At the Café we’ve been exploring the meaning of Episcopal identity. But we aren’t the only ones wondering. In a very good post at his website, Liturgy, New Zealand Anglican priest Bosco Peters is wondering as well. And in a post titled Communion means communion, Peters suggests that:
“A Communion of churches, at the very least surely, are churches that can celebrate communion together, churches where they accept the validity of each others ordinations, churches where someone ordained in one church can preside in the other.”
But, as he then writes;
“What is called “The Anglican Communion” is not such a communion. At the recent meeting of Anglican Primates, there was no shared Eucharist as part of their meeting timetable.”
Peters reminds us that this brokenness in communion dates back to the beginning of ordination of women in some provinces but not in others, and that though those differences did not threaten the “Communion,” the issue of full inclusion of LGBT persons has.
But he also reminds us that communion, table fellowship, is the beginning of reconciliation and not the end;
“The Eucharist is the source and the summit of our Christian life – including our unity. It is the source before it is the summit. One might say, hence, that the Eucharist is more source. We will not reach the summit if we do not draw on Christ the source in the Eucharist.
But the Primates, and other Anglican leaders, have reversed this dynamic. They will not draw near and receive the Body and Blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ in order to grow together until they have humanly reached the summit of cobbling together a unity that, following traditional theology, hasn’t been broken. The very act that Christ gives us to draw us into unity is evaded.”
Communion should mean communion, at the very least, and we should enter into it in humility and with open hearts rather than pridefulnees and closed minds.
Go check out all of what Bosco has to say here