Confidence in the Covenant?

From Religious Intelligence (h/t Fr. Dick Kim):

Thursday, 7th January 2010. 4:32pm

By: Ruth Gledhill.

In spite of all that I have written, it seems to me that schism in the Anglican Communion is not a fact. I would argue that it has not actually taken place. The Anglican Communion is still ‘teetering on the brink’, still ‘looking over the precipice’, but it hasn’t jumped. I base this conclusion - journalists are trained from the cradle to start not end stories with their conclusions - on all there is to base it on, the ‘instruments’ of the Communion.

We are used to hearing about the ‘music of the spheres’ but now there is a stranger song, the ‘music of the schism’.

In spite of the boycott of one instrument of communion, the Lambeth Conference, by some provinces in 2008, the last two Primates’ meetings have been fully attended apart from absentees explicable for reasons other than those at the root of the present debate. The next meeting will be in 2011, so perhaps we won’t have formal schism until then. But even that might not count. The ultimate arbiter might have to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, himself one of the four instruments of unity.

So far the instruments have been remarkably in tune with each other. They have produced the fourth ‘movement’, or draft, of that strange symphony that is the orchestration of the Anglican Covenant. It’s had its jarring Stockhausen moments along the way, to be sure, but the overall effect, now it is finished, is of pleasing moderation, even harmony. In post-modern Anglican fashion, and to mix musical metaphors, we might yet get a ‘middle eight’, if the Anglican Church in North America finally decides to apply for membership of the Anglican Consultative Council. The primates, a source tells me, have been expecting this application at the last two meetings but it has never arrived.

The sense I get is that, were they to go ahead, they would certainly be in with a chance of being recognised, either alongside or even in place of The Episcopal Church. Then I’d have to execute one of those complicated ‘coda al fine’ manoeuvres in print and the last movement would last a little longer. But as yet there is no sign of that happening.

So notes, bars, phrases segue on to their satisfying finale, where to a beat of God-Save-the-Queen-style steel drums Dr Rowan Williams will stand up and announce the salvage of the unity of the Anglican Communion.

But there might be a bar.

One of the composers of the Covenant is Gregory Cameron, former chaplain to Dr Williams in Wales, then at the Anglican Communion office before his recent elevation to Bishop of St Asaph. He was in at the beginning, and in spite of his move was one of the handful of Anglican theologians and scholars asked to look at the third, or Ridley, movement after it was roundly booed and hissed in Jamaica.

Bishop Gregory is relatively optimistic still about the overall process, but is anxious about the election of the Episcopal priest Mary Glasspool, who has been in the same monogamous relationship with her female partner for many years, as a suffragan bishop in Los Angeles. I spoke to him this week and he fears for the ‘disruption’ of the Communion if her election is confirmed in May. “We have succeeded in getting all the primates round the table at primates’ meetings so far,” he said. “I don’t think that would happen again if TEC confirms the election of Mary Glasspool.”

So would that be schism then? No, not in my view. Ultimately, the Anglican Communion will remain a ‘church’ that is not a ‘proper church’ (strange how the Pope actually does get it right sometimes) until the Anglican Consultative Council either expels one of its member Provinces or Churches, or one of these bodies takes the active decision to leave.

We spoke a little about how the covenant now sings a softer tune.

“There were two concerns in Jamaica. The first was about the meaning of the word, church. There is always a worry about what Anglicans mean when they say, church. Is there an Anglican Church at a universal level? Archbishop Rowan does use the term ‘the Anglican Church’ as a universal reality. But I would say there is not such a single entity. I think there is a family of churchettes which are provinces.” It had to be clarified because of concerns that anyone — the Recife diocese, ACNA — could claim to be an Anglican church and then sign up to the Covenant, in effect opting themselves into the Communion. Bishop Gregory said: “We have made it absolutely clear that the Anglican Communion is a family of national and regional Churches, so the Covenant is not talking about dioceses, but provinces.” Provinces and national Churches will be invited to join by one of the instruments of communion, so the only way ACNA could sign up would be to be invited, and for that to happen, ACNA will have to apply for membership of the Anglican Consultative Council.

In addition, what was starting to sound horribly like a juridical process for expulsion of naughty provinces has been reworked into a more melodious method.

It’s hard being a religious affairs correspondent sometimes. After 20 years or so, starting with women priests, newsdesks understandably want to know, has ‘it’, or schism, happened yet? They are used to waiting a day or two, maybe a week, for a story to develop, not decades. In the Church of course they are more used to dealing with ‘millennium-style leaps’, as I tried to explain to William Crawley on Sunday Sequence last Sunday.

But they will never lose interest in the story, because like a symphony it continually evolves, even if it only ever seems to sing the same old tune.

One of the joys of doing this job is the privilege of being able to telephone incredibly intelligent canon lawyer priests such as Bishop Gregory, who spoke having spent four gruelling hours on the A55 getting his son home from school in a snowstorm. Accessing such learning and spirituality at first hand is one way of going back to a different age, an age of monastic austerity, when theological ideas underpinned all reason.

Unlikely as it must sound, sitting down for a good listen to Anglican affairs can indeed be a bit like hearing the music of the spheres, and no one has ever said that true music isn’t complicated.