AS “GOOD NEWS” stories go, it has scope for improvement: Anglican leaders avoid split. The Primates’ conduct in Tanzania was not good enough to set an example of Christian charity to the world — the absence of seven Primates from the Sunday eucharist put paid to that. None the less, the news from the Primates’ Meeting was much better than many had feared. Whatever the reasons, whatever the explanations, a formal split in the Anglican Communion would have been a disgrace.
Just how successful the Primates were in avoiding schism remains to be seen. Much rests on how the new pastoral council is viewed: as a welcome contribution to healing within the Episcopal Church in the United States, or as the imposition of a clumsy structure that can only formalise division. Will the proposed pastoral scheme draw the secessionists back into the fold? Or will it create a separate fold of its own? Before these questions need to be answered, the US House of Bishops must produce a clear, unambiguous statement eschewing gay bishops and same-sex blessings. If it fails to do so, all bets are off.
The immediate questions, though, serve only to mask the bigger question that lurks behind them. Because the Anglican Communion has existed without rules or boundaries for so long, individuals and congregations have belonged to it by accident of birth or geography. The adoption of a covenant would turn the Communion into an intentional Church. If one wanted to invent a global church structure, this is one relatively gentle way of doing it: lots of definition, a bit of process, and very few sanctions. But Anglicans have arrived at this point without in any way committing themselves to a global Communion. Many churchgoers find it hard to accept that any power resides outside their parish. The suggestion that they might be prevented from doing something, or encouraged to do something else, by an overseas body is still a novel one.
Dr Williams and the Primates have been working on the premise that Anglicans are willing to slide from the old form of Anglicanism to the new one. Even those who would agree, probably the majority, need to see a better model of how this greater accountability would work. Three of the four instruments of unity — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, and the Primates’ Meeting — are entirely episcopal. Only the Anglican Consultative Council contains priests and lay people. The de facto arbiter of Anglican polity is the Primates’ Meeting. Its functioning in Tanzania has not greatly enhanced its reputation. Indeed, it might single-handedly scupper the Anglican experiment, if churchgoers see only tense wrangling ahead. The workings and supervision of the pastoral council in the US, if it is accepted there, will be a serious test of how a new Communion might work on the ground.
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