Over at No Anglican Covenant there’s a new blog post by Ronald Stevenson, QC, the former Chancellor of the Anglican Church of Canada, entitled “Some History of Resistance to Centralizing Authority in the Anglican Communion.” A sample:
5. The 1878 [Lambeth] Conference concurred in a recommendation that there should not be a central tribunal of appeal in disciplinary matters and said the duly certified action of every Province in the exercise of its own discipline should be respected by all other Churches and by their members.
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9. The 1930 Conference recognized the autonomy of particular churches and said the Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury were bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference. The 1930 Conference also reaffirmed that the formation of a central appellate tribunal was inconsistent with the spirit of the Anglican Communion and that the establishment of final courts of appeal should be left to the local and regional churches.
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15. Sir Owen Chadwick in his Introduction to the published resolutions of the 12 conferences from 1867 to 1988 traces the origin, development and growth of the Conference. The Conference has no authority and was only allowed to be founded on that basis. However, he wrote:
It was impossible that the leaders of the Anglican Communion should meet every ten years and not start to gather respect; and to gather respect is slowly to gather influence, and influence is on the road to authority. [The Conference] continued to have that absence of legal authority which some of its founders wanted and which of necessity was denied to them.