end they were permitted to be ordained to the episcopate. I firmly say do not ordain women. If you must do it, though, they must be admitted to all three degrees and not permitted each one incrementally.

 

I am not signing the petition linked in the OP. There's no point. That lady is not going to be 'unordained' or removed from the office to which she has been appointed.

I was going to check which Anglican churches still will not ordain women at all or will not ordain them to the episcopate. There is a Wikipedia article on this subject which contains a table showing, for each member church of the Anglican Communion, whether the church has allowed the ordination of women to each grade of Holy Orders and whether they have actually ordained women. It says that Kenya has not authorised the ordination of women to the episcopate and has ordained no female bishops. Clearly this is wrong and out-of-date so it can no longer be relied on

 

I agree with this opinion in principle (that we should ordain to all three at once, not incrementally), but in practice I think there are some places where it’s still fair to temporarily exclude women from the episcopate whilst granting them full access to the diaconate.

While the role of a Bishop is certainly to teach, to service, to steer and to administer, it’s also to hold the church together (or to defend). As 1 Timothy 3 guides us with appointing bishops, we must pick individuals who are thought well of.

The church is not, and should not be a pure democracy, so from time to time it may make controversial decisions. However if appointing a female bishop is still so untenable to members of a diocese that it would cause a schism, it’s perhaps best to hold off on appointing a female bishop in that diocese. It’s at no fault of the female candidate that they are “not thought well of” but it does none of the stakeholders any good to appoint a bishop that will lead more people away from salvation than towards it.

 

The reason I don't agree with this is because you are either eligible to receive Holy Orders or you are not. I know the majority of priests don't go on to become bishops but every priest ought to be eligible to be a bishop. I think the only two things that would delay a priest from becoming a bishop, rather than preventing it, is age and time since priestly ordination. The bishop has the fulness of Holy Orders. I think you must either ordain and allow all to be ordained or you do not ordain women at all. Of course, when choosing a bishop it may be a male candidate is the best one. However, if your church allows women to be ordained I do not think it is right and proper to refuse a woman the office of bishop because of her sex.

I do not believe that saying women cannot be ordained is misogynistic or treating women as second class. However, I do believe that if you ordain women but say you cannot be bishops that is most definitely treating women as second class. It is saying you are good enough to be deacons or deacons and priests but not good enough for the episcopate. I firmly believe it has to be one or the other and not some intermediate fudging of the issue.

 

right

I think it is worthwhile to sign it, because the petition in effect is not to the Church of Kenya (which isn't plugged into the western twittersphere) but rather to the Gafcon leadership and the orthodox Anglicans in the West, for a sign that they should act, in correcting this error...

 

I still find no valid cause for adding my signature. The GAFCON leadership and orthodox Anglicans in the West cannot correct this 'error'. They have no authority to make the Church of Kenya overturn this act.

It seems to me the Anglican churches continue to move away from orthodoxy and that even the churches who belong to GAFCON are moving towards the ordination of women, including as bishops. I think they will hold out for much longer on orthodox teachings regarding homosexuality. This is because changes in the churches towards this do not refelct theology by societal changes. Homosexuality is not widely acceptable outside the decadent West so I suspect the GAFCON churches will not accept homosexuality until or if their societies accept it.

 

I think we will see a further rift along lines of those who don't ordain women and those that do. It is a pretty hot button issue.

 

It is the ACK that is shrunk GAFCON by purposefully and willfully introducing division

 

The division to which you refer predates GAFCON and certainly predates this ordination in Kenya. If GAFCON wants this to be a divisive issue, that’s their call. It will have no impact on Kenya’s standing within the Anglican Communion.

 

What it will do is, it will mean that 80% of worldwide Anglicans will no longer consider the ACK in communion with them. ACK will have to seek fellowship with the episcopal church and the church of England, both of which will be demographically extinct in the next 20-25 years.

 

Do you have the math on that? The vast majority of Provinces in the Anglican Communion ordain both men and women to the priesthood at the very least. That includes Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and South India, plus the aforementioned Kenya. That’s a substantial chunk of the Anglican Communion that I don’t suspect will be going extinct anytime soon. Membership in GAFCON is not the deciding factor for whether a given jurisdiction is “Anglican” or not. I realize that’s contrary to schismatic ACNA dogma, as membership in GAFCON is their only claim to legitimacy, but the Anglican Communion has been around a lot longer than GAFCON, on the scale of several centuries. If GAFCON wants to shrink itself by kicking out Kenya (especially over a silly issue like this) that’s their call.

 

The 80% figure sounds like something David Virtue would publish out of thin air, kind of like the myth that there are only 5 ACNA dioceses that practice women's ordination. I suspect that figure is relying heavily on the Church of Nigeria being the largest member province of the Anglican Communion.

The fact is, Uganda and Rwanda will be soon to follow in the footsteps of the South Sudanese and Kenyans. ++Stanley Ntagali was amenable to consecrating women during his archepiscopate but refrained from doing so because of the newness and fragility of GAFCON. I have also heard recently that the Church of the Province of West Africa is prepared to take this step.

There was a time when the Orthodox Anglican Communion had two affiliates in Kenya. But one unilaterally began the ordination of women. The bishop was given six months to repent and revoke the faculties of the women. He did not and his affiliate church was expelled from the Orthodox Anglican Communion.

I am in full agreement with PDL, it's all or none. Either women can be ordained to every order or none of them. I would refer those who care enough to do a little reading to the writings of Alice Linsley; Alice was a TEC priestess for some years who renounced her office and became a staunch critic of women's ordination.

 

https://www.gafcon.org/news/a-communique-from-the-gafcon-primates-council
"Our provinces and branches represent 50 million of the 70 million active Anglicans of the Communion"

Indeed. I know her, what a wonderful and inspirational figure.

I see zero basis behind these claims. Ntagali is out of power and fell into shame; Uganda and Rwanda have zero indications of following Kenya.

The main reason for what happened was that Kenya has always been much closer aligned to Canterbury than other African countries; this is rooted in the colonial past and the strong admiration from the Kenyans for anything British. Today that means imbibing the heterodox influences flowing out of the West. That warm affection for Britain was the case even with their preceding Kenyan Primate.

Uganda on the other hand is irredeemably militant against heterodox influences from Canterbury and America. So if Canterbury had a chance to make their impact before, they lost it now, because every year that passes creates a greater rift between Uganda and any schemes Canterbury and the Episcopal Church would concoct. On the other hand ACNA's influence over those same countries grows by leaps and bounds. Where just a few years ago they were the foundling paternalized by Kenyan and other primates, today the ACNA primate is himself the Chairman of the entire Gafcon.

 

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news...inks-womens-ordination-to-homosexual-activism

https://virtueonline.org/why-women-were-never-priests-alice-c-linsley

 

ACNA Archishop Foley Beach has issued a pastoral message on this issue. You can read it here.

The upshot is that the ACNA status quo has not changed. I don't view this as particularly good news since the issue remains unsettled, and until some consensus is reached these kinds of problems are going to keep popping up. In my opinion, the core of the problem rests in the church regarding WO as an "inessential" matter rather than a fundamental issue of biblical authority over church practice.

This problem isn't going to just fade away. The longer the Anglican church lets it fester unresolved, the harder it's going to be to resolve.