THE Archbishop of Canterbury warned the Synod last Friday that the break-up of the Anglican Communion would not be a tidy affair, but would weaken vulnerable Churches. He aimed at clarifying his recent reflections on how the damage might be limited.
The complex processes of the US Episcopal Church’s Convention had produced a less-than-clear result, he said. "The final resolution relating to the consecration of practising gay persons as bishops owed a great deal to some last-minute work by the Presiding Bishop, who invoked his personal authority in a way that was obviously costly for him."
The careful disentangling of the resolutions was to be carried forward by a small group already appointed by the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council. The next Primates’ Meeting in February would digest what emerged.
The request from several US dioceses for direct Primatial oversight from outside the US raised very large questions; various consultations were going forward to clarify what was being asked, and to reflect on possible implications.
A working party was being established in consultation with the Anglican Communion Office and others to look more fully at the question what sort of covenant could be constructed on the Windsor report’s recommendation.
Dr Williams said that his published reflections in the wake of General Convention had contained no directives and no foreclosing of the character and content of such a covenant.
It was nonsense to characterise his words as a capitulation to fundamentalism or a cunning plan to entrench total doctrinal indifferentism. " When I said . . . that the Communion cannot remain as it is, I was drawing attention to some unavoidable choices.
"Many have said, with increasing force of late, that we must contemplate or even encourage the break-up of the Communion into national Churches whose autonomy is unqualified and which relate only in some sort of loose and informal federation. . . The problem is that it is unlikely to bear any relation to reality. Many provinces are internally fragile; we cannot assume that what will naturally happen is a neat pattern of local consensus."
The disappearance of an international structure left the possibility of much less than a federation, "indeed, of competing and fragmenting ecclesial bodies in many contexts across the world".
Dr Williams took the example of Sudan, where "a breakaway and very aggressive Anglican body", with political support, made "the ludicrous assertion that the Episcopal Church of Sudan is unorthodox in its teaching on sexual ethics. Some mischievous forces are quite capable of using the debates over sexuality as an alibi for divisive action whose roots are in other conflicts.
"And Churches in disadvantaged or conflict-ridden settings cannot afford such distractions. . . It helps, to put it no more strongly, that there is a global organisation which can declare such a separatist body illegitimate and insist to a local government that certain groups are not recognised internationally." Vulnerable Churches were not restricted to Africa.
Churches were free to say yes or no to a covenant — "and a no has consequences, not as ‘punishment’, but simply as a statement of what can and cannot be taken for granted in a relationship between two particular Churches," Dr Williams said.
Congregational (as in Congregationalist or Baptist) or national-Church (as in Lutheran) ecclesiologies were not where Anglicans had seen their true centre and character: "We have claimed to be Catholic." Anglicanism had never been just a loose grouping of people who cared to describe themselves as Anglicans but enjoyed unconfined local liberties.
"Argue for this if you will, but recognise that it represents something other than the tradition we have received and been nourished by in God’s providence. And only if we can articulate some coherent core for this tradition in present practice can we continue to engage plausibly in any kind of ecumenical endeavour, local or international."
Dr Williams said that he made no secret of his commitment to the ideal of the Church Catholic. "I know that its embodiment in Anglicanism has always been debated, yet I believe that the vision of Catholic sacramental unity without centralisation or coercion is one that we have witnessed to at our best and still need to work at."
The URL for this story is:
http://churchtimes.co.uk/churchtimes/website/pages.nsf/httppublicpages/411C87E4779EBDE4802571AA00415507
Maintainer: Ted McMichael
Send Comments or Questions to:
Administrator.ChurchOfTheWord@verizon.net