A resignation to send shockwaves

Via the American Anglican Council:

February 4th, 2010

By Andrew Carey, CEN

Just when it seemed that the Anglican Communion was being bored out of existence something interesting happens.

President Bishop Mouneer Anis of Jerusalem and the Middle East resigned from the increasingly important ‘Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion’ expressing frustration that his presence had “no value whatsoever”. In his letter of resignation he explains that the Committee had no will to carry through the Windsor Proposals, maintaining the status quo rather than acting upon the logic and trajectory of the Windsor proposals.

For Bishop Anis, one of the more measured and moderate Global South leaders, to come to this conclusion is a shocking thing indeed. It throws the whole post-Windsor strategy into confusion and challenges the legitimacy of recent developments in the Communion which have empowered a cavalier bureaucracy and undermined any possibility of reconciliation.

After the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson the Windsor Report provided a clear strategy for resolving the crisis. Firstly, it provided a means of discipline whereby Canadian and American Bishops who had created the crisis by blessing same-sex relationships and supporting the consecration of a practising gay bishop could be disciplined. This was through an invitation to absent themselves from the Instruments of the Anglican Communion. A need for some kind of alternative provision for traditionalists in North America was also recognised. The Covenant, regarded now as the only show in town, was a development further down the line which could resolve future crises.

Instead, the Archbishop of Canterbury invited all of TEC and Canadian Bishops to the Lambeth Conference, excluding bizarrely and insultingly only Bishop Gene Robinson and Mugabe’s crony, Bishop Nolbert Kunonga (formerly of Harare).

This deepened the divisions and undermined the Windsor process. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was even elected to the Standing Committee of the Primates Meeting, giving her a seat on the now all-important Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.


Consequently instead of decisive leadership we had a proliferation of useless short-term bodies, and a furtherance of bureaucracy. There was the ill-fated Panel of Reference, the Windsor Continuation Group, the Covenant Design Group, the listening process to name but a few. I’ve lost count of all the bodies, reports, drafts, resolutions and meetings.

In fact, the sole purpose appeared to be to bore the opposition out of existence. Well that has happened to some extent. Even as an Anglican anorak myself I can hardly bring myself to observe the slow water-torture which meetings of the Communion have now become.

What we now have is a Communion whose instruments and body are locked in a constant state of warfare—a power struggle. The Anglican Consultative Council disparages the Primates’ Meeting; the Archbishop of Canterbury reduces the Lambeth Conference to a talking-shop. And the Primates’ Meeting is literally culled from the scene – meeting on an ever more occasional ad hoc basis.

The body which Bishop Anis has resigned from has become the real benefactor of this civil war.

Previously it was only the Joint Standing Committee of the ACC and the Primates’ Meeting, but now it is styled as the ’Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion’.

This new powerful Standing Committee, which doesn’t even carry the support of all of its members, is what the Primates’ Meeting used to be – a body which, because it could convene regularly and could represent the entire geographical spread of the Communion, carried forward key resolutions of the Lambeth Conference and the ACC – especially on Aids/HIV, poverty and ecumenical relationships. It had the authority of the leaders of the Provinces of the Anglican Communion and for about five years it started to meet yearly.

The basis of the logic of sidelining the Primates is beyond me. Episcopally led, synodically governed is supposed to be a hallmark of Anglican ecclesiology. We are now apparently ruled by a
powerful new committee whose ‘elected’ membership is even more distant from the actual membership of the Anglican churches. Yet all this reorganisation has been done by
sleight of hand and not as part of an open process.

The Lambeth Design Group decided that there were to be no resolutions at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, someone made the decision to budget for fewer meetings of the Primates, and someone else made the decision to invent a new committee, ‘The Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion‘.

In the meantime, in case anyone hadn’t noticed, important leaders like Archbishop Henry Orombi has absented himself from all recent meetings of the Standing Committee and several provinces in the Global South seem to have completely given up.

Bishop Anis’ resignation is a signal that previously moderate voices are now also unable with any integrity to support an Anglican Communion whose sole purpose seems to be to keep everyone talking – at the expense both of truth and unity.