Praying for the Primates Meeting

The Primates of our Worldwide Anglican Communion will be meeting this week in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Primates are the Archbishops (or in the case of the Episcopal Church, Executive "Presiding" Bishop) of the various National Churches with membership in our World-wide Anglican Communion. They meet regularly to discuss issues confronting our Communion.

Unfortunately, the various activities of the Episcopal Church and its deviation from Biblical teaching has become a common frustrating theme at these meetings. Yes, it certainly would be great if they could spent all of their time working on strategies for evangelism and lifting up of the poor in Jesus' name, but dealing with that which is cancerous to the theological integrity of the Body of our Communion has to take presidence so that the other work can be accomplished.

In addition to the Primates, several other American Bishops have been invited to the meeting to help the Primates understand the dire state of the Church in America. Bishop Duncan of Pittsburgh is among them, as well as Bishop McPherson of Western Louisiana, and Bp. Epting who works in the Presiding Bishop's Office.

Lots of folks are hoping some sort of solid discipline for ECUSA's refusal to repent at General Convention and agree to the terms of the Windsor Report on Communion is coming, as well as some sort of alternate recognition of Dioceses/Parishes that are compliant. As always, instead of holding our breath we need to pray, pray, pray that God's will is accomplished, remembering that haste is a human need, often contrary to the virtue or patience!

Bishop Ackerman of the Diocese of Quincy has put together a Novena - nine day prayer intention for the meeting, which can be found in PDF (Adobe Acrobat Reader format) here
http://dioceseofquincy.org/pdfs_and_docs/novena-primates.pdf

So pray, pray, pray for the Church!