Via VirtueOnline

A New Instrument of Communion?

By Steven R. Ford
http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2011/3/24/catholic-voices-a-new-instrument-of-communion
March 24, 2011

The Church is in a pretty sorry state right now. A diocese has seceded from the province, although bishops, apparently on the advice of lawyers, deny this can happen at all. Unchristian and uncivil court battles over property and money are ensuing, and a newly appointed rival bishop has arrived on the scene. Consents to two episcopal elections have been denied, one for the suspected "moral turpitude" of the winner and the other for the disputed theology of the victor. And a priest withdrew as a candidate for diocesan bishop when questions arose about his loyalty to provincial church leadership.

No, this isn't the U.S. Episcopal Church. I'm in Mzuzu, the see city of the Diocese of Northern Malawi, in the Province of Central Africa. The diocese that seceded is Harare in nearby Zimbabwe. Money, sex and power. These are the preoccupations of too many Anglican Christians today. It's true in Central Africa, and it's most assuredly true throughout the United States and Canada. It's no coincidence that, as these preoccupations are growing, the traditional Anglican Instruments of Communion are breaking down. The office and person of the Archbishop of Canterbury are simultaneously accused of having too much and too little influence in the life of the Church. More than 200 bishops declined to attend the Lambeth Conference in 2008 because conference participants included bishops who had consecrated a noncelibate homosexual.

Several Global South primates and other bishops have resigned from the Anglican Consultative Council's Standing Committee. And because two North American primates had been invited, one-third of their Global South brothers declined to attend the Primates' Meeting in Dublin. Hardly "Instruments of Communion" at all anymore, these things. Our Anglican obsession with money, sex and power has seen to that.

I spent some time this morning visiting St. Mary's Convent in Luwinga, a few miles outside of Mzuzu. It's the new Malawian house of the Community of St. Mary (Eastern Province), the "Peekskill Sisters." I've been a priest associate of CSM for many years (though not a very good one, I'm afraid), so I naturally sought the place out. The nuns here are all central African, but their rhythm of life is the same as that of their American sisters in upstate New York.

Two professed sisters were trained in Peekskill. A junior, recently elected to life profession, was trained near Albany in the community's American mother house, and the newest junior received all her training in Malawi. At least two aspirants are expected in the next few months. Anglican multinationalism and multiculturalism are alive and well in CSM. In fact, they thrive in quiet lives of shared faith and service. It's a community which lives out the "bonds of common affection" between North American and Central African Anglicans. It binds together two very distinct provinces. It embodies the service to others to which all of us are bound through our Baptismal Covenant.

It's sometimes suggested that Anglican and Benedictine spirituality are one and the same. Indeed, a monastic heritage figures large in our collective spiritual culture. The bulk of our prayer book is the Eucharist and Benedict's Divine Office. Many of our church buildings are set up for singing the Divine Office in monastic-style choirs. Yet it's the core of Benedictine spirituality, largely forgotten among Anglicans at large, that's lived out in Luwinga: the "evangelical counsels" of poverty, chastity and obedience.

The very opposite of the money, sex and power after which we tend to chase and which cut like so many knives into the Body of Christ. It unites these Malawian CSM sisters with their American Episcopal siblings in Greenwich - and through CSM's Southern Province, with their sisters in Sagada in the Philippines. The Luwinga sisters feed orphans in a joint work with nearby Holy Trinity Church, and they're looking to establish their own orphanage. Sisters in Greenwich minister through the Diocese of Albany's Christ the King Spiritual Life Center.

It's not just the Community of St. Mary, of course, which seems increasingly to be the glue holding Anglicanism together - our new Instrument of Communion, perhaps.

On previous African sojourns I've visited convents of the U.K.-established Order of the Holy Paraclete in both Ghana and Swaziland, where sisters of diverse cultures and traditions live in kingdom-style unity which spills out in service. OHP African ministries include an eye clinic and a residential school for girls who have suffered abuse. The Order of the Holy Cross lives and witnesses not only in Canada and the United States, but also at Mariya uMama weThemba Monastery in Grahamstown, South Africa, where brothers educate local children.

And it's not just Benedictine religious communities which bind Anglicans together. The Society of St. Francis witnesses and works not only in the U.S. and the U.K. (among many other far-flung places), but also through a covenanted community of religious brothers providing hospitality in Zimbabwe.

International, multiprovincial and multicultural religious communities, Benedictine and otherwise, are living witnesses to selfless Christian service. These communities, in my growing experience, are the new Anglican Instruments of Communion which God is raising up even as we tear the old ones apart. Being that instrument just might be the 21st-century vocation of Anglican religious communities.

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The Rev. Steven R. Ford serves at the Church of St. James the Apostle, Tempe, Arizona