The CEC and Anglicanism

It has been some time since I last posted. Facebook seems to have diverted a lot of energy from blogging in general and certainly this is the case here. However I still need a place to put my thoughts and so I return to my blog. I am sure no one is really following it any longer but it still serves as a launching pad for my thoughts. Sort of like casting my thoughts on the river, you never know where they will end up.

It has now been about 1 1/2 years since I left the CEC. I did not want to publish criticisms or process my own feelings online. But now it is time for some reflection. As I look back at the CEC and where it seems to be now it has become increasingly clear to me that the CEC is essentially Anglican. It's ethos is Anglican since it tries to hold together catholic and reformed positions. It's expression has been Charismatic (with both the good and bad aspects of that) but its place among denominations is essentially Anglican. Case in point, I recently came across an anglo-catholic blog that suggested that the mascot for such a church be the duck-billed platypus and stating that they are catholic and protestant. This description just as aptly fits the CEC just. However the CEC has spent so much time distancing itself from Anglicanism that it has pigeon holed itself, forcing it to re-invent what already is. The problem now is that rather than drawing nearer to what it holds in common with the Anglican world (and since it has rejected the journey that leads to Orthodoxy or genuine Catholic faith) it is forced to further isolate itself by entrenching itself in the Convergence Movement. But the Convergence movement is like the Emergent church movement. All of those modes can be accomplished in nearly any church, and certainly in any Lutheran or Anglican derivative.

World-wide Anglicanism is in the process of realignment. And while it has fallen apart organizationally it is not dead by any means. Instead I think we are in the middle of one of those 100 year (or more)long corrections that we see in church history. We are living in the middle of a period of crisis. But Anglicanism is alive, as evidenced by it's growth around the world in places like Africa and Brazil and among Anglican groups like the ACNA, the CEC, AMIA and others. Perhaps the best thing for the CEC would be to realign itself with global Anglicanism and learn that it holds much more in common with Anglicanism than with Orthodoxy or Catholicism. The time of the CEC as a self-described "Catholic" church has passed. There was a move and an opportunity to align with either of those two historic churches. This proved too costly and was poorly handled. Perhaps now the CEC can find commonality within the Anglican ethos it was born into (ca "Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail") and gain strength from those associations. This would be good.