Bishop David Birney arrived in Panama today to report to the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting, bringing delegates up to date on the situation of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda. Bishop Birney is the Archbishop of Canterbury's Envoy to Rwanda and has spent recent months visiting the country and its Bishops. Despite continued requests and repeated visits by Church officials to those in exile, these Bishops, fearing reprisals, have refused to respond to the request that they return to their leaderless dioceses.
ACC News
Emerging Provinces of the Anglican Communion will be helped towards membership of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) under guidelines agreed at the Council's meeting in Panama City today, 15 October 1996. Following the guidelines will ensure new Provinces the opportunity to benefit from the advice of the ACC and the experience of other Provinces.
The issue of homosexuality is not a top priority for the world, the Anglican Consultative Council was told at its meeting in Panama today, 17 October 1996. Poverty, peace and reconciliation come much higher up the agenda, delegates pointed out.
Welcome to ACC-10. Together with Canon Colin Craston, Chairman of ACC, I greet you all in the name of our Lord and pray that this time together will be a time of blessing as surely as it will be a time of hard work! I want to begin this Presidential Address by thanking the Secretary General and his staff for all the preparation that has gone into this Assembly. We are most grateful to them.
With his employers looking at a budget crisis in the next few days, the Anglican Observer at the United Nations used a hi-tech multi-media presentation to back his impassioned plea to support his ministry among the world's diplomats. The U.N. representative is responsible to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Consultative Council through the Secretary General. Bishop James Ottley, who gives the Anglican Communion a voice at the UN, alternated between smooth diplomacy and inspired preaching to get his message across to members of the Anglican Consultative Council here Sunday night
OCTOBER 11, 1996 - PANAMA CITY, PANAMA - Anglicans from around the world began a 10-day meeting here to help develop a vision for the church in the third Christian millennium. With more than 80 members of the Anglican Consultative Council represent bishops, priests and deacons and lay people from the 36 major branches of the Anglican Church. It has met every three years since 1971.
The following resolution passed at the recent ACC-10 Meeting in Panama
Resolution on Rwanda
Trusting in God's reconciling power, and giving thanks for signs of repentance and spiritual renewal within the Episcopal Church of Rwanda, this Council:
Ecumenism is an inseparable part of the mission of the church to spread the Good News about Jesus Christ, a group of worldwide Anglican Church delegates was told recently.
The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) today passed a resolution which endorses a proposal to help create a new town plan for Bethlehem's Manger Square. Anglicans were asked by the Palestinian National Authority to take part in this restoration of Bethlehem. The project will focus on reconstructing and replanning Manger Square (the birthplace of Christ) by the year 2000.
"The next Lambeth Conference will be a defining moment for Anglicanism. It will determine what we are and where we are going," said Archbishop Robin Eames to the representatives at the Anglican Consultative Council. "It will stand or fall on our sense of unity and vision."
A Tanzanian bishop who is a former Minister for Education in the Tanzanian Government is the new Chairman of the Anglican Consultative Council. The Right Reverend John Paterson, Bishop of Auckland in the Province of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia was elected ACC Vice-Chairman in a series of closely contested ballots on 14 October.