Indigenous Anglicans issue joint statement in support of Navajoland diocese
[Anglican Communion News Service] Indigenous Anglicans from four provinces of the Anglican Communion, including The Episcopal Church, have issued a joint statement of support for the Episcopal Church in Navajoland, after the missionary diocese’s postponement of the election of its first bishop diocesan. The postponement was announced on 11 June.
The statement is signed by the Most Rev. Don Tamihere, archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia; the Most Rev. Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto, archbishop and primate of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil and bishop of Amazonia; the Most Rev. Chris Harper, national Indigenous Anglican archbishop and presiding elder of Sacred Circle in the Anglican Church of Canada; and the Rt. Rev. Daniel Gutiérrez, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.
The signatories write that they have followed Navajoland’s journey towards self-determination with “prayer, aroha and thanksgiving” and that they walk with their Diné family “not as distant observers, but as relatives” bound “by faith, by kinship and by a shared history of colonization.”
They share “the surprise and disappointment expressed by many at the postponement, for a second time, of the election of Navajoland’s first bishop diocesan. We know this must have been a deeply sacrificial and difficult decision.”
More on the Navajoland leadership transition can be found here.
