At the recent Toronto Pan-Anglican Congress, Rev. Canon Christopher Seitz summarised the aggressive plans for a stalwart defence of conservative orthodoxy: they intend to go down with a whimper .

Sietz, acknowledging that that battle has already been lost, concentrated on whether conservative parishes will be permitted to retain their orthodoxy. In other words, the retreat continues apace: no more reforming North American Anglicanism from within; the best conservatives are now hoping for is to be ignored by their dioceses, as they remain (if they are permitted to remain, that is) little islands of orthodoxy afloat in a festering swamp of heresy. Anything to preserve unity.

Read it all here:

Conservatives should seek terms for a negotiated peace to the Anglican wars, the Rev. Canon Christopher Seitz, Old Testament Scholar and Senior Research Professor at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto and a leader of the Anglican Communion Institute told a conference marking the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 Toronto Pan-Anglican Congress.

The battle had been lost leaving conservatives as “strangers in their own church,” he said on 18 Sept 2013, and “the question for conservatives [now] is about encouragement. Will we be allowed to walk the well-worn paths of the faith,” he asked “or must we follow the trailblazers?”

[….]

But the political battled had been fought, and the conservatives had lost. It was “no longer a matter of saying the new ways are wrong. That point has passed. “

“We are in a new time. It is now here. We can see a before or after” in the Episcopal Church since the consecration of Gene Robinson and in the rise to power of Katharine Jefferts Schori. One group has been defeated” and “traditional Anglicans have lost a battle.”

There is now “no single understanding” of the faith. New Prayer Books will emerge that will enshrine the majority faction’s dogmas. The question for conservatives is not whether they can stop this but if the majority will allow “two rites [to] exist side by side.”

Prof. Seitz noted the “intermediate steps” taken at the 2012 to allow each bishop to approve or reject local gay marriage rites had “no long term integrity.”  The General Convention endorsed “diocesan autonomy here, but rejects it elsewhere.”

In the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada “we are in a genuinely new time. A time of accomplishment and tidying up,” Prof Seitz said, and this is “why encouragement matters” for conservatives remaining in these churches. “Others have left us and our blazing new trails,” but not all hear the call to depart.

Encouragement for the conservative remnant “would be allowing the status quo ante. Not a new church allowing traditional Anglicans” a home, but the existing churches giving conservatives “the moral space and right to exist.”

“Will dioceses and parishes be permitted to do what has been done before,” he asked. Will we be given the “moral space to conserve our traditions? Can bishops let go of parishes? Can dioceses choose to say no? Can we [as Episcopalians] remain a valued and trustworthy expression of the church catholic?”

[….]

“Conservative parishes are waiting and trusting,” he said, as “God is hiding his face for a season for his own purposes.”

Perhaps God is hiding his face because the conservative parishes still in TEC and the ACoC have ignored his call to disentangle themselves from institutional apostasy.