SCOREBOARD

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Who won the Current Unpleasantness? Easy. Rowan Williams:

A meeting of the leaders of 23 of the Communion’s 38 provinces has produced a draft agreement diminishing the primates’ role as an instrument of unity for the Anglican Communion. The primates meeting is to be restructured into a pan-Anglican fellowship for conversation, with a goal of “acknowledging diversity and giving space for difference” within the church, according to a ‘working document’ released at the close of the Jan 24-30 meeting in Dublin.

The reforms put forward by Dr. Williams and the Dublin primates have abandoned the calls for discipline and good order made by the primates since the 1997 Jerusalem meeting, conceding there is not political will to take action against the Episcopal Church. It also follows upon the revamping of the Lambeth Conference as a teaching instrument for bishops in 2008, the controversial 2009 ACC meeting that torpedoed the Anglican Covenant process, and the creation in questionable circumstances of an all powerful Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion last year.

Dr. Williams has now effectively gathered the authority once held by other instruments of the communion into his own hands, and into those of a London-based bureaucracy.

Which means what? According to Matt Kennedy, not much.

Since the conservatives will not go to many Communion meetings, the official face and voice of the Communion will become more and more bizarre and will be increasingly ignored by serious people…in much the same fashion serious people ignore the Episcopal Church in the United States. But that will bother the conservative primates and bishops less and less as they, like everyone else, go about their business paying little heed to the circus music wafting from Canterbury.

This will not be “the end of the Anglican Communion.” It will not even be the beginning of the end. Don’t expect any dramatic provincial breaks with Canterbury or any calls for a new official Communion center. Do expect the theological and relational ditch presently separating the conservative provinces from Canterbury, the Communion Instruments, and the liberal/moderate provinces to steadily widen to a chasm, a gulf, a deep dark ravine of healthy differentiation. But think of it as a separation rather than a divorce.

And there it will stay for the foreseeable future. I suppose you might call it a de facto split but there won’t be an official one. Formally everybody will be connected to Canterbury. In reality everyone will be much happier than we are now or have been for the last nine years.

While the Anglican Communion Institute believes that the Anglican Communion is broken so let’s all work together to build it back up. Or something like that.

Second, the Dublin meeting acknowledged no accountability to and, indeed claimed no continuity with, past Primates’ Meetings. It made no mention whatsoever of the moratoria the Primates and other Instruments had developed and ratified repeatedly over many meetings in the previous decade. The Anglican Covenant, similarly the focus of several years’ intensive effort, was mentioned only in passing in a footnote. Each of the Primates’ Meetings, and indeed meetings of the other Instruments, in recent years had placed their work in the context of developing and interpreting their own prior work and that of the other Instruments. On both the acknowledged “critical situation” facing the Communion and their own self-definition, the Dublin participants seemed to operate in a vacuum, having a conversation among themselves about “journeying together in honest conversation.”

For all these reasons, the group of Primates who met in Dublin cannot be recognized as acting in accord with the accepted Communion understanding of the Primates’ Meeting as an Instrument of Communion. This Instrument thus joins the others as now being dysfunctional and lacking in communion credibility. The role of the Lambeth Conference as an Instrument of Communion is to “express episcopal collegiality worldwide.” But in 2008, when the bishops of most Anglicans “worldwide” were not present, it could not perform this function. It accomplished little of substance and is now regarded throughout much of the Communion as a symbol of futility. Similarly, the Anglican Consultative Council has been re-structured legally so that it is no longer recognizable as the Instrument defined in the Covenant or in past Anglican documents. The role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Instrument of Communion is to function as “a primacy of honor and respect among the college of bishops,” as “a focus and means of unity,” and the one who “gathers” the Lambeth Conference and Primates’ Meetings. Whatever may be said about the cause of the disintegration, it is incontrovertible empirically that Canterbury has been unable to perform this function over the last three years. The Communion thus finds itself with no working Instrument that has been able to perform its necessary function, follow its rules, and garner credible acceptance from the majority of the Communion.

The first task for those who share a Communion ecclesiology is to begin to re-constitute working Instruments of Communion. These will necessarily be provisional at first, but if the Communion is to survive they must evolve into Instruments that actually work to unite the member churches of the Communion. If church history, including our own recent experience, teaches anything it is that neither confessions without instruments nor instruments without common faith and order are sufficient to preserve unity. As recently noted by the Secretary General, the vast majority of the Communion continues to share Anglicanism’s historic faith and order notwithstanding its rejection by two provinces. What is needed as a matter of urgency are Instruments that express that common faith. We call on the Primates representing the vast preponderance of Anglicans, together with their colleagues, to take up the charge of seeing to the furtherance of the Communion and we pledge our prayers to that end.

For his part, Dr. Williams is going to try to mend fences with some of the primates who skipped his dog-and-pony show.

The Archbishop of Canterbury will engage in a round of shuttle diplomacy in an attempt to improve relations with the Global South primates who boycotted last week’s primates’ Meeting.

Speaking during the closing press conference at the Emmaus Centre, near Dublin, on Sunday afternoon, Dr Williams spoke of his plans to visit some of the provinces of the absent Primates, such as South-East Asia. He said that he had recently met the Archbishop of Kenya, Dr Eliud Wabukala, one of the Primates who did not attend, taking part in “a very long and detailed conversation on a variety of matters”.

Such diplomatic endeavours would be a “long task”, he said; and trying to keep the diverse Com­munion together was “difficult”; but “the task we’ve been given, it’s part of the gift of living in the Church” and “part of the cross we carry”.

Dr Williams acknowledged that there remains a “critical situation” in the Anglican Communion. “Nobody would deny that. But that critical situation has not ended the rela­tionships, often very cordial and very constructive, between Churches within the Communion.”

So essentially, not much of anything is ever going to actually happen. The last possibility of the North Americans receiving any kind of sanction for their apostasy has been effectively neutered by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

That won’t stop the old fraud from continuing to prattle on about “conversations” and “relationships.” And it’s probably true that the traditionalist primates will completely ignore Lambeth Palace, its meetings and its instruments of unity.

But we’ll all be happier? Depends on how you define “happier” considering that absolutely nothing has changed. The something that we are always being told needs to be done to repair the Communion is just as vague, inchoate and down-the-road-somewhere now as it was in 2003 and will be in 2015.

Global South primates still consider themselves Anglicans and still are Anglicans, regardless of how often they remind us how apostate the North Americans are or how many times we are told that the GS is not in Communion with the US and Canada. And if they continue to insist that they’re not going anywhere, they will continue to rolled by Dr. Williams and his successors.

Unless the traditionalists put a break with Canterbury back on the table, I don’t hold out any hope for some kind of independent conservative Anglican entity that we are constantly assured will inevitably develop at some yet-to-be-determined time at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future. I am a Missourian, after all.