Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
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News.
Communion
is above all a discipline
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, March 2004
Togetherness for its own sake may not always be the best thing. Lay people who
never once in their lives said the words Anglican Communion have suddenly been
told to be very, very concerned about togetherness in the Communion. Clergy who
never gave the Communion much thought, and who have always taken a rather relaxed
stance about conforming to any authority outside of themselves, now appeal to
a minority of the leaders of the churches that comprise the Communion as a kind
of Vatican or United Nations. From the days of the first ordination of women,
people who were unable to persuade their brothers and sisters in this church
have been increasingly appealing to the Anglican Communion as though the Episcopal
Church holds some kind of franchise from it.
Nothing in our constitution or canons places the decisions or actions of this
church under foreign scrutiny. This is quite understandable. The integrity of
national churches was the only point of Henry VIII's reformation - he hated Protestantism,
all of it, and his opposition to the Reformation in Europe was how the English
crown got the title Defender of the Faith from the Pope in the first place. Our
fundamental organizational principle is the right of national churches to arrange
their own religious affairs.
When the Episcopal Church was formed (1783-1789) there was no Anglican Communion.
There was the United Kingdom and its possessions. Along with the church in the
U.K. there was the underground church in Scotland and us, and there was no system
of relationship.
As the tentacles of the British Empire were hacked off or relaxed, more autonomous
national churches came into existence, and the informal relationship among bishops
that had been going on since the first Lambeth Conference (in the late 1800s)
began to take on a more organized and bureaucratic existence as a relationship
among churches.
It is only after World War II that the Communion as the big business we know
developed, and the Compass Rose, its symbol, began to blossom as the last flower
of the British Empire.
In recent years there has been increased psychological fusion of the Lambeth
Conference of Bishops, the meetings of the Primates, and the Anglican Communion
in many minds, a fact that only confuses discussion and increases the perception
of papal apparatus or a court to appeal to when you don't like what voting produces.
The Communion, as a voluntary association, has indeed been a useful arrangement
for keeping us aware of the catholic nature of the church, keeping us connected
to sisters and brothers very different from us, and has made it easier for us
to support church work around the world.
It has been a forum in which all members have been free to witness and to learn.
It has been, and to some extent still is, a disciplined relationship of mutual
respect. That's the good news.
The other news is that like all other organizations, from labor unions to government,
the apparatus of the Communion (and the parallel structure of primates' meetings)
knows only how to grow in personnel, expense, frequency of meeting, and the assumption
of authority never originally granted it.
If big government is scary, big church government is terrifying. We seem to be
losing the core concept that communion is a process, a way of being. If we are
going to turn communion into government, I most sincerely believe that we need
to go back to Rome, both to cut down overhead and because Rome knows how to do
smoothly and elegantly what is now being attempted fairly clumsily by some among
us.
No parish or diocese in the Episcopal Church has any connection with the Anglican
Communion except by being a member of a national church recognized by Canterbury.
Thus the twenty-seven (at last count) "continuing churches" that split
away over the women's or prayer book issues are being somewhat disingenuous when
they call themselves Anglican.
They may worship in the Anglican tradition, but they have abandoned, and may
not ever have understood, what makes one Anglican, the core commitment to maintaining
the Church through relationship.
At the time I write this, 12 archbishops (and one retired archbishop) out of
38 (plus numerous retirees), have said that actions of the Episcopal Church's
General Convention lead them to be in "impaired" or totally broken
communion either with the entire Episcopal Church or just certain bishops and
dioceses in it.
Some are inventing entirely new rules for themselves by picking and choosing
exactly whom in this national church they are recognizing, and there is little
uniformity about with whom they are in broken or merely impaired communion. The
confusion extends: some of them do not accept the ordination or women - others
do so only in part. A number of them have mixed fairly harsh anti-American sentiments
with their pronouncements, in ways that suggest that more than one score is being
settled in their minds.
It is not well known that the Episcopal Church is among the very few truly democratic
churches in the Anglican Communion.
When the Episcopal Church acts, it does so through a process where a representative
group of lay people and priests, along with the House of Bishops, must agree
on actions and positions before they become those of the Church.
The primates who have spoken out have acted without anything like a General Convention
behind them; though they claim authority over many millions of Christians, they
simply cannot be said to speak for them in any way we would recognize. While
I very much regret their pain and their words, I recognize them for the angry,
hurt, and essentially autocratic actions they are, and believe that in time we
will work things out, as long as everyone keeps talking.
If it is true that the actions of the American church have stretched the bonds
of communion, the unilateral, autocratic, and repudiative words and acts of these
primates have stretched it even farther, and in ways that may create more profound
and enduring wounds than any convention decision can.
It is important to note that the bishops in Swaziland and Kajo Keji have not
been among those to see their relationships with America as cut off or impaired.
Our diocesan relationships with those churches will go on as before, and there
is much important work to do. Let's do it.
Last month I joined several other bishops in working on an invitation to those
foreign bishops who have the gravest doubts about the Episcopal Church to pay
us an extended visit, to worship with us, to get to know how we believe and think
before pronouncing further judgments. Should that invitation fail to be sent
by the entire House of Bishops, a number of us are prepared to issue it on our
own.
In sum, what the Anglican Communion offers is not a substitute papacy or Vatican
curia, much less a Pythonesque church police, but a framework within which we
have the opportunity to know, love, and work with other Christians with whom
we share the English church heritage. It is my intention that we continue to
live out this relationship. At the same time, that relationship must not be permitted
to become one of coercion or manipulation. Persuasion and intimidation are very
different styles of interaction, and I do not think we can choose to follow one
or the other depending on how our particular point of view is doing. Communion
is above all a discipline.
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