New commission to aid

Anglican-Methodist relations

NEW YORK – How Methodists and Anglicans relate to one another can vary widely from country to country.

The new Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission, which held its first meeting in January in Mexico City, hopes to have an impact on those relationships.

According to the Rev W. Douglas Mills, an executive with the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Inter-religious Concerns, the new group “will look for ways to cooperate in mission, in evangelism, in service”, even as the two denominations wrestle with theological divisions.

“The big lesson from this meeting is that Anglican and Methodist relations around the world are very different in different regions,” said the Rev Mills, who attended the meeting.

While the two denominations have established relationships in some countries, such as Britain, Ireland and the United States, that is not the case everywhere. In Mexico, for example, “both are minorities”, he explained. “They are allied in some ways, but they also have very little contact.”

The Rt Rev C. Franklin Brookhart, Episcopal Bishop of Montana, who has been co-Chairman of the official dialogue between The United Methodist Church and US Episcopal Church, said: “In many ways, the commission could be a catalyst for the churches around the world to work more closely together.”

The Rev Dr George Freeman, a commission member and General Secretary of the World Methodist Council, pointed out that unlike the Anglican communion, the structure of Methodist denominations can vary from country to country. “Within the Methodist-Wesleyan family, we have a variety of expressions of how we do church,” he explained. “We’re not uniform in our governance.” – United Methodist News Service.