Stephen Bates of The Guardian thinks is may be. He writes:
Archbishop Rowan Williams’s plea last week for measured discussion and lengthy contemplation over whether the Anglican communion should develop a mutually agreed covenant of core beliefs and then, eventually, perhaps, a looser structure of constituent churches and associated churches, seems to be falling apart within days.
The bishops of Nigeria are already demanding that those same liberals should be excised like a cancer from the body of the church. Their primate, Archbishop Peter Akinola, criticised Dr Williams’s letter even before he had read it. And some liberals, here and in the US, are beginning to ask themselves whether the worldwide Anglican communion is such a worthwhile body to belong to after all.
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Things fall apart
Rowan Williams’s plea to the Anglican communion to hold together appears to have fallen on deaf ears.
The Guardian
Stephen Bates
July 6, 2006
Archbishop Rowan Williams’s plea last week for measured discussion and lengthy contemplation over whether the Anglican communion should develop a mutually agreed covenant of core beliefs and then, eventually, perhaps, a looser structure of constituent churches and associated churches, seems to be falling apart within days.
The bishops of Nigeria are already demanding that those same liberals should be excised like a cancer from the body of the church. Their primate, Archbishop Peter Akinola, criticised Dr Williams’s letter even before he had read it. And some liberals, here and in the US, are beginning to ask themselves whether the worldwide Anglican communion is such a worthwhile body to belong to after all.
Akinola has already begun the process of anointing his own representative in the US, the Rev Martyn Minns (the English evangelical who ministers to a church in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC) as a bishop of the Nigerian church, putatively to lead like-minded conservatives in America – a move described by Lambeth as unhelpful. Not sure what Minns’s rivals, such as the Rev David Anderson of the conservative American Anglican Council, or Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh, for that matter, think of that, but at least Minns, after several failed attempts to get a mitre in an American diocese, has now achieved one from Africa.
Akinola has also questioned whether the next Lambeth conference of all the world’s Anglican bishops, scheduled for 2008, at which Dr Williams fondly hopes the covenant might be discussed, should go ahead at all, or whether the orthodox bishops of the global south should rally to a meeting with him instead.
Half a dozen American dioceses are now queueing up to ask Dr Williams for alternative archiepiscopal oversight, because they either don’t like the idea of a woman presiding bishop, or, as they state more openly, her liberal views, which coincide with those of the leadership and the majority at the recent general convention. None of the would-be break-outs has yet suggested Archbishop Akinola might be the best man to lead them, but that may be only a question of time.
They may even now be contemplating the words of Gerald Bray, another English evangelical bien-pensant and recent professor of divinity at a university in Alabama, in an edition of Churchman, the learned journal of the Church Society (Winter 2003): “Faced with a choice between a white American homosexual bishop and a black-skinned African archbishop … the celebrant may look more like the church janitor than like any of his worshippers in the pews, but it does not matter.”
Or, alternatively, they may be once again rueing Archbishop Akinola’s hair-trigger response to any development of which he disapproves. His ego is a mountainous thing, almost insurmountable for them. When I was attending the US Episcopal church’s general convention in Ohio a fortnight ago, one conservative told me: “It’s not so much what he says but the fact that he doesn’t tell us in advance what he’s going to say, so we can tell him not to.”
Even Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney sees the need to distance himself from some of Akinola’s more extreme remarks about homosexuals being worse than beasts, in an interview this week on Australian radio.
The cost of a covenant, it is already becoming clear, may be too high. The idea has been around for a couple of years now, since publication of the Windsor Report, but it has taken Archbishop Williams’s statement to focus minds. And, once they start thinking about what it might contain, it seems practically no one likes it.
There is a question of how prescriptive such a covenant would be (and, if it’s defined so loosely, what is the point of having it?) Last week, I interviewed Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, the primate of Canada, on the day the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter was published, and he told me: “If the covenant helps collaboration, absolutely. But if it is exclusionary and disciplinary, that would be utterly inappropriate and un-Anglican and something I would not favour at all.”
Later that afternoon, highly unusually, a senior figure at Lambeth Palace rang me nervously to ask how Dr Williams’s statement was going down. I told him Archbishop Hutchison’s response (and since the two of them had had a 90-minute meeting at Lambeth only four days before, Hutchison must have known what was on Williams’s mind). Oh, said the senior Lambeth person, it wouldn’t be exclusionary or disciplinary. That wasn’t the idea at all.
Well, in that case, quite a few people around the Anglican communion have got the wrong idea about what the Archbishop of Canterbury is proposing. Not least of them, Peter Akinola. People are certainly starting to wonder how the covenant would work. Would it mean that member churches would have to give up their autonomy to make their own decisions, because other members of the communion might not like them? That seems to be the implication: no more openly gay bishops, certainly, maybe no more women bishops, possibly.
But what about something conservative evangelicals such as Archbishop Jensen would quite like, such as lay presidency – the administration of Communion by laymen, not ordained clergy? Would that be permitted, or would Archbishop Akinola – or someone else – have the last word on how they do things in Sydney? Fine, if it was something he approved, or could be persuaded to support, but what if not? Does everything have to move at the speed of the slowest, theologically, culturally, socially? That’s a sure recipe for losing touch: in Archbishop Williams’s words: “We have a special relationship with the cultural life of our country and we must not fall out of step with this if we are not to become absurd and incredible.” He said that, of course, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury.
Would the Church of England itself be inclined, or able, to sign up to a covenant? Perhaps not the present, more liberal, general synod; but what about one from whom the liberals and Anglo-Catholics have withdrawn? More to the point, would parliament be prepared to endorse the necessary ecclesiastical legislation to approve a new, binding, covenant? MPs could have some fun with that.
If the church is taken over by the conservative evangelicals, how broad would it remain? And if they are in charge when Prince Charles becomes king, with his commitment to being a defender of faiths, would they feel happy to crown him? After all, some of them disapprove of ecumenical, or interfaith, services as it is. Where would that leave the old church’s established status?
Liberals are beginning to wonder whether a covenant is something they could, or should, support with more than lip service. One of the less-noticed points about the US’s new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is that not only is she a woman, but she’s also far from being a member of the Anglican communion’s international circuit.
She’s certainly not one of the old boy network. In fact, it seems, she has scarcely been east of the Rockies. She evidently does not feel huge allegiance to the idea of a worldwide brotherhood (or, presumably, sisterhood) if it conflicts with her idea of the church’s priorities. When I asked her about the Episcopal church being thrown out she murmured merely that it would be “unfortunate”. I suspect quite a few, even in the CofE, would agree with her and, asked to choose between New York and Abuja, might find the former more congenial.
These questions are all up in the air for now. Archbishop Williams would like them to be gently, academically, theologically, politely, collegiately, teased out over the next few years. Three years’ experience should have taught him better by now. It does not look as if he is going to have that opportunity. Things are moving too fast. Can the centre hold?