Anglican Communion Network

HOB Oversight Plan will take “extraordinary new levels of trust”

Network members, moderator, respond to ECUSA plan

The national Episcopal Church’s just-released plan for “Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight” will require “tremendous generosity and charity on the part of the bishops and an extraordinary new level of trust on the part of the people and clergy,” if it is to work, said the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh, and moderator of the Anglican Communion Network.

“The Network bishops will do what they can to enable the plan’s success,” he added. “I am deeply concerned that we are able to offer Adequate Episcopal Oversight as the Primates understand it. The question is whether there is the will in the Episcopal Church to make this plan into that,” said Duncan. “My commitment, and that of the Network, is to stand in solidarity with people of faith who are desperately struggling in some of our dioceses.”

Responses from clergy and laity in the Network’s 12 dioceses and six convocations make it clear that, for most, the new plan leaves much to be desired.

“Parishes being oppressed by bishops have to go to the person oppressing them, meet with them and then they may provide another bishop for you,” said Kendall Harmon, canon theologian for the Network diocese of South Carolina.

According to Fr. Greg Brewer, Rector of the Church of the Good Samaritan in Paoli, PA, “generosity and charity” haven’t been what he and other orthodox parishes in liberal dioceses have always received in the past. “I was very disappointed in the content, It presumes the good will of liberal bishops to provide outside conservative pastoral care. There are a number of bishops that do not have that kind of good will,” he explained.

The Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, commonly known as the Anglican Communion Network, represents the Episcopalians of 12 dioceses and six regional convocations as well as thousands of individual Episcopalians from all over the United States, committed to being a united missionary movement of those sharing the gospel and rejecting false teaching. Primates, representing more than two-thirds of the world’s 60 million active Anglicans, have voiced public support for the Network.