Julian Mann: "Anti-Anglican Attack on Sydney Diocese"

We share Rev. Mann's inquiry re: Sydney's adherence to the Protestant, Reformed and Confessional articles and Dr. Porter's recent attack.  However, we are concerned about the reports of non-liturgical and Praise Band worship in the Sydney diocese.  If one wishes to be a broad evangelical without a Prayer Book, be one.  But, don't claim to be Anglican without that good old BCP, those revered Articles, and that old godly and reverent worship.  We here at RA are Prayer Book Calvinists in worship, doctrine, and piety...and for good reasons. 

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=14805

ANTI-ANGLICAN ATTACK ON SYDNEY DIOCESE
By Julian Mann
Special to Virtueonline
August 30, 2100

Dr Muriel Porter's attack on Sydney Diocese is fundamentally anti-Anglican. That is manifest from her complaint about the Ministry Training Strategy which the Very Reverend Phillip Jensen, now Dean of St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney, set up in the late 1970s when he was a parochial incumbent.

In her book about the threat Sydney Diocese allegedly poses to world Anglicanism, an extract from which has just been published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dr Porter complains that 'MTS has been the primary recruiting ground for all Sydney clergy, a pathway strengthened by Phillip Jensen's 2003 appointment as director of Ministry, Training and Development, the diocese's department for the training of clergy'.

In essence, Dr Porter is complaining that God has blessed a ministry training programme within an Anglican diocese that has sought to identify men and women with Bible teaching gifts, to support and nurture those individuals in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then to encourage them into full-time Christian service.

To identify, encourage and train biblically faithful servants of Jesus Christ is not a criminal offence. In fact it is thoroughly Anglican. Witness the Bishop's charge to those ordained presbyter in the Ordinal: 'And seeing that you cannot by any other means compass the doing of so weighty a work, pertaining to the salvation of man, but with doctrine and exhortation taken out of the holy Scriptures, and with a life agreeable to the same: consider how studious ye ought to be in reading and learning the Scriptures...'

The other aspect of Dr Porter's analysis that must be challenged is her suggestion that 'authentic' Anglicanism is not Evangelical and Reformed. She tries to paint Sydney Anglicans as theologically deviant, lambasting their diocese 'as an extremely conservative, hard-line monolithic Evangelical centre'.

One wonders what Dr Porter makes of the thorough-going Reformed Evangelical doctrine of the 39 Articles of Religion. They certainly provide no support for theological liberalism or Anglo-Catholicism.

Furthermore, to suggest as Dr Porter does that Sydney Diocese's refusal to ordain women presbyters makes it unAnglican is hugely problematic from the perspective of the historic Anglican formularies. Neither the Book of Common Prayer, nor the Ordinal, nor the 39 Articles stipulate that women presbyters are an essential requirement upon the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately, Dr Porter does land a punch in relation to Sydney's self-publicity. One hopes one can say this humbly, but it is always unwise for Christian ministers to broadcast the significance of their own leadership role. Talking about the extent of one's own influence inevitably draws hostile gun-fire.

But Dr Porter's ungodly whinge about Sydney Anglicans is not merely an attack upon an individual diocese that seeks to uphold the biblical doctrine of the 39 Articles but upon all in the world who aspire to practice confessing Anglicanism.


----Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire, UK. His weblog is Cranmer's Curate.