TIME WARP

I live in a time warp. We are an hour behind South Bend time where the diocesan office is located. I have to remember that when going to see the Bishop. We only use Rite One at Mass here. The High Altar remains firmly in the “eastward” position. La Porte is a small Midwestern community, and large Victorian homes flank the roads around the stone church. My rectory adjoins the church building. I don’t even have to go outside to enter the sacristy. I always preach on the Propers and leave politics to the politicians. I have a good excuse. As I’ve only been in the US for just over forty years I haven’t had time to become a citizen let alone understand its odd form of government. We may have gay parishioners who attend. I don’t ask what people, gay or straight, do in their bedrooms.I have a weak stomach and anyway a gentleman wouldn’t.

Living as someone who believes that one must be in communion with the See of Canterbury as part of the Anglican Communion -communion is a much stronger word than federation and much clearer than “Church” – is for me instinctive and obvious. I have never believed that a “particular” church is omni-competent, not even the Church of England!   I find denominationalism unreasonable, unscriptural and untraditional. I believe that our Prayer Book contains the doctrine of the Church, expressed in the language of rite and in the Catechism.

By natural inclination and not virtue I am not inclined to shun those with whom I disagree, for I actually like people, all sorts and conditions of people and my experience informs my unwillingness to join “starter-churches”. I have many friends among those who have separated from TEC. Many of their clergy are heroic in ministry and could teach us a thing or two about building churches without external funds. I work in a diverse diocese in which we all manage to work together in great harmony, led by a pastoral, kind and orthodox bishop.

It is therefore easy for me to remain in TEC!  My “tolerance” comes at no great price. I am only challenged on line. Even then few vent their spleen in my direction and most who have share my own beliefs! There is an irony there.

I really feel for clergy and laity whose lot is not as fortunate as my own, who daily work in hostile environments, liberal or conservative and who must struggle against resentment and disillusion and often subtle and not so subtle persecution. I wish we could do something about this result of the narrowing of our comprehension and of our minds. I am sure that one of the real tests of just how Anglican our leadership really is will be demonstrated by whether provisions are now made to foster and safeguard the faith and ministry of Christians within TEC who do not find themselves able to receive the policies adopted at jurisdictional level, whether National Church or diocese. There was a time when our bishops thought it part of their job description to respect parochial integrity and tradition.

If, as I suspect, the Anglican Communion generally moves towards the adoption of a Covenant a way must be found for our “minority” to retain its full Anglican status and koinonia. Seven bishops will meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury shortly to discuss the plight of those of us who are hopelessly antediluvian. As I remember the last time seven bishops bucked the Establishment they were incarcerated in the Tower of London. Perhaps room is being prepared in a part of 815 for these new seven bishops!  Pray for them.

WHILE I WAS AWAY

I managed to be out of the country for most of the time General Convention met and for that period of reflection which came after the bishops and deputies returned to the reality of their respective homes and jobs. Of course even at a safe distance, in Yorkshire, Scotland and then County Durham, I heard and read of the decisions our leaders made for us. Mercifully not one of my relatives, well except for my older son, and he in passing, had the slightest interest in what TEC was up to in California. I was thus not drawn into the emotions surrounding TEC’s convoluted decisions to go it’s own way, wrapped in the mantle of exceptionalism and prophecy.

Towards the end of my stay in Durham, I did meet it’s Bishop a few times, unaware during our brief conversations that he exhibits megalomania ( as English Liberals in Changing Attitudes proclaim.)  Indeed Bishop Wright was approachable, humorous and very kind. But then I am an unashamed fan of his biblical writings and admire his integrity and purpose. It is not +Tom Wright who suggests that he is a prophet with a special message from God.

(My son Mark is now a priest in the Diocese of Durham, a lecturer at Cranmer Hall seminary and in the history department at the University there, as he reads for his doctorate and helps out in local parishes: the energy of youth!)

Again I am in the minority over here when I welcome the Archbishop of Canterbury’s measured and charitable response to the actions of General Convention on the ordination of partnered, sexually expressive persons of the same gender or the blessing, aka marriage, of same sex couples. I was amazed to read that some people didn’t understand what he was saying and that others thought he said too much. If one reads much of +Rowan’s work, the ideas of patience and civility come over with gentle firmness. The Archbishop obviously doesn’t think that drawing damning conclusions about behavior, however duplicitous, furthers conversation. He is not adopting the role of a Victorian father and ordering TEC and the Canadians from hearth and home, never to darken the doors of Lambeth Palace again. What he does say, again firmly and gently, is that actions have consequences and that those consequences cannot be evaded by equivocal or contradictory interpretations or an appeal to what were once described as “situation ethics.”  The consequence of going it alone is obviously a measure of disassociation, particularly if a Covenant is adopted by most of the Communion and rejected by General Convention.

American Episcopalians should not resent the fact that people overseas do not accept on face value claims that TEC has been uniquely singled out to teach the rest of the Communion God’s alleged new line on ethics. I remember being in Westminster Abbey as a young man. I was walking with a cleric of the Abbey when we saw a young fellow standing on a chair and addressing a group of bystanders. Michael approached the young man, who obviously was not a tour guide, and asked him who he was and what he was doing. He replied that he was a Latter Day Saint and was talking to his followers. Michael replied, “Stuff and nonsense!  If God had wanted to give a new revelation in the 19th. Century it would have been to an Englishman.”  Quite so.

Prophecy, we are informed by Scripture, is to be tested. At this moment most of the Communion, in varying degrees, is not convinced that what TEC prophesies is the authentic Word of God. TEC on the other hand, and its Canadian Anglican friends are convinced that the majority voice of a General Convention is an authentic expression of the will of the Holy Spirit. I suppose one might conclude that this theory is a sort of collectivized version of the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, despite the fact that Anglicans have always held that the Church is indefectible but not infallible and that Councils do err, even ones which meet in California. One would be much happier if a trace of humility accompanied claims to Pneumatic Inspiration. But as with the matter of Health Care in the US, temperate reason has left our discourse, and partisans to the right of us and those to the left fire salvos at each other, shots which rarely hit home, but fly off over heads to hit those caught in a battle not of their making.

In a sense I am relieved that TEC has now charted its course. It is perhaps alarming to realize that one now belongs to a tiny minority in a largely monochrome church. It would be ironic if I found myself, once again, in a body out of communion with the wider Anglican world, a church whose leaders once chided me for being an Anglican in a “continuing church.”. God does have a sense of humor. In the meantime we must hope and pray that the Communion Partners Bishops take strength and require that faithful Anglicans in TEC be given a way to remain in communion with the See of Canterbury and space to get on with the task of talking about Jesus the Saviour.  We shall see. My son Mark believes that we should refrain from being distracted by issues and, emulating the Evangelicals and Tractarians who began to call the church back to mission as small groups of dedicated people without power or influence, get on with the work of evangelism.

CROMWELL LIVES: GC ASSUMESEPISCOPAL DUTIES.

I watched today a video of a press conference in which the President of the House of Bishops and members of her Council of Advice reported about a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury held at General Convention now in session.  Bonnie Anderson stated that the Council explained to the Archbishop in a short meeting that TEC has a particular and novel ecclesiology which affirms that reactions to requests by Instruments of Unity may only be made by resolution of General Convention. No one may speak for TEC except the General Convention is session every three years. Specifically our bishops as a House may only speak as one House and not for the Church.

If this were the case in matters of negotiations between countries, and countries whose legislature only meets once in three years, what would be produced would be diplomatic paralysis. Yet there is something more vital here than “process”. Years ago I wrote an essay entitled “The General Convention Church” which may still be accessed at “Anglicans Online.”  What seems to be advanced here is a notion once embraced by non-episcopal denominations who advanced egalitarian and non-sacerdotal or episcopal doctrines and were free to do that which their governing bodies decided. Anglicanism at the Reformation stood against such notions even in their most reformed moments.

No one surely doubts that if one wants to know about TEC’s views of global warming, MDGs, even the war in Iraq, on its budgetary priorities, or even its mission priorities, the decisions of General Convention are the literature to access. However if one reads the Ordinal, the language of the service for the ordination and consecration, one reads language which affords to the bishops, individually in their dioceses, collectively in TEC and further in the wider church, for us the Anglican Communion and to the rest of Christendom and the world certain specific duties. They are to “guard the faith, unity and discipline of the Church”. Note the capital “C”. They “share in the leadership of the Church (capital “C”) throughout the world.”

Nowhere in the Baptismal, Confirmation, Reception, or ordination to the diaconate or priesthood is such language used or description of Apostolic function and ministry afforded or described.

Historically the House of Bishops is described and limited adjectivally in its present form in the great compromise which was framed to reconcile New England High Churchmen who were “Episcopalians” with Latitudinarian Southern Church people who thought that bishops were not of the “esse” of the church. The House of Bishops may block resolutions from the House of Deputies. The same is true in the other direction. Yet the veto power of the Deputies in no way compromises the Apostolic duty of the bishops to guard and defend and proclaim the Faith of the Church. Bishops collectively have the special charism to authenticate and proclaim the Faith the whole Church, capital “C” has received.

Of course bishops traditionally share this authority, or rather are advised by priests in their dioceses, and take note of the counsel of theologians and spiritual advisers.

All this is far from the dramatic claim that a synod of a “particular church” alone may exercise an authority which is essentially episcopal. The essential authority of the episcopate is not merely sacramental, as our polity affirms in diocesan government, but is also doctrinal, in matters of essential discipline, and in worship.

If indeed only General Convention,  disturbingly described as self-validating and omni-competent ( “no Supreme Court” as a member of the President’s Council of Advice smilingly advanced in the press conference) what was proposed to one of the most learned scholars of ecclesiology, Rowan Williams, was a form of particularism which is not only novel but thoroughly uncatholic – I here refer to basic teaching and not theological opinion – and unanglican and I would propose a form of ecclesiology much more radical than that embraced by the founders of TEC. In short the compromise embraced to include Seabury Anglicans is now being abjured. In matters of faith the House of Bishops is the Supreme Court.

I find this fundamentally more disturbing than matters of same-sex blessings and the ordination of gay bishops in sexual relationships. The Church has survived all sorts of novelties but in this case, as with much of Mutual Ministry theology we are being pulled far away from Anglicanism and into a quaint form of Puritanism.

TEC and ACNA

The “Anglican Church of North America” has been formed. What it will become is yet to be seen. From the outside it seems to be a bewildering mixture of structures, including rump former Episcopal dioceses, collections of congregations which were formerly parts of the Anglican Church of Canada, ecclesial extra-territorial missions of overseas Provinces which have established ‘mission’ in North America and appointed missionary bishops, an Anglo-Catholic society, Forward in Faith which developed originally as a coalition of ‘Catholic’ clergy and parishes within TEC after the ordination of women and at least one jurisdiction which created its own self-identity in the midst of the Catholic Evangelical disputes of the 19th.

What unites this disparate constituency is a common belief that there is no room at the inns we term The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Canada, the official Anglican Provinces of the Anglican Communion in this Continent. This is not the first attempt to create a common home for the alienated. In 1977 in St. Louis a Congress met which attempted to create a similar united alternative expression of Anglicanism. If anything the differences of appoach, even of faith and one must say personalities which made a shambles of that movement are even more pronounced in Bedford, where the new Archbishop will be enthroned tonight.  One significant difference is to be noted. This time those attempting to create “common cause” in Texas this week have the support and perhaps in an informal manner the oversight and counsel of overseas Provinces and dioceses and again in an informal sense those charged with leading ACNA have a larger constituency overseas to which they must answer. We shall see whether the “particularism” which seems to be in the American bloodstream south of the Canadian border will be as potent in ACNA is it is in TEC. The temptation to claim a special revelation vouchsafed to Americans and to be exported abroad has been manifest in both groups, although from different prospectives and both have been potent dividers in the Anglican Communion.

Three main problems face the newly formed ACNA, and they are all formidable. All of them in a sense limit the ability of ACNA to break free of its emotional and psychological attachment to that which has brought them to this point.  The first revolves around property disputes. I wrote to bishops and deputies to General Convention today suggesting that a trust or trusts be formed to administer disputed property and to enter into temporary agreements in cases in which a vast majority of parishioners in such properties wish no longer to be in TEC, negotiating leases, shared arrangements and creative solutions to take these disputes out of the secular courts. I was not encouraged by the responses I received, most of which accused those leaving us off stealing property or of being so bigoted against gay and lesbians that in justice they should be shunned.  Justice, I am told, trumps charity.

The second problem revolves around the language used to depose bishops and other clergy who have joined ACNA which, if language means anything at all, purports to laicise such clergy rather than merely to desprive them of the right to exercise ministry in Provinces in which they have no desire to exercise ministry.

The third is the problematic relationship between ACNA and the Instruments of Unity of the Anglican Communion which has exported American problems worldwide and threatens to destroy the unity of the entire Communion. If indeed the Communion comes apart because of what has happened here, ACNA will, whether it deserves to be blamed or not, bear a good deal of responsibility for a tragic schism, a responsibility in which it will ironically, be accused of sharing responsibility with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, to what extent perhaps is a judgment differently assessed by people on differing sides of this tragedy.

These drawsbacks into that which has happened harm both sides in the dispute. TEC and the ACofC have a psychological, territorial and monetary investment in their commitment to retain property, diocesan identity and to disown those who have left them. ACNA has a similar investment in retaining property, diocesan and jurisdictional integrity and the status of their clergy.

Thus the ghost of things past haunts both households. Both also are driven to defend what their part has been in all this and such a defense is capable of compromising the essential identity and mission of the church. Causes replace Gospel and self-authentication replaces mission. In such situations it is easy for both groups to become mirror images of each other, or other sides of the same coin, trapped in their own involvement like a couples in a lengthy, bitter and unresolved divorce.

Those of us in TEC who were once moderate “traditionalists” are now driven to the edge and wonder just how welcome we are in a growingly monochrome and less comprehensive Episcopal Church, a church now impelled to justify its narrowing “comprehension” to the rest of the Anglican Communion and capable of being as militantly reactive to anything and anyone whose faith is that of the Prayer Book and the Catechism as it has been to those who have left. Those of us who are “Communion Partners” are already being branded as schismatics merely because we wish to adopt an Anglican Covenant at diocesan level whatever the General Convention eventually decides to do once a Covenant is offered to the Communion.

General Convention has an opportunity to reach out to those who have left and to those of us who remain by adopting a language of charity and forbearance, the language of the Cross rather than that of institutional self-justification and protection. We shall see.

INSPIRATION

Those of us old foggies who oddly can’t accept that the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony may be entered into by two persons of the same sex are frequently accused of resisting the activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church. It’s an effective charge in that no one has a way of judging the validity of the accusation. Certainly such an accusation is packed with emotional if not cerebral content. How may Christians and worse still clergy defy the operation of God in the life of the Church? To use a Wolf Blitzerism, it seems “SHOCKING”.  I want to address three aspects of this accusation.

The first is the aspect of chauvinism. Technically a “chauvinist” is an ultra patriot. One hears this sort of thing when conservative American politicians reject universal health care on the grounds that it is “European” along with French Fries (the noble English chip smothered in malt vinegar) or the pernicious “u” in colour. By the way I’d trade the American health “system” for the French version any day. The health care I received in France  was wonderful and instantly available, even though I was a foreigner. The French seemed to have the odd idea that health care was as vital and thus as universally available as education.

Thus for those who believe that “full inclusion” is that which the Holy Spirit is prompting TEC to embrace, “the church” is fully and totally encompassed by what is described as “THE Episcopal Church”..worldwide.  The rest of the Christian Church, unless it agrees with TEC’s “inspiration” doesn’t count. The reason is obvious. No other Christian body is as democratic, a democracy formed by an American identity. That such a self-estimation is entwined with the sort of secular particularism, perhaps the natural popular form of patriotism embraced by Nineteenth Century Americans who crossed the Atlantic “Red Sea” and founded a Promised Land, the “last great hope on earth.”

Now I would not dispute that the American experiment in freedom and liberty is a mighty and salutary example to the secular world. I have neither the space nor time to illustrate this, but certainly in recent times this has produced in many, perhaps unconsciously, the type of chauvinism which concentrates on a superiority of a culture and system with the gifts such a culture may offer to others.

However TEC and by extension its Canadian partner is not THE Church. Perhaps Episcopalians may believe that the present concentration of “including” gay and lesbian Christians in the Church – I leave alone what “inclusion” means – is a gift of insight to be “gifted” to the rest of the Christian world. But to go further and imply that those who doubt the Christian authenticity of the gift are defying the Third Person of the Trinity is a theory which may have no objective proof and which carries with it a arrogance which is breathtaking. (Persons who are “attracted” to persons of the same sex, who are baptized are obviously included in the Church and always have been. Those whose attraction in accompanied by relationships of true and faithful friendship are not and never have been excluded. Further it is rubrical and good Anglican practice that what they do together is no one’s business unless they cause the sort of scandal which is the product of self-advertisement: and by that I do not mean conjecture, gossip, or “outing”. If they thereby sin, and I do not thereby trivialize sin, they are in no worse or better case than the malicious gossips who seek to expose them. Pastoral practice by sinners towards sinners has nothing to do either with the doctrine of Holy Matrimony or who may or may not be a bishop. (Yes, bishops are sinners too. And yes there is a certain hypocrisy about our hope and prayer that a bishop may not place on public display those sins best left unnoticed. Such sins they must deal with, one hopes, in private. What they must not do is give cause for public scandal. The Church has always made such a distinction not because it wishes bishops to hide their sins, but because it is “open and notorious” sins, ones performed on an open stage and frequently without care for the audience, which offends the faithful and harms the Church thereby. The sin may be at base the arrogant action of parading a behavior known to unnecessarily offend merely to advertise ones “freedom.” One supposes that the very fact that the personal lives of prominent Christians in an age of internet and blog are prey to often malicious gossips has made the problem of fallible bishops and clergy more vulnerable. Ironically that a bishop lived with a particular friend a century ago probably went without comment. If he drank too much port it was!! )

None of which has much to do with the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. This leads me to a second point. After a century of conflict over what constitutes a sacrament, in which the number “seven” finally triumphed (perhaps two major and five minor) in the American BCP we are now being asked to accept that the “matter” of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony has developed by the action of the Holy Spirit in the life of tiny North American “particular” churches. It has been suggested that such a developement is in order because, for instance, Anglicans decided a few hundred years ago that married persons could be the proper “matter” of the Sacrament of Holy Order. Yet such “matter” wasn’t radically changed or made more or less “male” then, or if you will “human” by being married. Nor was the idea of a married clergy innovative. It was a return to an earlier tradition.

I will grant that sacramental numerology is eccentric, if a handy way of identifying obvious ways in which the actions of the Church demonstrate an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

We come now to this whole business of the promise that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. Is this a promise that the Church will be gradually let into Godly ideas which were not “revealed” in earlier days?  John Henry Newman in his famous essay on the development of doctrine argued that seminal concepts undefined or “developed” in earlier days might be defined and “unpacked” or fleshed out by universal ecclesiastical authority. Rome bit dear and often naive Newman by providing such a universal authenticating authority in the shape of an infallible papacy and church.

Anglicans were slow to cotton on to such a theory. Before Newman the assumption was made that as Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” He is the final “doctrinal development” and the Holy Spirit guided the Church to apprehend this final Revelation as it codified that which was revealed in Scripture. Thus the universally received definitions of the General Councils of the whole Church were “inspired” by the Holy Spirit because they identified that which the Scriptures taught and the task of the Church was then to teach and uphold such doctrine and to translate such teachings into the cultures of the world. (The concept that culture informs doctrine rather than providing a language and a cultural expression for the articulation of doctrine and practice is very modern indeed and seems to turn everything on its head. Which culture and why?)

But if Newman was right, or shall we say that if we may go even beyond Newman and not require some seminal root for development, how may a particular Province, or a family of Provinces claim with confidence that it is the oracle of such a development?  In practical terms what about the re-marriage of divorcees or the ordination of women. Of the first I would only suggest that outside the influence of the Roman Catholic Church the re-marriage of divorcees under penitential terms is not novel nor has ever been. Nor may I say that the inclusion on women in the Sacrament of Baptism is an indifferent “seminality” in defining who may be the “matter” of Holy Orders. There remain cogent arguments on both sides of that issue.

However the union of a man and a woman for the purposes obviously demonstrated by the distinct identity and mutuality of a man and a woman is not the same at all as identifying the common Christian unity and identity of all baptized men and women through baptism into the priesthood of Christ, laying aside all other arguments for and against the ordination of women. Nothing is more “obvious” than the distinction and compatibility of a man and a woman becoming “one flesh”. To discount such obviousness is disingenious and perhaps eccentric.

I must address very simply the objection that a marriage between a man and a woman may fail or result in much harm and that therefore such failures indicate that marriage between a man and a woman is no better (or worse) than that of a same sex couple. An ideal is an ideal because it elevates us to a level beyond our natural capacity. Marriage from a Christian standpoint is an impossible ideal. If it may ascend to a manageable “possibility” by placing before a man and a woman the relationship between Christ and the Church is not to be discounted by the fallibility of the Church but to act as a vision to which the Church is continually called and enabled by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Similarity the union of a man and a woman, Christians have always believed relies on the Presence of Christ continually by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit inspires the Church into all truth by confirming the Faith once delivered to the Church renewed in every age and generation. However right Darwin may well have been, Christian belief and practice is not a matter of the developed survival of the fittest!

BETWIXT & BETWEEN

I have an urge to rename the Sunday after Ascension “Episcopalian Day”.  The similarities are striking. The disciples were huddled in the upper room “for fear” of the people outside. One may well imagine the debate that went on. Jesus had left a number of parting commandments. “Go into the world and tell”. “Go baptize”. “Do this in remembrance of me.” “Love one another”.  “You will receive dynamic power and you will be my life-givers to the furthest parts of the earth.”

Yet it is probable that Jerusalem was the furthest from home they had ever been.  The treasurer had been dipping in the funds, had turned on Jesus and then committed suicide. Peter had denied he knew the Lord, and only John and the women had hung around and dared to go to the Cross. A likely lot!

Well, like good Episcopalians there was one thing they knew how to do. They held an election. We don’t know how controversial Matthias was, but he hardly moved mountains. We hear nothing about him after his election. Sounds like a nice safe candidate for the episcopate.

If the disciples in the upper room were really like the rest of us, after a long debate about evangelism (sounded like something those fundamentalist Pharisees would get up to) they probably hung a discreetly suitable sign outside saying “Tasteful worship. Visitors may apply for membership.”

No doubt the new treasurer advised that spending the little money available for going into the world would be imprudent and demonstrate a lack of fiscal responsibility. Maybe someone suggested painting the room blue, and after heated debate the motion was carried.

There were probably conservatives who opposed change and thought evangelism was best aimed at those who shared the same world-view and ethnicity, and some wild liberals who thought going to the Gentiles would be good as long as no hint were given that their present religion was inadequate or even untrue. Better campaign against crucifixion and open a soup kitchen, the latter staffed by others.

What about Mary the Mother?  Well let’s not get too High Church. Do we have to make Eucharist everyday?  Share everything in common?  Sounds egalitarian.  What’s all this about the Holy  Spirit. We’ll be holding balloons and waving our arms in the air next.

And so they huddled. No doubt someone suggested that Jesus’ words should be taken metaphorically, were misunderstood, quoted out of context, or elaborated upon when written down hurriedly.

So they huddled and if nothing had happened none of us would be a Christian today!

POWER

I have become more and more uncomfortable with recent attempts to define and perhaps limit the implications present in the rather novel polity TEC enjoys. On the one hand we have witnessed an ad hoc extension of “primatial” authority on the part of the Presiding Bishop argued on the grounds of jurisdictional danger and perhaps canonical silence.

On the other hand the Communion Partner Bishops have put their name to a document which seeks to argue that the bonds of communion between the dioceses which make up TEC are voluntary. This seems to be an odd way to seek permission to retain ties with the Anglican Communion, should TEC shuffle of with its own worldwide alternative communion. It has been noted that at the current meeting of the ACC our PB introduced herself as Primate of a far flung worldwide church!

I have no doubt that our church has the perfect right to discipline recalcitrant bishops and to organize in areas where schism has occurred. However I see no canonical role for the national leadership in reorganization, except to afford help and recognition to continuing entities. The use of power and secular legal force to secure property for which the local diocese has no use or means of maintaining only brings scandal and plays into the hands of secularists. No one may count the number of people secured in ecclesial agnosticism by these methods.

Yet to argue historically that the founders of TEC went to such extraordinary lengths to forge unity between disparate constituencies with a mind that such unity was voluntary and revocable seems an attempt to rescue some kind of power and control. That it is true that “original” Episcopalians have been ruthlessly marginalized is not the point. How may one argue for the ecclesial unity of the member churches of the Anglican Communion when one argues for the ecclesial disunity of TEC?

In any case membership in the Anglican Communion is primarily between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops he recognizes and not between the See of Canterbury and Provinces. In may cases around the world bishops came before Provinces. It is upon this basis that the Archbishop may invite or disinvite bishops to conference with him.

However the bottom line in all this is a constant attempt to use coercive or reactive power to force conclusions. We have seen this in majoritarian rule by Synods and Conventions, bullying Primates abroad, coalitions and networks, so politicized that only structural means are contemplated. Where in all this is grace, compassion and love?

A PROPOSAL

I have forwarded this proposal to the Bishops/Deputies list, a web site which invites the Bishops and elected Deputies and Alternates to General Convention to enter into conversation.

<The divisions in our church are, I believe, to be tackled by members of TEC. The basic problem in addressing these issues is one of trust. They have become both issues of principle and issues in which individuals exhibit a lack of trust in each other.

I want to propose that immediately a bishop, a priest and a lay person from each “party” self nominated or proposed by whoever is thought to represent them, spend a week together in seclusion examining these dreadful problems and that at the end of this “retreat” issue a unanimous report to the church. Obviously such conclusions would not be official and perhaps the more important because of such an ad hoc nature.

Around the time of the 2000 GC Louis Crew, Brian Cox and others, of whom I was one, engaged in such discussions in what whas termed the “New Commandment Task Force”.  The manner in which these discussions took place was honest, respectful and fruitful. The initiative died in the politics which subsequently occurred.

Such engaged discussions might well be monitored and enabled by persons trained in a reconciliation process.  While such a process would obviously not change minds, what may result are suggestions pointing towards principles which go deeper and beyond the slogans and “political” rhetoric of our present atmosphere of accusations and of structural positions.

To my mind what may well emerge is not a legislative solution, but an appraisal of the strength or weakness of our determination to live together as a family within TEC. The participants would have to be persons of both clear conviction and also persons with a willingness to listen, learn and contribute in a positive manner. I do not believe that these qualities are mutually exclusive.

Our church mirrors the stark divisions in the country, present since the 60s. We need to bring to these stark divisions a Christian, realistic and compassionate spirit just as our present government is seeking a common will and mind to rescue the country from its grave problems and divisions.

Perhaps this suggestion seems symplistic and utopian, but surely as Christians we are utopians?

Tony>

OR TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY

The season before the Lambeth Conference is now consigned to the “dead” past in many of our memories. Many TEC pundits on the “left” were then insisting that TEC was a unique Province in the Anglican Communion. They contrasted the alleged “prelacy” of overseas Primates and lauded, in contrast with “other” Provinces the essential democracy of the American system. Much of the rhetoric was based on scant information of the sort that suggests that the Queen (of the UK) rules rather than reigns. The very title “Archbishop” raised the hackles of good republicans.

Yesterday some Communion Partner bishops signed a statement which argued that TEC is indeed one of a kind, a confederation of sovereign dioceses which compact to live in unity, but retain essentially sovereignty. Much of the argument was based on examining the Constitution of TEC in the light of the history of its adoption and the opinions of some of the people who were involved in its framing. One is reminded of the squabbles between political Conservatives who insist that the American Constitution must be interpreted in the light of the intent of its framers, and those who believe it must be construed in the light of development and present circumstances. One might deduce that those who have signed the Bishop’s statement on TEC Polity are “strict constructionists.”

As in all such arguments what is afoot at the moment in the Elephant in the room. God help the furniture. Certainly an historic examination of why TEC is as it is: certainly a uniquely structured body among Anglican churches and a church with international pretensions. In that matter no other Anglican Province has its foot in territories apart from itself although the Archbishop of Canterbury (not the CofE) has jurisdiction beyond the boundaries of England. There is something of an irony that TEC claims jurisdiction abroad but objects to the Southern Cone Province in South America now claims jurisdiction in the USA!

The Elephant in the room is named “Identity”. It represents the worry on the part of those Episcopalians who are now on the “far right” of  that the church to which they belong may disassociate itself from the wider Anglican Communion or be “disassociated”. These Episcopalians – and I am one of them – reject the idea that TEC is a discreet “denomination” which at present belongs to a fellowship which is worldwide, but from which they draw no essential authenticity and to which they owe no essential reference.

A second distress is present in all this. The way the polity of TEC actually works at the moment, is a “winner take all” system. It resembles nation states in which one party has such a majority in its governing councils that the opposition is impotent. The elected majority is so formidable that it has become an elected dictatorship and in such a position of power experiences no checks and balances to its power. An example is that mirrored in the present South African elections in which the concern is that the ruling party will receive a sufficient majority to make an opposition virtually powerless and in which the majority party may amend the national Constitution at will.

A third concern has been brought to the fore by the attempts of TEC dioceses to depart and the subsequent intervention of the Presiding Bishop in a manner which does not seem to conform to the actual authority granted to our Primate by the Constitution. While the office of the Presiding Bishop has not articulated “legally” a justification of actions taken, the general argument seems to be that TEC is threatened and therefore the executive must be granted extra constitutional authority to deal with “terrorism”. Herein is another irony. Episcopalians who tend to vote Democrat in national elections and who wish to bring to account those who are deemed to have gone beyond the legal authority of government in the Bush administration are supporting the extra-legal actions of the PB and General Convention while those who may well have lauded the Republican government’s allegedly extra-legal actions after 9/11 attack the actions of the TEC government for its extra Canonical activities. It is a rum old world.

An aside here. When TEC was founded it was largely influenced by the American Revolution. Its founders for me most part were utterly against autocracy, monarchy and what they termed prelacy. This Brit will not attempt to describe what was meant by those first two terms, well at least not today, but it is obvious they were not reacting to monarchy and the parliamentary system as it now obtains in Great Britain. But what did they mean by prelacy then?  In 1789, to pick a date, the constitutional government of the English church was supressed. The ancient Convocations of bishops and clergy had not met for decades. Bishops and archbishops were appointed by the crown upon the advice of its ministers and were more often than not so appointed because they were safe agents of the government. The Church of England was largely a department of state responsible, ineffectively, for the moral improvement of the population. While Evangelicanism was slowly reviving the English church it had yet no bishops and no influence.

Many “original” Episcopalians were suggesting that just as they had managed without bishops since 1607, they might continue so to do. Yet ironically in the North-eastern states a constituency existed, led by Bishop Seabury who were soaked in Patristic and “High Church” theology who believed “no bishop: no Church.”  The English Church couldn’t get its mind around the idea of a bishop who was not appointed by the Crown. Remarkably they were also concerned that the infant PECUSA would be a church weak in Credal orthodoxy with an inadequate liturgy; the draft BCP of the emerging American church was appealing to those who sat lightly on the miraculous, whose God was remote, and whose duty was moral improvement rather than salvation. I find that odd in that so many English Anglicans were similarly “latitudinarian” and yet worried about the orthodxy of American Anglicans. (All the issues about whether the bishop-elect of Northern Michigan is orthodox is very late 18th. Century: there is nothing new under the sun.)

I think its perhaps true that the significance on the American Constitution in advancing the power of the central government over the States was not settled by the Constitution, but by the Civil War and by decisions which have been made during the past fifty years. A concept evolved.

My main quarrel with the Bishop’s Statement is not that it is defective in its assessment of what was envisioned when PECUSA was established but rather its silence about what has evolved subsequently. Like it or not, the powers of the diocese in the matter of church property and the election of rectors has evolved, most particularly in the past 35 years. In part it is framed in the Dennis Canon which seems to claim ownership of church property by the diocese rather than the parish and by the national church over the diocese. It is also suggested by the creation of local diocesan laws which have largely taken away the rights of parishes to call rectors. A miriad of diocesan regulations have emerged, ironically on the grounds that dioceses have the right to establish methods of rectorial election, unsupported by national Canons. In short both the National Church and the dioceses, and diocesan bishops now claim authority far from that claimed by the founders of PECUSA. In some areas this has established laws far beyond those our founders granted to the National Church, and dioceses have established regulations which have limited parochial rights as established by the Canons. In short both the National Church and the Diocese assume to theirselves authority far beyond the intentions of the founders or the text of the Constitution and Canons.

Our founders were persons who believed that rational people could compact a union which permitted each level of organization to function at that level with little coercion. People of good will might be trusted to act as rational human beings. It was perhaps a Utopian ideal but one which inspired the creators of the United States. Subsequently a more cynical/practical view emerged, reacting to what was perceived to be abuse of power at differing levels. Thus, at least to my mind, it is not sufficient to evaluate TEC solely in the light of “original intent.”  Yet I would suggest that a contemporary evaluation cannot lose sight of original intent and in this context the statement of the Communion Partners Bishops is a valuable recall to that intent.

To my mind, the present solutions to the anger of a perpetual and virtually impotent minority in TEC has been thoroughtly and practically eronious. It has attempted to enforce conformity to majoritorian rule by coercion and has created the dictatorship of the majority and overthrown the essentially Christian -non-legalistic – notion which inspired our ancestors to create a church which was closer to the model of the Early Church and unlike the Ersatian model presented by the Church of England as it was then seemed to be.

I would be more inspired by the Idaba model proposed as the pattern for our next Geneal Convention if those of us struggling to be loyal to TEC, yearning to remain part of the Anglican Communion in the fullness of its Compehension, liberal, moderate and traditional were given a voice and potentially an influence based not on electoral tallies, but on our place as a legitimate and equally historical presence in the Anglican spectrum and tradition. We represent nothing new. We represent an authentic presence within Anglicanism, both here and abroad. We are loyal to the formularies of our church, to the Scriptures, Creeds, General Councils and to the clear words enshrined in our Liturgy and the Catechism. Such a claim is a fomidable appeal to respect and incorporation rather than to perpetual and disenfranchised minorititarianism and an  eccentric perceived identity.

Yes, we are a nuisance. But we claim the right not merely to be a scantly tolerated personality rather like a rather daft relation asked to Thanksgiving dinner. Yes some of us are an embarrassment and some of us seem to want to create an alternative “meal”, but most of us are not self-seekers, or destroyers. We claim no individualistic “prophecy” to alter or overthrow the church we love.

When trust dissolves no law may succeed. Only a willingness to walk in each other’s shoes and to examine objectively why we believe what we believe and why we really believe that we are authentic Episcopalians simply because we may accept the words enshrined in the proposed Covenant in their intentional meaning. Like our founders we agree to the Scriptural, Credal, Conciliar, Patristic foundations of Anglicanism without crossing our fingers. And this no longer is about TEC’s majoritarian views about sexual unions and expression. That issue is merely one symptom among many. How that issue is to be resolved is yet to be revealed. What is at stake is the crucial issue centered in what it means to faithful to the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Church as the Anglican fellowship of churches has received it and to which we have pledged our fidelity as baptised Christians and for some of us by our ordination vows.

JESUS AND THE COVENANT

Facebook has brought me into contact with Claviers around the world. One is names Jesus, and lives in Venezuela. I wrote to him saying that if I told people I was emailing Jesus they would be sure I’d lost my marbles. He replied that they would be even more amazed to discover that Jesus’ last name is Clavier!

The process of electing a Bishop for Northern Michigan more and more centers on the question, “Who is Jesus?”  That question gets muddled with speculation about if or how God works outside the Church, whether non Christians may be “saved” or can we learn from other world religions? These speculations have nothing essentially to do with who we believe Jesus is.

The Creeds, which we all recite at the Eucharist and the Daily Offices clearly state who we, and by we I mean the Church, believe Jesus to be. He is truly God and truly Man, the connection between humanity and the Godhead and thus the gateway to relationship with God. His Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection and Ascension accomplished for the sins of the whole world that which no other religious or human activity may. In this sense Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and in that sense “no one may come to God except through Jesus.”

The sole purpose of the Church is to tell this extraordinary Good News until Jesus comes again and to preview in its being that which will be when all things are gathered into God in a new Heaven and a new Earth. We enter this community of faith and practice through Baptism and we are kept alive and in communion with the Trinity through the Eucharist.

This is the faith of the Church. Now when we get to the questions of how or if God works outside the Church, or whether devout people of faith in other world religion may be called by God through Christ and the Spirit outside the Church, or whether they can teach us important things by their practices and goodness, who will be saved and who will not, the Church has never defined certain belief or knowledge for us. Indeed Jesus seems to say to us that this knowledge is “none of our business.”

The very fact that many non-conservative bishops are voting not to confirm the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan is a signal that when it comes to the heart of the Gospel many whose thoughts on sexuality seem rather odd, have not given up credal orthodoxy.What is troubling is that it appears that the election of the bishop-elect has been met with approval and support by the Presiding Bishop and other national church officials.

And this is a pressing example of why we need a Covenant. When our church was organized -if it has ever been organized – General Convention promised that the American Church would not depart from the essential doctrine espoused by the Church of England. The adoption of an Anglican Covenant by the Episcopal Church would be a similar promise and agreement to be faithful to the essential doctrine and worship the Anglican Communion has received and proclaimed.

I rather fancy from what I have read that the Bishop-elect has come to his opinions not through the employment of intellectual rigor but by emotional sentimentalism. This form of sentimentalism is often confused with the Christian notion of love. Christian love is not primary sentimental and has nothing essentially to do with “feelings” at all. But that is a story for another day.

A WORD TO GENERAL CONVENTION

Some of us who write for the Covenant Communion website have offered a statement to the Deputies and Bishops who will assemble in General Convention later this year. You may read this at: http://covenant-communion.net/index.php/features/reconciliation_in_communion/

No, I was not responsible for using the noun “disciple” as a verb.

EASTER SERMON

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/sermons_that_work_106615_ENG_HTM.htm

REMISSION OF SIN

Perhaps it is a very good thing that the Northern Michigan matter is gaining some traction during Holy Week. I want to concentrate on two issues which center around just how the Church with a capital “C” has regarded just what happened on that “green hill far way.” Or rather I want to focus on two misunderstandings surrounding our doctrine of the Cross.

I was informed the other day that a parishioner, or parishioners were troubled that my preaching of late has been “negative”. No I do not ever preach about the conflicts in TEC. I’ve been concentrating on just what was happening as God acted in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, a natural Lenten theme.

American folk religion is wonderfully sentimental. I judge that this sentimentality has two causes. It is a reaction to fundamentalism. It wants to embrace everyone. Neither motive is unholy. There’s a “racism” deep in the psyche of popular fundamentalism. By “racism” I mean a desire to identify people who are “not as I am.” It feels good to discover that one is on the Lord’s side if there are a host of people, from whom I may separate myself, and judge as being hell-bent. There’s a perversion of the Gospel which wants to say that God in Christ only loves the saved and that the “saved” have no need to love “sinners”.  This religion wants to teach that God the Father broke up the Trinity for a moment, as he condemned his Son to a frightful death in order to pluck a few from the jaws of hell.

Those who have escaped from such a religion turn this perversion of the Gospel on its head and adopt a version of Calvary which concentrates on Jesus the good man, showing an example of self-sacrificing love, demonstrating the errors of “fundamentalist” religion and raw political power, to enable us all to follow that example and claim the love of God for everyone.

And if Jesus is supremely a Good Man, adopted, as it were by God, then surely God has acted through other good people, and that therefore one should not make any particular claims for Christ. He is surely reflected in the lives of those revered in all religions and in none?  After all do not particular claims for the uniqueness of Christ lead to to bigotry and the use of religion to justify intolerance:intolerance against other religions and intolerance towards people whose lifestyles or beliefs challenge our own?

No the delicate possibility in all this is that the motive may be good, and the reflections about just how people may use faith as a blugeon to bash other people to the ground is also true.

Reactive faith, or reactive unbelief, does not contribute to a rational faith and Christianity is utterly rational. The Church has never defined what actually Jesus was doing on the Cross. There has never been an official doctrine of the Atonement. It is irrational to define what cannot be defined.Rather like the adoption of exclusive definitions about just how Jesus is present in the Sacrament of the Altar, exclusive speculation leads to error and not to truth.

My guess is that the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan and his supporters are reacting against hostile religion, but in reacting against the perversions of the Gospel, they react against the Gospel itself.

In the mystery of redemption, Christ died for our sins and the sins of the whole world. The Church offers Christ’s sacrifice to draw all from the bondage of sin and death into new life, a new life which heralds the coming of God’s Kingdom and works in Christ for that Kingdom’s effect here and now. It is a Gospel of personal and corporate redemption and restoration. “He died that we may be forgiven: he died to make us good.”  The “we” is not merely a personal transaction, but a cosmic redemption.

Take away this Gospel, offer another Gospel, and the Church is left with nothing to say except “do as you would be done by”. Any self-reflective person knows that is sooner said than done. The reactive Gospel proposed by the Bishop-elect, in its own way is as exclusive as that offered by those who propose a God of vengeance offering his son, as Abraham sought to offer Isaac to appease a blood-thirsty deity. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. If the Church forgets this, it forgets its doctrine and its mission.

Northern Michigan

It is a pity that the Northern Michigan election has become loaded with partisan reflection. Rather like lovers in a deep quarrel, every statement becomes loaded with past hurt and recrimination.

Thus one comments where angels fear to tread.

There seem to me to be two important issues here. First of all does the “functional” approach to ministry, which teaches that in baptism we all individually receive the charism of leadership, and that ordination or setting apart or recognition in what ever form by the local church, conform to the doctrine and discipline of our church as expressed in the Ordinal and the Catechism?

It seems to me that some advocates of the Mutual Ministry theory are setting forth a theory of ordination which was once espoused by “Congregational” or “Independent” churches. Such groups claim the authority to raise up from their own membership those recognized as possessing gifts, seminally present in all Christians in baptism, and yet found particularly useful or graceful in a local setting. In that, to an Anglican, this inevitably assumes that one such person is acclaimed as one who may consecrate and bless the Elements at the Eucharist (or in the diocese perform the sacramental authority of a bishop) while others are recognized to preach, or teach, or perform pastoral ministry, far from taking us away from priestcraft, one elevates sacramental authority in a focused and theroughly “priestly” or “episcopal” manner.

Secondly while the church has never defined a specific doctrine of the Atonement, the words of our liturgy, particularly in Holy Week and Easter, would seem to commit us to a belief in the Atonement, that Jesus in his death and passion has atoned for the sins of the world and that the atonement is at the heart of our dying with Christ in Baptism and rising with him in the Resurrection. May a bishop of this church, in the light of the solemn commitment made in the ordination vows, teach a theory of Christian life which discounts the Atoning death of Christ as the means by which our sins, and the sins of the whole word, and their reward, are set aside?

In what manner are we permitted to construct liturgies of our own construction for public and parochial use, given our promise only to use those usual rites and ceremonies set for by the authority of the church?

A bishop promises to be the center of unity, right belief and Christian practice. He represents the whole Church, as well as the Province and the diocese. May the “local” church, TEC for us, recognize and raise up a person to fulfill these roles who cannot in good faith affirm and protect the faith received by the whole Church?

It seems to me that these are the matters to be considered by bishops and standing committees as they consent or withdraw consent in an election.

MANAGING

An old chap I knew long before I became an old chap, when asked how he was always replied “managing”.  I’ve found that answer to be a splendid and brief retort.

If I am asked how I am as an Episcopalian, I may truthfully reply “managing.” I think this is possible because my love since I was a child has been history and particularly the history of Anglicanism and the history of the Church in England. This does not mean that I have no interest in American Church History. The trouble is that there is so little of it.

It may be for that reason that people here find it so easy to change things, or too easy to think that “the glory hath departed.”  There is still so little of it and there are so few “story tellers” of our history and tradition. Just as the story teller in the village was vital in that he or she kept the community in mind of its heritage and identity, so church historians are our story tellers and exist to fulfil the same purpose.

After the Reformation in England two ever present realities countered the enthusiasm of the radical reformers. The first factor was that people continued to worship in place. Their ancient parish churches and cathedrals spoke to continuity with the past. However eagerly radicals wielded the hammer and the axe, smashed statues and windows, pulled down altars and set up Tables, the very stones cried out in witness to other days of piety.

Again for those who believed that all was lost, that the treasures of the past were gone for ever, and the mood of piety and belief forever darkened, those same stones stood as a constant reminder of the permanence of truth, a permanence that no fleeting revolution might utterly destroy.

The second reality was the Book of Common Prayer. It preserved a sufficient affirmation of the Sacramental life, anchored to the Christian Year and the Lectionary. Gradually those words sunk into the consciousness of believers and into the English language. Whether our newer rites will do the same remains to be seen. A consistent use of the language of prayer is a very dangerous thing. It shapes and molds a way of life and a way of living.  Remembered prayers are a very present help in times of trouble. Liturgical revision isn’t merely an academic exercise. What is produced will either become the channel of right belief and the source of that belief (next to the Bible), or it will fail in that purpose and be less than minimally acceptable. Every Liturgical scholar should remember that.

Even in the worst moments of Cromwellian dictatorship, when the Church of England seemed utterly destroyed (except in Virginia)  parsons whispered the words of the Prayer book by memory within those ancient buildings and others met secretly to observe Word and Sacrament and young ministers went to the deposed bishops by night for ordination.

The Gospel is tougher than fashion. In time, again and again, unbalanced enthusiasm for novelty has been balanced by a re apprehension of the faith once delivered to the saints. At the same time depressive reaction has been enlivened by old truths spoken in a new context and with a new accent.

There are no new  revelations. Leave that sort of thing to the Mormons. Jesus is God’s revelation. The task of the Church is constantly to make old truths new and apply them to the lives of its contemporaries. Because we never strike the right balance, forgotten emphases suddenly burst forth and we think them to be new, or old truths are discovered and we lament we forgot about them.

+Rowan Williams patiently asks us all to be patient. Patience is not a talent much regarded in our “instant” world.  It is so much easier for us to thrill to something new or lament the loss of something old, as if either, in itself is either gained or lost. For only God and his truth is eternally “now”.  All else is passing.

If our next General Convention, a mere local council of a small local church, rejects the moratoria agreed upon a mere three years ago, the situation will be no graver than it was in 2003. As a priest I am bound to the faith as expressed in our formularies and in the Catechism and the Book of Common Prayer.  I will remember what is as I worship in a building which reminds me of that which is and as I use the liturgy, our drama of God’s truth.  As I am getting old, perhaps sooner than later I may not have the first, but I shall always have the second.

PRAYING THE OFFICE

Of course one shouldn’t value disciplined prayer for it therapeutic qualities. Yet at this moment of some measure of crisis in my life, the round of the Daily Offices has proved to be of extraordinary value.

I’m rarely joined by anyone as I say Morning Prayer. I still “cause the bell to be tolled” as the rubric in the earlier Prayer Books required. I have no idea whether any plowmen stop in their tracks as they hear the bell and remember that the Parson is praying for them.

In an age in which earnestness and spontaneity are so valued, words like “duty” and “discipline” seem out of tune. Anglicans have often been accused of using “vain repetitions” a charge which might easily be levelled at those who tell their loved ones that they love them each day. When even the most careful of us has been caught up in the belief that things are only “meaningful” when they issue forth from our own needs or imagination, saying Matins and Evensong, Noonday Prayers and Compline daily surely fail the test of utility.

Yet praying the psalms -even in the infuriating order in which they appear in the lectionary nowadays – reminds us that these were the hymns which Jesus and his disciples used as did their ancestors. We join with a host which may not be numbered as we recite those ancient words some of which are ascribed to a petty king who lived in the Bronze Age.

Hearing the meat of Holy Scripture during the year reminds us of passages we would never bother with left to our own devices and more familiar words take on new and varied meanings as we hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” them.

Praying the Offices takes away from us the temptation to personalize all Scripture reading, all recitation of the psalms, all prayer. +Michael Ramsey warned us of the fetish of turning “God contemplation” into “self-contemplation.”  This age manages to obsess together as its obsesses individually. The most obvious example of this is our one track record about human sexuality as if sex had just been invented!

Yet in the Offices we are praying with the Church, for the Church and by the Church. We join together with our contemporaries from centuries past and centuries to be and find ourselves resting in God’s eternal “now.”

Finding ourselves employing the minutes we use to pray as a gateway into timelessness takes some getting used to. We blink from the light streaming from the entrance to “a new heaven and a new earth”. We sense fleetingly what it will be like when all our church feuds and fights, divisions and tempests are well and truly gone for ever.  The words of the liturgy make few provisions for our cluttering our minds with our problems or even pet causes. We are where God IS, where God is all in all. Nothing matters because God IS.

This unworldliness is not an abdication of concern for the poor, the victims of oppression, war, family divisions and those who starve. Far from it. Where God  is in Trinity, those who are down-trodden find their effective champion and we as the Church are enlivened by the grace which pours forth in the Daily Prayers of the Church to find Jesus in the face of the troubled.

I wish that our church set a daily obligation for clergy to say the Office in church. Such an obligation obtains in many parts of the Anglican Communion, not as something to be enforced but as something binding on the consciences of the ordained. I say this because I believe that the rhythm of daily prayer is one of the most potent means of continued formation and growth. Lent is a good time to begin to observe this holy work or to revive within us the will to pray the Offices in sincerity and truth.

SPACE

I’ve written about Comprehension in the last two posts. The problem the American Church faces today is how such a principle may apply given the theological and sociological divide within its midst. Nor is TEC (The Episcopal Church) alone in having to face such a predicament. As the Church of England staggers towards the appointment of women bishops it faces an equally severe crisis. Thus far the C of E, in permitting the ordination of women priests has tacitly acknowledged that in so doing it has abandoned the older principle of not legislating radical changes that alienate a significant portion of its constituency. It has therefore opted for a new variation on the older theme by creating a safe space for those who cannot in conscience accept that women may be ordained to the priesthood.

It has done so by appointing flying bishops, and creating thereby a new form of suffragan see annexed to the two Archbishops within their respective Provinces of Canterbury and York. The prospect of there being female diocesan bishops now faces a more difficult problem, one that so far seems intractable.

If Anglicanism, at least in the “West” is set to embark on radical change, the question posed is whether it is possible to allow for such change without losing part of its historic base. Perhaps a second question is whether those who are now enabled by Provincial synodical government really believe in Anglicanism’s broad based “coalition” or whether it espouses a new vocation to be a “prophetic” church, prepared to jettison its less adventurous constituency in the name of justice and a stream-lined model able to recruit that part of the population in tune with such a vocation.

In the United States the matter of creating a safe space has been made the more difficult by the polarization of its constituency -reflecting a similar polarization in society – and may one say a certain triumphalism on the part of those who hold sway in General Convention. Attempts to create flying bishops on the English model have met resistance from bishops who wrap themselves in the mantle of inviolable diocesan territorial jurisdiction. It is difficult to see how such a principle may logically be advanced given the collapse of its parochial territorial integrity. Indeed overseas, and particularly in Europe, TEC admits to the possibility of a form of diocese based on a personal episcopate afforded not on the basis of territory, but on the choice not only of expat. Americans but anyone who lives near an Episcopal community. Ironically the Presiding Bishop only claims “normal” jurisdiction in such a setting. If two or more “flavors” of Anglicanism may exist side by side in Europe it is difficult to see how that may not be considered within the United States based on the pastoral necessity of comprehending those who have a heritage of doctrine and practice dating back to Jamestown in 1607.

The only theological objection to such an accommodation would be that TEC enjoys the same form of territorial right enjoyed by the Church of England. The claim of the C of E is based on the theory that it is the historic “Catholic” Church of the nation dating back to Augustine of Canterbury. Yet TEC makes no such claim. Its ecumenical policy admits to the reality of it sharing territory with the ELCA. Indeed TEC has largely abandoned the idea of organic unity with other Christian bodies based on the notion that it is possible for episcopal churches embracing different traditions inhabiting the same territory. There was a time when TEC robustly claimed its identity as being the Catholic Church in America, reformed. Now in practice it embraces denominationalism.

If TEC now opts for a more homogeneous identity, it faces the pastoral problem of how it cares for those it alienates. Two possibilities are obvious. It can either create a safe space for traditionalists to remain in its midst, a space which creates security and a right to survive and grow, or it  may envision the recognition of a discreet entity outside of itself and yet sharing the maximum measure of intercommunion possible.

I hasten to say that the latter model is not an obvious choice if TEC is to live into its obvious comprehensive history. It should not appear by a process of unilateral dissolution; the establishment of such a body without mutual agreement.

Either model may only be successfully accomplished if those in power adopt a genuinely sympathetic and pastoral approach to those whose consciences may not embrace radical and legislated change. If an internal structure is to be considered it must permit those embraced to honestly keep the oaths taken at ordination or reception. If the second model is considered it must permit and require a maximum expression of relationship in all areas where this is possible.

After forty years of alienation it would take an act of enormous grace for all parties to negotiate in good faith and trust. Yet both faith and trust are gifts of God. If the next meeting of General Convention is intent on adopting measures that may well alienate many of its faithful clergy and laity; if the breaches which have notably occurred during the past few years are to be healed, the sort of passion associated with the changes in process, “justice” concerns, should be balanced by an equally passionate concern for the alienated; a “mercy” concern.

THE VIA MEDIA AND COMPREHENSION

The term Via Media, (middle way) was popularized by George Herbert in his poem “The British Church.” His “mean between two extremes” was a literary devise to contrast the English Church with Roman Catholicism on the one hand and Genevan Calvinism on the other. While not intended to describe  an ecclesiological position, a theology of the church, it was useful shorthand for the position the Church of England found itself in the early 1600s, as it was denounced by Rome on the one hand and derided by radical Puritan separatists on the other.

While George Herbert was influenced by the revival in appreciation for the continuous heritage of the English Church espoused by his mentor Lancelot Andrewes he was essentially a rather conservative person, at home with the 1559 Prayer Book and the muted ceremonial which had typified “Anglicanism” in the previous reign. He was not a Laudian High Churchman. That his famous essay on the life and duty of a Parson was first published during the days when Anglicanism was proscribed by the Commonwealth attests to his moderation. Many moderate Church of England were driven to support the abolition of the episcopate and the Prayer Book during the English Civil War because of the close association High Church Anglicans had with the Stuart monarchy. They would have preferred the retention of a reformed Episcopate along the lines adopted one hundred and fifty years later in America, and such reforms were advocated by moderate Parliamentarians. Instead in the passion of Civil War they lost everything.

The church which emerged with the restoration of Charles II was no longer a Via Media in the original sense of that term. True it still stood in contrast to Roman Catholicism, but “Puritanism” was driven underground by the punitive legislation of the “Cavalier Parliament” in such draconian measures as the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile Act. The heirs to the Puritans were divided theologically and also over church government. Many would slide into Unitarianism. The revival of Nonconformity, those ejected because they refused to accept the 1662 Prayer Book would wait for another day.

It is true that the term Via Media remained in use. In recent time it has been employed in a slightly different manner by popular historians such as Stephen Neill who placed Anglicanism between those who have added to a corpus of essential doctrine (Rome) and those who have diluted essential doctrine such as the Nonconformists. Such descriptions hardly obtain in a modern context.

However it is important to draw a distinction between the concept of a middle way or a Bridge Church -who on earth wants to live on a bridge? – and comprehension. The ideal of Comprehension describes the internal reality of Anglicanism rather than contrasting Anglicanism with other parts of the Church. In short Comprehension describes a theory which attempts to comprehend various theological and ceremonial emphases described and limited by common subscription to episcopacy, common prayer and a set of core doctrines contained in the Book of Common Prayer and the Catechism and in the general manner in which the Church has identified its faith in Scripture as containing all things necessary unto salvation, in the Creeds as summaries of the Apostolic Faith, in the witness of the Early Ecumenical Councils of the Early Church and until recently in the Articles of Religion as a pattern of how Anglicans do theology in times of discord.

Comprehension also describes a measure of liberty in which people and movements from time to time inform (or disurb) the church. It is described by the old adage, “in essentials unity, in non-essentials diversity and in all things charity.” It depends on the idea that a core doctrine, what Henry McAdoo termed the “Hapex”, exists, or “matters essential”, and that other matters such as local liturgical adaptations, rites and ceremonies and customs, “matters indifferent” may be authorized from time to time by the authority of National churches.

This theory of comprehension depends on common definitions. It also speaks to an unwritten principle that no National Church or Province will legislate or make official doctrines or practices which violate the consciences of parties to the Comprehension. Granted such a principle does not make for a very adventurous church. “Prophetic” witness is given extraordinary license but circumscribes the adoption of “reform” until consensus or “reception” has clearly occurred. Lacking a central magisterium such as that contained in the Papacy on the one hand or the confessional authority of denominationalism on the other, Anglicanism advocates patience and restraint, an essentially practical and pastoral reaction to new ideas or the resurrection of older ways.

It was not envisioned that the restoration of synodical government by the infant Episcopal Church, and the spread of that system to most other Provinces would empower ecclesiastical legislative bodies with a form of Magisterium competent to reform or radically alter core doctrine. As the authority of Scripture and then revisionist approaches to Creeds, Councils and core doctrine has progressed, the distinctions between “essential” and “non essential” doctrines has been all but obscured and thus the very foundation of Comprehension undermined.

The idea of an Anglican Covenant is in part an attempt to rectify this situation by reaffirming the core beliefs and traditions of Anglicanism. It poses a grave problem for the Episcopal Church which has largely abandoned comprehension in favor of uniformity and assumes itself to be a discreet church with an omnicompetent General Convention.

Such a principle or practical way of life is hard to maintain in times when authority is derided and individualism trumps corporate identity. Those advocating radical interpretation of Scripture or doctrine are described as progressive or courageous while those who embrace traditional norms are termed reactionary. Anglicanism was perhaps meant for more gentle and civil days. It suffers greatly in times of passion and zealotry.

A further problem is the popular living into historical amnesia in which the past is forgotten or automatically derided for its alleged bigotry. Comprehension has become a lost treasure and a forgotten art.

DIVERSITY

I’ve been musing about Anglican diversity. When I was young our diversity ran from those who believed in a sacerdotal priesthood, Apostolic Succession, the Sacrifice of the Mass, auricular confession and the use of the Missal to those who believed that Anglican “priests” were Ministers of the Gospel, that an Historic Episcopate was adiaphora (not core belief), that Jesus was present at Holy Communion only to faithful believers and not in Bread and Wine, that sins were to be confessed diectly by the saved and who used the Prayer Book with little or no ceremonial. In short there were individuals, parishes and dioceses -perhaps whole Provinces – which differed little from Roman Catholicism and others which made a Scottish Presbyterian seem High Church.

There were also notable clerics who doubted the supernatural aspects of Christianity. Indeed for centuries there had been Bishops who were Deists, like Bishop Hoadly, and many more who sat lightly on Credal Faith.

The first Lambeth Conference was in part initiated by bishops who were annoyed that the Bishop of Natal had written a book on the authorship of the first few books of the Old Testament which nowadays would be regarded as small beer.

Nor is this the first time that our internal divisions have brought us to the point of collapse. At the beginning of the 17th Century Anglicans who sought to rediscover the heritage of the church before the Reformation, albeit in what would be considered very mild reforms such as placing the Communion Table back at the East end and fencing it with rails to prevent dogs from urinating on the Holy Table or parishioners using it as a repository for their winter clothes, collided with “conservatives” who were militantly Reformed and Protestant. The church collapsed. For over a decade Anglicanism, except as an illegal and underground church, survived only in Virginia.

What in part provoked that struggle was the determination of the the “High Church” reformers to enforce their practices by Law, as Archbishop Laud issued his regulations and prosecuted conservatives in Ecclesiastical Courts.

When the Church of England was restored in 1660 it took its revenge on those who had opposed the Laudian reforms by persecuting the Puritans, driving our saintly folk like Richard Baxter. Those driven out went underground and created Nonconformity and the Free Churches and the Church of England no longer could claim to be a truly national church.

What then developed was not a homogeneous church but one that learned to tolerate extraordinary diversity without officially endorsing the various movements and emphases which emerged whether Evangelical, Catholic, Broad Church or merely eccentric. Such liberality was sorely tested particularly after the Anglo Catholic Movement which occasioned the Reformed Episcopal schism and of course Anglicanism wasn’t flexible enough to embrace Methodism.

So what is different now? I scanned the bill of particulars appended to the Nigerian Primate’s recent letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Therein one finds snippets of statements and interviews given by our Presiding Bishop and other Episcopalian worthies. None of these snippets were as radical as the sort of stuff some Anglican theologians were airing thirty years ago. No one broke communion then. Only the retired Bishop of Newark, an “inverted fundamentalist” writes books which challenge the entire belief system of Christianity. Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that many of the attempts to appear intellectual or sophisticated in attempts to attract people who have problems with the uniqueness of Christ for instance are indeed a betrayal of the faith. But there’s nothing new in anything they say. Why then are we in danger of falling apart now? John Robinson’s “Honest to God” didn’t break us up. Why now?

I think there are a number of reasons for our present state. The first is the advent of the internet. We now know intimately what people say and teach. Secondly we haven’t come to grips with the sexual revolution which began with the invention of reliable contraceptives. The Western Church now inhabits a world in which casual sex, living in what was once termed “sin” and the creation of powerful groups advocating their rights to sexual expressions once regarded as immoral have faced the church with pastoral situations once unknown. Clergy routinely marry couples who have lived together and have children out of wedlock. Young people in our pews take such things for granted.

As the church has fudged or accommodated such relationships for decades it has become difficult to articulate moral teachings which are consistent.

Fundamentally, if I may be permitted a pun, our problem in TEC is that our church like the Laudians is intent on legislating a new moral code which we often forget embraces the non-marital relationships of both gays and “straights” and blessing these relationships in a manner which looks like Holy Matrimony, a “lesser” sacrament according to our Catechism. Like the Laudians the advocates of such formal legislation have scant patience with the old conservatives who are subject to official and non-official persecution, some self-inflicted by those with a taste for martyrdom and other marginalized because they cannot in conscience embrace these “reforms”. We see our Mother Church going to great pains to provide episcopal oversight to those who cannot accept the ordination and consecration of women clergy while our own church which has little claim to be a National Church refuses to make room for those whose claim to membership in the Episcopal Church is historical and actual. As a result those alienated behave like alienated people, plan schism and export their grievances abroad. The dreadful divisions in the Anglican Communion have been largely caused by zeolots in power who neither embrace Anglican comprehension nor an adequate Anglican ecclesiology. They have been deepened by wounded traditionalists who have looked for help beyond the borders of TEC and for a number of reasons, some virtuous and some self-serving no longer trust those in power or recognize our bonds in baptism and worship.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for restraint, for patience, for a time out fall on deaf ears as Anglicans cling to their principles and slogans, embrace their wounds and regard themselves as guardians of the holy flame, whether liberal or conservative. The ideological divisions which have brought our American politics and politicians into disrepute similarly alienate many Episcopalians who find themselves in the middle and merely want to worship in peace and retain their identity as Anglicans and Episcopalians.

In times past we learned that enforcing reforms brings nothing but disunity and schism and an alienation of ordinary parishioners from their duty to worship God in accordance with our rites and ceremonies. We once learned the hard way to give space to reformers, allowing the common sense of ordinary lay and clerical people to engage in a practical assessment of new ideas or a return to old ways. The two great revivals in Anglicanism, the Evangelical and the Anglo Catholic were essentially conservative revivals of aspects of the church which have had their day in times past. We’ve had Liberals among us at least since the 17th. Century. Even the great Reforming Bishop Hugh Latimer was a social liberal in his own context. He was locked up in the Tower of London for championing the poor!

In many ways our great Archbishop of Canterbury, a convinced Catholic is calling for us to reexamine and live into our comprehensive tradition. But we don’t listen. Instead we seek to institutionalize and legislate our new and old ideas by Canon or by creating extra-mural structures. It is high time we revisited our long tradition of informal toleration, a tradition which has maintained in our worship and customs the core beliefs of Reformed Catholicism while giving space to reformers whose bright ideas we have informally embraced, rejected or amended over long periods of time. TEC in its initial attempt to enforce one liturgical practice has unwittingly drifted into an intolerance with dissent which has no place in our tradition. Such a drift has emulated the bureaucracy of large franchises rather than Anglican comprehension. But that is a story for another day.

FROM THE PRIMATES

The Primates of the Anglican Communion have met and today issued an important communique. You may find their report at Covenant-communion.net. They addressed a long list of items among which is a schism in the church in Zimbabwe led by the Bishop of the see which coves that nation’s capital, a notorious follower of Robert Mugabe. They also responded to the Archbishop of the Episcopal Church in the Sudan whose Province faces frightful problems in large measure caused by the government of that country.

The Primates noted the special role they play as representatives and Chief Pastors of their Provinces and National Churches. The title “Chief Pastor” is one which is used of our own Presiding Bishop. However after voting for the communique our own Primate issued a statement suggesting that only General Convention may speak for TEC. Now it is true that the office of Presiding Bishop was modeled on that of the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church who is not a “Primate” in the sense that title is usually used in the Communion. In earlier days the senior diocesan bishop in consecration was our Presiding Bishop and exercised no “primatial” functions except that he took order for the consecration of bishops, was normally chief consecrator and had vague rights to conduct visitations to the dioceses of PECUSA.

Over the years the job of PB was divorced from that of a diocesan bishop and PBs were elected and assumed some executive responsibilities. He or she is now elected to the office for a time certain. The office was elevated by adding the title of “Primate” and “Chief Shepherd or Pastor”. Our PB proudly carries a Primatial Cross and is styled “The Most Reverend”. Our Primate is recognized in the Communion and given the honor of being an equal member of the Communion’s Primatial Committee. In recent months we have seen our Primate exercising “metropolitical” authority in areas where our church has split.

A cynic might say that our PB acts as a Primate when it is convenient and attributes primatial status to General Convention when it is convenient. As I have asked before, are we an episcopal church or a “General Convention” Church, something novel in Catholic and therefore Anglican polity? The practical effect of TEC’s claim to a novel polity has been the cause of enormous confusion when our present and immediately past Primates have voted with the rest of the Primates and then come home and stated that their vote means not what it says because only General Convention may speak for TEC. Do we really believe that our bishops are successors of the Apostles or are we suggesting that Synods are their successors.

Whether our General Convention is competent to sever links with the Communion or walk apart from it is perhaps a matter for Canon Lawyers to determine. The Archbishop of Canterbury rightly suggests that autonomy stems from Communion and not the other way round. An ecclesial body made up only of bishops in communion with their own “brand” within a national group, unless isolated by issues beyond their immediate control lacks the fullness of Catholic Order.

Thus while one is delighted to see that our Primate has joined with the other Primates in commiting to the moratoria on the consecration of priests in same-sex relationships and on “same-sex” blessings and of initiatives to mediate the schism which is both external to and internal to TEC, one fears that such a participation and agreement may be disavowed because our Primate, at home, isn’t really a Primate. If indeed she is not surely she should abstain from joining with the other Primates when they issue communiques which affect TEC. At least such an abstention would be open and above board.

Those who are seeking to form the Anglican Church in North America should also heed the Primates. They were indirectly represented by the Primates who embrace them. They sought recognition as a parallel Province. They now have their answer. They have a process charted for them. Let them respond to mediation in full faith and commitment. They have not yet created a church. Let them delay further moves which would make mediation impossible. The Primates have made clear that it is not for local groups to recognize themselves as Provinces. If TEC is to be asked to submit to mediation – and it should – it should also accept a moratorium on legal actions aimed at dissident congregations and diocesan units and lift its depositions. It is clearly possible to lift depositions without inviting those bishops to meetings of the House of Bishops and General Convention.

In the present climate it may be possible for those who have left TEC to eschew active proselyting of TEC members without much effect. No doubt those leaving will continue to leave and find homes in the parishes of extra mural groups and such a moratorium may focus “continuing churches” on mission and evangelism to the unchurched.