“It seems good to us and the Holy Spirit”: The “Us” of General Convention

From Covenant Communion:


by the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 4:11 am

The more sinful the church, the more that church is reducible to the descriptions of the social scientists, the more “merely” it functions just as any other organization…. So, the theological analysis that does indeed need to be done, should includes this question: which ecclesiology are we now to grasp after, one oriented to our sin or one oriented to our redemption?


Let us leave aside the substantive theological aspects of the recent Episcopal Church General Convention. They are important, of course. But I am interested here in the dynamics of decision-making that underlay the way things turned out. I am interested because these “transactional” aspects, as some call them, may tell us a lot about the future. And we are hearing a lot about these aspects from the Convention: it was surprisingly “respectful”, many have reported; it was engaged without “acrimony” and “contention”, and despite the momentous topics addressed, people were calm and relatively relaxed. All very different from past conventions, with their hand-wringing, protests, weeping and gnashing of teeth. “Where are all the passionate arguments?” many wondered, breathing a slightly uncomfortable sigh of relief. The explanations for the relative peace breaking out varied: some said that the traditionalists of TEC’ had all been “purged” or disappeared or were simply too exhausted and defeated to raise a ruckus; others said that the church had finally moved to a real “consensus” about previously contested matters of sexuality. “This is who we are!”, the Convention could finally say with some coherence.

The “purging” and the “consensus” explanations are probably both right to some degree. But it is a complicated overlap that merits some reflection. This is what I want to offer now. I have been doing some reading of late on the matter of how church councils “decide” things. And inevitably I have had to delve into some of the social scientific literature on related topics. There are two writers in particular who, I think, have something to say about this particular council we call the General Convention that has just met. And applying some of their broad insights can indeed, I suggest, help us to map the future a little bit.

Here, then, are some of the major elements of their thinking that may be pertinent, which I can lay out in the most generalized of ways.

The first thinker in question is Serge Moscovici, a well-known French social psychologist, who did some important experimental and theoretical work from the 1960’s through the 1980’s on “consensus” in organizations both small and large. (I am thinking here of his 1992/1994 book, written with Willem Doise, called Conflict and
Consensus: A General Theory of Collective Decisions.) One of Moscovici’s goals was to counter the then (and still) widespread presupposition that healthy group decision-making tends to “converge” towards the middle, leaving the extreme views of participants aside as the majority moves through discussion and compromise to a more central outlook. But one of the consequences of this postulate of moderated convergence, Moscovici argued, has been the tendency of group leadership to drive out extreme views, wary of their power to upset things. This can be done in many ways, through discouragement, disenfranchisement, shame, manipulation and so on. But it happens rather forcefully in many groups.

And the consequences of excluding “extreme” views, on the basis of some assumption that consensus represents a “moderated convergence”, Moscovici claims, have been generally disastrous on several counts. First, such exclusion tends to limit participation in decision-making altogether: more and more people “abstain” from participation, assuming that their views will not be heard in any case. This means that decisions once reached, while they appear to have few objections voiced against them, are only uncertainly representative of a broad consensus: who really knows what people agree with, if many say or do nothing at all? The corollary of abstention – something one sees even in broad democracies like the United States – is the concentration of decision-making in smaller and smaller hands. Moscovici calls this consolidation a form of “combination”, where smaller units of expertise “combine” in determining consensus. But no matter how competent these experts may be – experts in knowledge, in interest, in activist skills – their decision-making tendencies will be increasingly insulated from alternative views, with the end result of, shall we say, blindness in the face of complex problems. Ironically, the postulate of “moderated convergence” ends by establishing extremism at least in terms of wisdom and prudence. Political examples from the discernment and decision-making around Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs and so on have been widely studied on this matter: smart people, buffered from alternative views (because “extremist”), taking what turn out to be disastrous courses of action.

Moscovici himself, along with others, did experiments and collected data that demonstrated that the postulate of moderated convergence is in fact not the freest, and in his view healthiest, way of reaching consensus. Given relatively un-coerced or un-manipulated parameters of action, groups tend to reach consensus, not through lopping off extreme views and inching towards the middle through compromise. Rather, a relatively free decision-making process will engage in vital wrestling with extreme views, and that engagement will often end by coalescing around some version of an extreme view itself! In other words, as extreme and divergent views are permitted and deliberately engaged over time with freedom from constraint, people actually learn things and change their minds, and a more creative consensus emerges that tends to be more decisive, yet also more aware, in its understanding of what is at stake and what the risks and opportunities actually are. One of the main issues that comes from this kind of research is this: how organize decision-making so as to encourage this form of creative consensus? Leaving aside the theological aspects of this matter, the question is surely timely for churches!

The second thinker I have found helpful in reflecting on church councils is better known in the United States, and that is Albert O. Hirschman, economist and social scientist. One of Hirschman’s most popular books is called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Response to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Published in 1970, the book has been revisited several times since, by Hirschman himself among others. The book’s argument is simple and elegant, but also complex in its implications. In general, Hirschman argues, the real or perceived “decline” in an organization’s quality can be identified and responded to in two ways: by leaving (“exit”) or by “voicing” criticism and reform. This is true with respect to an organization’s membership (e.g. employees) or by “consumers” of an organization’s goods. In real life, of course, “exit” is not always possible (imagine citizens of a closed and coercive society) or easy, and “voice” is not always clearly granted or used. Exit requires available alternatives, and voice requires available procedures. Furthermore, as these two elements exist along a spectrum, response itself can become subtle.

Hirschman, finally, adds a third element in his mix, and that is “loyalty”, a kind of internal psychological or cultural component that informs a participant’s understanding and use of available means of exit and voice. After all, if someone is utterly committed to an organization – say, a political party – “decline” itself will be read in certain ways that mitigate the utilization of available means of exit and voice.

Hirschman’s concepts could be used to argue for the appropriateness of “monopolies” in certain circumstances, e.g. public schools, on the basis of the need to maintain the “voiced” participation of citizens in generalized education, rather than diluting such education through easy exit and multiple choices that no longer offer contexts of accountability. But his categories are also obviously relevant to organizations like churches.

So now let us take some of these ideas and move backwards, as it were, from the recently concluded General Convention. It is obvious that there are fewer traditionalists within the ranks of General Convention deputations and within the House of Bishops. The proportional voting breakdowns on key resolutions regarding sexuality point this out. Yet it is also the case that even here – within the 3-1 proportions of progressive to traditionalist groups – the “voicing” of objections was even less prominent, and the character of “abstention” more looming. At one point in the debate, it was reported, a liberal bishop said he was “uneasy” that there were so few conservatives coming up to the mike. What can account for this?

Most obviously, we know that traditionalists have left the Episcopal Church. But do we actually know how many? And, do we know whether the delegates to General Convention proportionately “represent” the actual viewpoints of TEC’s broader membership? How would we know? It would appear that TEC’s obvious and rather significant loss of membership is a sign of exit. Is the exit a sign of loss of “voice” as well? In which case, we are dealing, not with something that has happened decisively at the 2009 General Convention, but of something that has been happening over the course of several years: perceived decline in the church, voiced dissent, frustration, abstention, exit, and the disappearance of one set of “extreme views”.

We can try to test this possibility. The largest recent “exits” from TEC, obviously, came after the 2003 Convention. Yet why did so many choose to leave at that time rather than stay as “dissident reformers” who raised their voices against what they perceived to be the “decline” of TEC? According to Hirschman’s theory, there are several factors working together: the perceived loss of voice, the availability of alternatives through exit, and a weakened set of constraining loyalties. If this is so, it points us back further, then, perhaps to the formation of the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA), in 2000. It was at this time, after all, that a clear set of alternatives for exit was established, according to a model that was then followed after 2003: foreign jurisdictions taking departing clergy, congregations, and finally dioceses under their wing, and so somehow maintaining “Anglican Communion” identity (unlike earlier “continuing churches” of “exiting” members). But what of voice and loyalty?

Here we come to the most interesting aspect of this history. Clearly traditionalist voices were losing ground for some time before 2000. Why else would departures have been organized? At the same time, however, ties of loyalty among traditionalists to TEC were also being weakened. How and when did this happen? I would identify two aspects – education and mission – that focus the matter in the 1970’s. (I might also point to matters of Prayer Book revision and woman’s ordination, but I am less convinced that the numbers would bear these two aspects out as being of the same importance.) The founding of Trinity School for Ministry in 1976, with Alfred Stanway as its first dean, represents just this focus. The seminary was started, as we know, out of a perceived need to regain a more “orthodox’ evangelical educational foothold in the Episcopal Church, and also to nourish and renewed missionary commitment and skill set.
Both of these elements, the founders believed, were in “decline” within TEC. But this perception arose from an orientation that had been formed very explicitly by the Charismatic-Evangelical movement that had grown up in the earlier part of the decade.

I believe that a polarizing dynamic took root just at this point in the church, and took root decisively. When I began work in 1981 as an appointed missionary of the Episcopal Church (working in Burundi), I entered a world, organized from the national offices at 815 Second Avenue, New York, that was deeply suspicious of Charismatic-Evangelicals. I know this, because at the time I shared the suspicion and engaged the dynamics of that suspicion! But I was experiencing something that had already embedded itself in the outlook of church leaders. TEC had shrunk its missionary support enormously by this time, a process that began in the 1960’s, for a host of ideological, not to mention simple practical reasons. Although one ought rightly to look at the theological shifts of the church that began in the 1950’s and earlier, the dynamics of missionary and educational struggle only emerged in the 1970’s. And this seems to me to be the cross-roads of decision-making for our church. The question I would then ask is Moscovici’s: what were the dynamics of consensus that took over then, such that abstention and exit became the major choices adopted by traditionalists within the church?

What I would suggest is the following. The advent of the Charismatic-Evangelical revival within the Episcopal Church, which ended by focusing upon education and mission, was something new to the church. (“Evangelicalism” among Episcopalians, insofar as it existed at all, meant something quite different before the 1970’s.) The Charismatic-Evangelical movement represented an “extreme” set of views, that came into conflict with both earlier “traditional’ Episcopal outlooks, but also with the liberal drift in theological education and mission that was already a strong current within the church. And, quite frankly, the decision-making structures of the church did not know what to do with this movement. It was, as George Sumner has put it, a new “Methodist moment” for Anglicanism especially in North America. And nothing was learned from the past! Consciously or unconsciously, the executive network of the Eipscopal Church sought to exclude the role of Charismatic-Evangelicals within the ordering centers of power, especially the executive power of the national headquarters this contrasts with the Church of England).

At the same time, the Charismatic-Evangelical movement itself shifted more and more in a broader cultural evangelical direction, flourished in many areas, and attracted new members whose “loyalty” to the specifically “Episcopal Church” was thin. Indeed, ecclesial loyalty in general began to thin out in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in all sectors of TEC’s membership, as the more consumerist approach to spiritual commitment (or “fulfillment”) became embedded in American religious culture. But the point is this: the advent of the sexuality debate within TEC arrived within a decision-making system in which two realities were now well-established. First, what had were viewed as “conservative” viewpoints were already colored by the suspicions of extremism (the common epithetic of conservatives as “fundamentalists” goes back to the 1970’s and has gained steam) and were therefore held at bay. Having discussions in the church always foundered on this prejudice. And second, thin ecclesial loyalties were ready for alternate choices as they became available. From 2000 on, this becomes the recipe for exit by traditionalists, and “combination” consensus by an insular progressive elite.

All of this is conjecture, I realize. And none of it is particularly relevant to our current situation except insofar as it points to the future. Here Moscovici’s theories lay out a path of somewhat discouraging potential. As traditionalists leave TEC, consensus decision-making will prove more and more devoid of accountable divergent thinking, and the decisions made will become less and less informed and representative. This spells danger and self-destruction for the Episcopal Church. Alas, though, the same is true for the exiting groups. From the perspective of decision-making, the loss of divergent thinking will affect traditionalists who leave TEC as negatively in their own sphere as the liberal church they have left behind: alternative views will be suspect as “extreme” and councils “buffered” from their effects; small groups of decision-makers will prevail over the engagement of broad participation; and, just as importantly, the existence of multiple and available choices will spur exit over loyalty. American Anglicanism has never appeared so vulnerable as now (Canada is just a few steps behind).

A warning, then, a warning to all world Anglicans! All you who pass by! Do not touch the American disease! Too many choices, too many fears, insecurities and enmities, too few loyalties. The Anglican Communion cannot turn into an enclave. That is not what Christian communion embodies. Yet, should it simply split apart, it will become a set of enclaves, spreading their little seeds of insularity.

Of course, I have been deliberately avoiding any theological analysis here. Are churches merely social organizations, to be described according to (debatable) transactional models? What of God’s purposes and the promises of Christ? What of the power of the Holy Spirit? What of the Way, the Truth, and the Life as absolutely given? My guess is that the more sinful the church, the more that church is reducible to the descriptions of the social scientists, the more “merely” it functions just as any other organization. That is my guess. But sin is forgivable, and grace is given. So, the theological analysis that does indeed need to be done, should includes this question: which ecclesiology are we now to grasp after, one oriented to our sin or one oriented to our redemption? Or is it even possible to distinguish the two any longer?