Four really bad ideas in the Windsor Report - Mark Harris

From the Rev. Mark Harris's PRELUDIUM blog — I especially like his take on Bad Idea #1:  "Walking together vs. walking apart as quasi-poetic imagery for being in or out of communion."  Mark says:

What makes us all pilgrims on the way is not that we agree with each other, but that we have reason to be together, and for Christians that reason has to do with God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. We are hurrying to meet Jesus, not on a jaunt with right thinking people.

Another favorite is Bad Idea # 2 (extra paragraphing and paragraph numbering is mine):

[a]  Subsidiary and adiaphora, which is more or less the notion that decisions should be made at the most basic level possible (subsidiarity) and that things of lesser import are the ones made at the more basic level (adiaphora).  This means, of course, that really important decisions must be made by really important people, at the highest levels.

[b]  This means, in an Episcopal system, big decisions get made by bishops.  What it also means in the Anglican Communion is that some few decisions get made by the Primates, and in particular by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[c]  In the Anglican community almost none of these persons are accountable in any way to the folk at the bottom, and in many cases not accountable to folk in the middle either.  Oh yes, and by the way, very few of them are elected by any combination of people other than fellow bishops. Some, like the Archbishop of Canterbury are appointed by the State.

[d]  It is hard to see how subsidiarity works in any way to the good of the whole, unless domestic decisions regarding church leaders in England really do have meaning ordained by God for the whole Communion.

The implicit assumptions of paragraph [b] are problematic.  Constitutionally, it's obvious that the top level of the Episcopal Church hierarchy is not the bishops, nor the Presiding Bishop, nor even the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the General Convention.  Mark obviously has a similar view.

It's worth a read.