My article posted at Episcopal Cafe: "Goooooooooooal!"

"Goooooooooooal!"

By Peter M. Carey

It should be of no surprise to anyone who reads the Episcopal Café that this summer is the once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops in Canterbury, England for the Lambeth Conference. Much has been written about this conference this year, and the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are surely picking up more than our share of headlines. I have been thinking about this gathering of bishops and their spouses and thinking about both the turmoil and the possibility that exist for the Anglican Church at this moment in our history.

I was reading last month in Ed Friedman’s posthumously published book, A Failure of Nerve, that one sign of overly reactive and anxious organizations is that there is a lack of playfulness. Is the Anglican Communion displaying the tell-tale signs of an overly reactive and anxious organization? Is there playfulness and humor at each level of the body of our church? I hope there is more playfulness than I am sensing in what I read and see.

While I know that the lack of playfulness and humor is the result of the reactivity and anxiety, I wonder if play and humor may also be a solution.

Read it all HERE.

Links to this article:
A Blogspotting Anglican Episcopalian

"Splitting Up: Anglican Angst" in the Christian Century Magazine

The Christian Century has an interesting article, "Splitting Up: Anglican Angst" by Jason Byassee which is well-worth a read...

I wonder what Ed Friedman, the late guru of family dynamics as they apply to organizations and churches, would make of the "family" dynamics in our beloved Communion...

the Rev. Peter M. Carey

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Splitting up

Anglican angst

by Jason Byassee

Last year the Church of the Resurrection in suburban West Chicago closed its doors and put its building up for sale. The Episcopal congregation had suffered membership losses 14 years earlier when some conservative members left to start their own church, also called the Church of the Resurrection, in nearby Glen Ellyn. The new congregation later aligned itself with the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA), which is connected to the Anglican Church in Rwanda. The new Church of the Resurrection later experienced its own split, with some members leaving to launch the Church of the Great Shepherd—also affiliated with AMIA—in Wheaton. The Church of the Great Shepherd eventually closed its doors, but not before a 2004 split led to the formation of the Church of the Savior back in West Chicago. During this time the ranks of St. Mark's, an Episcopal congregation in Glen Ellyn, had been swelling—until the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003, whereupon many St. Mark's members left to form All Souls, still another AMIA church, in Wheaton. Meanwhile, another split at the original Church of the Resurrection in West Chicago, which had experienced renewed growth, led to the creation of the Church of the Resurrection Anglican, a church which is overseen by the archbishop of Uganda. So now there are two Resurrection churches in the area, both formed in exodus from the original—now defunct—Church of the Resurrection, and both affiliated with African Anglican bodies, not with the Episcopal Church in the United States, sometimes abbreviated as TEC. Got all that? Even for Anglicans in the vicinity it takes a long memory or a flow chart to keep straight all the Episcopal-Anglican divisions and acronyms that have developed in the well-heeled suburbs of DuPage County, just west of Chicago.

...read the rest HERE....