From the Anglican Communion Institute: The Pastoral Requests of the Dar es Salaam Communiqué

Posted April 2, 2007

The decision by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church to reject the Pastoral Council, and the much harsher statements about the character and responsibility of the Primates Meeting as an Instrument of Unity, made by individual Bishops of the Episcopal Church, have caught many of us off guard.

We leave here to the side the accounts of the Presiding Bishop’s understanding of her role at Dar es Salaam in respect of the communiqué, and her subsequent interpretations of that role in the context of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC). Much of this is simply confusing. At times there appears to be a willingness to concede that the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar schemes are fully within the realm of canonical viability, and desirability. At other points this becomes contested.

It would be useful therefore to state in simple terms what is at stake and what is possible, in the light of the hard work undertaken by the Primates, including the Presiding Bishop of TEC, at Dar es Salaam.

1. The Lambeth Conference charge of “enhanced responsibility” for the Primates as an Instrument of Unity/Communion stipulates that actions they request are to accord with the constitution and canons of the Province in question.
2. The Primatial Vicar and Pastoral Council scheme do not in principle violate either of the above, and the details need to be carefully worked out within TEC and not rejected ab initio.
3. The point of this scheme is to help TEC address its own problem of full compliance with requests of the Instruments of Unity/Communion and so remove the reason for foreign interventions. The proposal of the communiqué in this regard is not “injurious” but indeed helpful to TEC.
4. The actions taken by the Primates are not juridical but pastoral, and should be received in that same spirit.

In the light of this, and in view of the difficulties with compliance with the requests of the Primates, what is the way forward?

We suggest the following:

1. Bishops prepared to agree to the ‘Camp Allen Principles’ should meet to pray and discuss the best way forward.
2. Nominations for the role of Primatial Vicar should be solicited, as requested, and sent on to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
3. The Pastoral Council should be constituted with those members prepared to move forward as requested.
4. The Pastoral Council should select a Primatial Vicar from the nominations sent by Bishops in compliance with ‘Camp Allen Principles’; the courtesy of consultation with the Presiding Bishop should be extended, should she not wish to nominate members to the Council herself.
5. The Pastoral Council should then receive individual requests for oversight and communicate these to the relevant Diocesan Bishop, asking for permission to be given for the Primatial Vicar, or some other American bishop within the Pastoral Scheme, to act in accordance with the guidelines of the Pastoral Council.

Our prayer would be that the scheme be allowed a chance to work. Clearly certain individual Bishops would be willing to grant permission to a Primatial Vicar so constituted. Others would not – or so it would appear from the responses of individual Bishops to the Dar es Salaam communiqué.

Let this, then, emerge as the point of disagreement, should that transpire, rather than appearing to stall the work of the Communion by a widescale rejection ab initio of the pastoral request being made by the Primates at Dar es Salaam. This disagreement could then be addressed by the HOB before the 30 September deadline, at which time the consequences for wider compliance with the requests from the communiqué will have to be ascertained.

Nothing prevents an individual Bishop in TEC from granting permission for a Primatial Vicar or some other American bishop to exercise appropriate oversight, thus bringing canonical order to the proposed scheme. Should individual Bishops reject the requests, the reason for that would be given and the issue could then be joined where it is relevant. Rejecting the scheme altogether is inconsistent with the character of what if being proposed by the Primates Meeting. It also fails to indicate how the other requests have any chance of compliance by the September 30 deadline, thus calling into question the nature of TEC’s life in Communion, the very thing being guarded, if fragilely, by the Instruments of Unity and the Covenant Process presently underway.

We would hope that the Bishops in Compliance with the ‘Camp Allen Principles’ will give sustained thought to what it might mean to exist as Bishops operating in conjunction with such a scheme as proposed by the Primates; what it means for individual parishes; and what it means for their own role in respect of the HOB of TEC. But these are matters that can be discussed in a serious way, with proposals and prayerful responses to be forthcoming.

Christopher Seitz
Ephraim Radner
Philip Turner

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