The next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council is a few months away, and one of its main items of business will be the proposals put forward by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) to modify the definition and the governance of the Anglican Communion. The proposals, called the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (NCP – as ever acronyms abound, and readers will want to set aside the concept of a ‘National Car Park’…) have at last begun to attract critical interrogation. They are momentous proposals which, if accepted, will fundamentally alter the nature of the Communion. Paul Avis recently published a scathing assessment of them in the Church Times, and to his voice was added last week the weighty opinion of Peter Sedgwick, member of ARCIC and author of a magisterial two-volume study of the Anglican moral tradition. I largely agree with these assessments, and don’t want simply to repeat what they say. But I think there is a bit more to be said, and so this my ‘two pennyworth’ into the debate.
The NCP are laid out in a lengthy document on the Anglican Communion website. It is a curious document – very carefully written, well resourced from historic Anglican texts, eloquent and perceptive in its description of many aspects of the recent history of division in the Communion, and insightful in its laying out of some of the implications of these divisions, and yet at the same time strangely two-edged. I was struggling to think why this was, when I realised that the document essentially reflects two quite different moods. One is hopeful: its note is perseverance through difficulty, looking forward, hard-going but persistent and determined to face down difficulties. The other mood is recessive: things have gone too far, we have to adjust and step back from what we’ve said, we can’t anymore claim to be what we have been. The prospects for the Communion are accented in the first mood; the actual proposals are couched in the second. At best, these seem to me to amount a spirit of ‘retreat in order to advance’. And that I think is a problem.
Plainly I can’t here comment on the whole document, which does repay careful reading. But I want to pick out two points which it seems to me worth exploring.
The first of these concerns the way a second agenda is inserted into the document, subtly, without adequate explanation or exploration. Right at the beginning – paragraph 2 – we get what we would expect – a reference to the recent divisions in the Communion, which are stated more fully in paragraphs 6 to 8. These are surely the main reason for IASCUFO’s work, the reason the ACC requested that IASCUFO look again at the Instruments of Communion in the first place. But we also get a reference couched in strangely allusive and vague terms: “Others [which others?] have wondered whether an unattractive colonial residue still clings to the structures of the Communion and may need correcting.” Now anyone following Anglican Communion affairs will be aware of the serious divisions which have occurred over the three decades over same-sex relations, and to a much lesser extent over women’s ordination. And likewise, they will be aware of the weight of post-colonial criticism in various circles, aimed in particular at the countries of the ‘Global North’, and especially at Britain. I don’t for one moment want to suggest that this criticism either doesn’t exist, or is to be ignored or set aside. But where is the evidence of the connection made here, and implicitly tied to public discourse, between post-colonial criticism and the governance and structures of the Anglican Communion as a whole, I mean of a communion-wide internal debate referenced by the ACC and other bodies? It is not presented here in the NCP, and although the basic claim is made several times in the document, it is not referenced, not elaborated, and so not decisively established. It is at best a contentious and controverted point, which should not be brought forward in the way it has been here without much fuller and more systematic exposition.
There is just one point at which something like a fuller explanation is attempted, but that is actually quite a tendentious one. In paragraph 20, the claim is made that the Lambeth fathers (and yes of course, they were all men) in 1930, in their Encyclical Letter, equated ‘Anglican’ with ‘English’. The quote they use does seem to suggest that. But the foregoing paragraph in the Encyclical Letter, which they do not quote, gives a different slant, because it makes clear that the influence of the Church of England on the churches of the Communion is not to be characterised in terms of national culture (not ‘Englishness’), but the theological and ecclesial elements valued by the Church of England (“the leading characteristics of the Church of England”), and these are then spelt out, briefly, as the supremacy of Scripture, the undivided Church, particularity (‘national’ or otherwise), repudiation of a central authority other than a Council of Bishops, freedom in the pursuit of truth. So when NCP implies that, in 1930, the Bishops of the Lambeth Conference assumed ‘Anglican’ represented ‘English’, it is being thoroughly misleading. Admittedly, the Encyclical Letter somewhat confuses things by setting ‘Anglican’ and ‘Catholic’ over against each other, but this can be read – probably should be read – in terms of denomination versus universality. And the use of ‘Anglicanism’ increasingly in the nineteenth century – it was not quite a neologism of the 1830s and 1840s – rarely implied simply what most of us, reading NCP, would assume the document means by ‘English’ – rather, it was the third ‘branch’ of the Catholic Church, episcopal in structure, professing the faith of the early, undivided Church, but non-papally aligned. It had nothing formally to do with nationalism ,though of course the history of the Communion was mightily inflected by all the influences of empire. This might all seem a bit pedantic of me, but I’m disturbed by the way this ‘second agenda’ has crept into NCP without any evident foregoing discussion. At best the case is not proven here; at worst, it represents a distraction from the serious business to which NCP is addressed.
The second thing that strikes me concerns the language of ‘communion’. At several points NCP discusses – and I think it does this well – the common ecumenical language of ‘degrees of communion’. We can have communion with other Christians in other church traditions to varying degrees, through our common baptism, through joint prayer, and so on, right up to ‘full communion’ involving mutual eucharistic hospitality and the interchangeability of ordained ministry. The 1930 ‘definition’ of the Anglican Communion used the phrase “in communion with the See of Canterbury”. NCP proposes this phrase be dropped, in favour of a much looser “historic connection with the See of Canterbury”. The evident justification for such a step is that some member churches of the Communion have declared themselves ‘out of communion’ with both the last and the present Archbishop of Canterbury, over the Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith process. But although the new, proposed version of the 1930 definition does refer to members seeking “to foster the highest degree of communion possible one with another”, it is not really clear how this in practice would be applied to a whole range of churches. Nor is it really faced to what extent such a change would fundamentally challenge what it means to be an Anglican Communion. The degrees of communion argument doesn’t really work here – the Church of England, for example, has ‘communion’ to some degree with all the other mainstream churches in England, and some of these also have ‘historic links’ with the See of Canterbury, and may even profess the “Catholic and Apostolic faith and order as they are generally set forth in the Book of Common Prayer”. But that doesn’t, presumably, mean that those churches are to be encompassed within the meaning of ‘communion’ as in Anglican Communion? Moreover, if this change is being driven by the refusal of some churches of the Communion to recognise any longer that they have communion with the See of Canterbury, is the goal then to put in a definition acceptable to them so that in more limited ways they can hang to some sort of lower-degree relationship of communion, in order to hold the ‘Anglican Communion’ together? That seems absurd, especially given the strength of language used by those overlapping bodies, the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) and the Global Anglican Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON). GAFCON, for example, in its recent ‘Abuja Declaration’, claimed that the Instruments of Communion (Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Conference, ACC, Primates’ meeting), “seek to hold together a confused communion of institutional co-existence, based on the fiction of ‘walking together’ with those who are walking away from the truth of the gospel and the teaching of Jesus”. They explicitly reject the approach outlined in NCP, saying it cannot lead to “true communion”.
That last point seems to me decisive. It shows that simply tweaking the definition of the Anglican Communion, and watering down the commitment to communion with the See of Canterbury, is a waste of time. It will not achieve its object of holding the current membership of the Anglican Communion together. In abandoning the idea of a central, organising principle of communion between all member churches, focused on the See of Canterbury, NCP is sawing off the branch on which the Anglican Communion sits. It is substituting a loose idea of ‘fellowship’, which could be articulated at widely varying levels of relationship and engagement, for the strong principle – yes, currently workable only in certain parts of the world – that all the churches of the Anglican Communion are in communion (that means full communion) with each other, through their shared communion with the ancient See of Canterbury. Why not in future simply call it the ‘Anglican Federation’? For that is what it will be. I don’t think it’s putting it too strongly to say that NCP, if adopted, effectively means the end of the Anglican Communion as it is now.
What about the post-colonial point, then? Even leaving to one side the refusal of some member churches currently to accept – at least in practice – the 1930 definition, doesn’t there remain a problem with the very specificity and historicity of the link through the ancient-pre-eminent see of the Church of England? I can see that. Obviously Anglicanism is not alone in focusing on one historic see – think of Rome and Constantinople, for example. Personally I would see no difficulty in principle with having an Archbishop of Canterbury from any member church other than the Church of England (we’ve already had one from Wales, after all), but of course there are quite considerable practical and legal difficulties there. They are not perhaps in the long run insurmountable. But I’d want to see a clear, sustained, communion-wide conversation on this point, rather than the sly slipping-in of something which isn’t obviously referenced in the original ACC mandate.
Ad fontes 