No Jurisdiction in this realm:

On the matter of intervention and autonomy in the Anglican Communion.

 

The Rev. Mark Harris

(poetmark@worldnet.att.net)

 

 

The Archbishop of Canterbury speaking recently at a conference in South Carolina is reported by Episcopal Life to have said, “No one has the right to take decisions which affect the whole… No diocese should take unilateral action, which impairs the life of the whole Province.  No Province should take unilateral actions which affect and impair the whole Communion.”  His plea was to step back from fractious disagreement and to find deeper dialogue. The Archbishop was suggesting a way to remove that impediment to communication, common prayer and work: “We must not,” he suggested, “intimidate one another, misrepresent one another or despise one another.”  Given the current quarreling among us, the Archbishop has every reason to be concerned for unity in the community of Anglican churches.

 

Yet there is something wrong here.  Instead of reducing the stresses in the fabric of Anglicanism his words have too easily played into the hands of those who wish to bend an emerging Anglican Communion polity to their own use in the engineering and management of an ecclesiastical coup in the Episcopal Church.

 

Some few members of the Episcopal Church organized as the Association of Anglican Congregations on Mission have petitioned the Primates to intervene in the Episcopal Church or declare it no longer part of the Communion because of, among other things, its having acted in unilateral and unorthodox ways.  It now appears that some Primates are willing to give this petition a hearing.  Further, if the report is true that the Archbishop of Singapore has determined that the United States is an open “mission field” because the Episcopal Church as departed from the Gospel, the intervention of bishops from outside this Province has already begun. The right of this Province to govern itself is being challenged from within, and its challengers are being supported from without.   

 

In the midst of the raw violence that strikes down whole peoples and the more sophisticated violence of economic exploitation it seems odd to spend even a moment on these squabbles within the Anglican Communion. Still, these quarrels are the beam in our own eye and they obscure our vision and unduly occupy our time and thoughts. The beam is now a growing ecclesiastical hindrance to compassionate vision. I believe we will have to spend the time now to deal with this strange petition or it will grow and become a destructive monster. 

 

Perhaps there are political or tactical reasons to avoid responding to these petitioners or their Primate supporters. Who indeed has the time for this sort of thing?  But the Archbishop makes this difficult because his comments have reinforced one of the petitioner’s basic tactical premises: that member Provinces of the Anglican Communion are morally bound to conform to resolutions of the Lambeth Conference and judgments of the Primates.

 

The Archbishop’s proposes that “no one has the right to take decisions which affect the whole.” It is a particularly hierarchical and monarchical idea. It offers a stepped ecclesial scheme: local, diocesan, Provincial, and then “the whole.” Within that hierarchy no lesser agent has the right to “take” decisions for the greater. There are two things wrong with the proposal: (i) it may work pretty well for “lord and liege” governance systems, but not in even vaguely democratic ones, and (ii) it absurdly equates the Anglican Communion with the “whole” as if claims to orthodoxy from within Anglicanism had any standing in a Christendom that is lamentably already fractured. 

 

Anglicans indeed profess obedience to a whole, but that whole is the Body of Christ, not to be confused with this or that ecclesial body (The Anglican Communion, The Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, etc.)  Within the ecclesial bodies of broken Christendom our obedience is tempered by sensibilities for justice waiting for action. In the brokenness of our fallen condition as churches there is indeed the right “to take decisions which affect the whole.”  It is a right to be used with care, but it is a right.

 

Autonomous action by a Province or Regional body has been the effective means by which real and important changes have been made which “affect and impair the whole.”  “Impairing” the continued subjugation of women in ministry by the “whole,” by unilaterally breaking the ban on ordaining women, was a use of that right to autonomous action. 

 

It is useful to remember that once a determined English Church abruptly terminated the claims by the Church of Rome to represent the greater “whole” and acted in autonomous and unilateral ways. We are the inheritors of that sensibility.  “The bishop of Rome,” the Articles of Religion said, “hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.”  Perhaps we too in our day must remind The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates that they have no jurisdiction in the Episcopal Church.

 

But what of the authority of Lambeth?  Should that body exercise jurisdiction?   When the idea of gathering bishops with historical connection to the Church of England was first proposed great suspicion was voiced that such a gathering might take on a legislative or judicative function. Assurances were made that it would be only advisory, a conference only. What happened to those assurances?

 

Times have changed. There have been occasions where the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop, the Primates, or the Anglican Consultative Council or have forcefully acted, often for the good.  The primary force of such action has been the encouragement for reconciliation and the power to invite to table fellowship. One or the other of these instruments of unity can encourage fellowship where there is brokenness, invite communities into communion, or deny invitation to fellowship when a break becomes a reality. Often those decisions have made in meetings that seemed legislative or judicial in intent.

 

Like it or not, there is the beginning of legislative and judicial sinew on the raw bones of international Anglican Communion order. This is not all bad.  The Primates and Canterbury often do provide spiritual and moral direction. And we need to carefully hear them in that office. They can make and enforce such rules for inclusion or exclusion in their fellowship as they see fit. The ACC and Lambeth do have strong recommendatory effect.  But in all the petitioning and arguments that are flying about, the Episcopal Church needs to be honest and clear in its understanding of the matter: this Church has not as yet given over any internal governance to these or any other ecclesial ‘instruments’ outside this Province. We need to make sure we do not do so.

 

The Archbishop argues for limits on unilateral action on the grounds that there is no right to take such action. In saying this, the Archbishop is making a legal argument to the effect that rights to take positions or ‘act’ derive from the whole Communion, and not from its constituent Provinces.  This is affirmed in his ordering: dioceses have no rights to act when it would “affect or impair” the Province, and Provinces have no rights to act when it would “affect or impair” the whole Communion. It is the needs of the whole of the Anglican Communion that thus dictate the limits of rights of any of its constituent Provinces and dioceses.

 

The quasi-legal “Petition to the Primates’ Meeting and the Primates of the Anglican Communion for Emergency Intervention in the Province of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America” is a prime, but not the only, example of the challenge to the authority of the Episcopal Church as an autonomous Province. It proposes intervention by representatives of other Provinces of the Anglican Communion in the ministry of this Province, or barring that, a declaration by the Primates that the Episcopal Church as currently constituted is no longer the “constituent member” of the Anglican Communion, and that another “constituent member” can arise and be supported in its stead. 

 

This petition is a tragic and pathetic attempt to disavow the polity of this Church in the face of a failure by its authors and others to win the hearts and minds of sufficient deputies and bishops to stem the tide of what they consider to be ‘unorthodox’ belief and action.  It would not be worth the time needed to read it were it not for the fact that its authors understand all too clearly that our Constitution begins with a definition of the Episcopal Church that references inclusion in the Anglican Communion. The exact wording in the Constitution is this:

 

Preamble: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as the Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church), is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.

 

If these petitioners could convince the Primates to consider their petition, and a majority of Primates were to believe the Episcopal Church apostate they could indeed cast the Episcopal Church out of that fellowship. A real quandary would then arise within our own Constitutional context. The Episcopal Church might find itself operating outside its own definition of self, for we would not be what we said the Episcopal Church was, “a constituent member of the Anglican Communion.”  At that point we should not wonder that the vultures would be circling. 

 

For these spoilers, meetings of the Primates provide a tempting venue for such a coup. Under the guise of building up the role of the Primates in Anglican Communion affairs, so called ‘orthodox’ groups have been trying to put real legislative and judicial power into the hands of the Primates.  The petition brief assumes what is not yet proven to be the case, that the Primates have a right to intervene, that is to say exercise jurisdiction, in the workings of autonomous Provinces.

 

Of course these same groups could go another way: they could try to convince the Archbishop of Canterbury. If he refused to invite the Episcopal Church’s episcopate (or those who were ‘revisionist’) to Lambeth, and broke communion with them, the matter would be joined.  At least that way would be honest to the issues of table hospitality.  Still, if communion were broken this way, the same constitutional concern would be at hand, and the same spoilers could enter.

 

The matter at hand is this:  When will the Episcopal Church insist that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates of the Anglican Communion, who we love and hold in great esteem, nonetheless have no jurisdiction in the workings of this Church?  Where is the issue joined in a way that disarms this tragic / comic petition, whose purpose is to take the shadow of the Episcopal Church and claim it as the true form?

 

Surely there needs (i) to be a way of affirming at our next General Convention that this Church has every intention of hearing the profoundly valued voices of its sister churches in the Anglican Communion, but no intention whatsoever of having its leadership, legal basis for constitution, or legitimacy as an instrument of God’s purpose determined by bishops or others outside this Province, and needs (ii) a way to reject the assertion made by the petitioners, and seemingly affirmed by the action of some Primates, that the Episcopal Church has “been led astray from the true Gospel” and needs to be replaced in the Anglican Communion by another ecclesial entity. 

 

Perhaps the simplest way to address the first would be to draw up an agreed upon “sense of the houses” of General Convention: that the Convention understands the first sentence of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Episcopal Church to be a non-binding description of the fellowship of this Church, as it names itself and relates itself to other Churches throughout the world, and that the form, structure and actions of this Church are self-determined as, guided by the Holy Spirit, it explores its vocation as an instrument of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

 

Regarding the second, if the Archbishop of Singapore or other Primates believe that the Episcopal Church has abandoned the Gospel and so declare themselves by word and action, this Church must be prepared to clearly and collectively reject their charge. Further, the exercise of pastoral or ecclesial authority over clergy within the dioceses of the Episcopal Church by Primates or bishops outside this Church must be rejected as an abandonment of this Church by those clergy and an unwarranted and illegal intervention by those bishops and Primates.

 

If the Primates collectively or individually begin to act in concert with this petition, and if the leadership of this Church does not put a stop to such efforts within its own jurisdiction, we could find the authority of this Church to govern its own affairs as it perceives God’s will, to be undermined. 

 

If those in our Church who cannot reconcile themselves to a polity that does or will make decisions contrary to their own best sense of God’s will, then they have every business leaving. There is an honorable history of convinced Christians doing so.  But it must be clearly understood that any effort by them to wrest from this church its mission, people, name, churches, funds or agencies will be met with authoritative, clear and resounding resistance.