Hugo Blankingship and John Rodgers on AMiA

Time has passed and the AMiA implosion of 2010 has receded into historical memory. Many people, even those involved up close with what happened, don’t quite know what caused things to happen. Two new memoirs have appeared from Anglican House Publishers which I hoped might shed some more insider’s light on those days, but I have been disappointed in what I read. The books are Zoom Memoirs by Bishop John H. Rodgers Jr. and Through the Deep Waters by A. Hugo Blankingship, Jr.

Blankingship writes:

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A serious problem arose when AMIA decided to withdraw as a founding member and take a new, lesser status as a "Ministry Partner" under ACNA Canons allowing for a more detached role.

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Bishop Murphy had advised the ACNA that the House of Bishops of Rwanda had made an official finding that AMIA’s status as a full member of the ACNA was in violation of the Canons of Rwanda. A review of the document setting forth the claim of violation and the circumstance surrounding its adoption raised concerns within the ACNA over the true motivation of Bishop Murphy as the AMIA bishop. Nonetheless, but with reluctance, the ACNA Council approved the AMIA request to reduce its status to Ministry Partner, and they ceased to be a full member of the organization they had helped created. This was a very painful time for the rapidly expanding ACNA and especially for Archbishop Duncan.

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Not long after this unhappy event, Archbishop Kolini retired as the Primate of Rwanda, and a new archbishop took his place. The events that followed this change of command are subject to various interpretations, the details of which will not be covered here. Suffice it to say that AMIA underwent some substantial changes, even to a point of seeking affiliation with another African Anglican Province.

Blankingship is writing at such a high level of abstraction and with so little to say that his account adds little if anything to the historical record on this subject and does not serve future historians of ACNA well. I am speaking with regard to the AMiA, not the entire book, which I have not read yet.

Bishop John Rodgers, a founder of AMiA, writes:

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When AMiA withdrew from Rwanda, it happened without my permission. At the same time, I did not want to withdraw from AMiA. I did not want to do anything that would cast any doubt on my relationship with Yong Ping Chung and Emmanuel Kolini. They had paid a high price for their willingness to take the first steps. So I did not withdraw from AMiA, but I also never officially withdrew from ACNA. So, I’m kind of a strange duck.

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I have tried to be a reconciler all the way through this process. That has been my role; it continues to be my role. The separation broke my heart. After the separation, we had a meeting in Bob’s office with Chuck and some others from AMiA and ACNA. Chuck actually asked rather tentatively to come back into ACNA, but Bob was not open to this apart from AMiA bishops remaining in Rwanda, since they had also withdrawn from full membership in the ACNA College of Bishops the previous June (2010)

Stephen Noll asks him:

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As I understand it, ACNA was trying at this time to convince the remaining overseas Provinces, Rwanda in particular, to hand back their North American client churches. So it was a delicate relational matter, and there was a dispute going on between AMiA and the new Provincial leadership in Rwanda.

Rodgers says:

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We in AMiA had been raising money and sending ten percent of our annual budget to Rwanda to be distributed by their archbishop. After Kolini retired, the bishops there decided that that was not sufficient. They wanted literally to manage us, whereas we thought of them as giving us cover. They finally gave us an ultimatum: either give them what they wanted or resign. So Chuck resigned, and our whole house of Bishops resigned with two or three exceptions and took me with them. I was already retired and did not know about it until it had already happened. I was simply asked if I wanted to come along.

Rodgers had added a bit to my understanding of events, but just a bit. I have hundreds of pages of historical records on those events, but it would be truly beneficial to have email, interviews, and insider perspectives that I imagine we will never have. I may publish my sources at some point before the tide of history carries us all away.