Stand Firm

I am being quite presumptious in my title, I know, since frankly, nobody—but perhaps Matt?—at GAFCON cares what I wish would happen. But I thought I would share my perspective as a Communion Conservative on the event, just for discussion and to have a different outside viewpoint. I recognize that what I say in this article is likely to offend many on all sides of our “conservative debate”—but at least I’m offending everybody equally. If you find your blood boiling as you read, then read on, and you might quickly turn to chortling and head-nodding, who knows?

I have been watching—from a far distance and certainly on the sidelines—the proceedings at GAFCON. In the midst of a heavy work-week I’ve breezed through a number of blog posts and articles, listened to the hysterics and “all-caps writing” of the Entirely Unbiased Secular Media, and watched a grand total of five minutes of live streaming of the event.

From its first announcement, I recognized that essentially GAFCON would be largely for those and about those who have departed TEC, or those who are overseeing the departed—The Dearly Departed, actually. In other words, this conference would be essentially an international Common Cause gathering. Subsequent actions and announcements confirmed my view. The GAFCON leadership team is primarily from the five CCP provinces—Kenya, Uganda, Southern Cone, Nigeria, and Rwanda—or from the Dearly Departed From TEC. The seven Global South Primates who attended included the five CCP primates, and two more.

And so I never became all that enthusiastic about the meeting, recognizing that for those of us in TEC who have made the decisions to go to a non-Anglican entity should we leave TEC [and there are a lot more of us than some of the leadership of Common Cause appear to wish to admit], very little from this meeting would change anything for us on the ground in TEC dioceses and parishes. I’m not going to a CCP province [even if “recognized” by some Primates of the Anglican Communion] nor do I wish to trade my current leadership for the CCP leadership, nor do I accept some of the theological underpinnings of the CCP actions. So it’s simply a lose-lose for me all around, which I think I’ve made crystal clear over the past three years of faithful blogging. My perspective on GAFCON, then, has been fairly detached, and fairly uninvolved.

In a strange and sad sense, my thinking about the Common Cause Partnership is rather similar to my thinking about the Communion Partners Fellowship—which is richly ironic, as I’m sure that people can see.

Nevertheless, I also did not engage in the shrill cries of horror from various of my fellow Communion Conservatives about the meeting either. I think it is healthy and good for people of the same values and goals to get together and strategize and fellowship together, even if those people don’t share my values and goals in some areas [although we certainly share the same gospel]. I hoped that it would be a success, although a number of what I believe were dreadful decisions and actions—including the initial communications that purported to make it much much more than “Common Cause International”—boded ill for that. I didn’t think that GAFCON would “prevent” people from going to Lambeth; GAFCON was in some part for those who weren’t going to Lambeth no matter what to get together, and I do not begrudge them that one bit. Some on my side of the fence appeared to petulantly believe that if some Anglicans weren’t going to Lambeth, then by jingo they shouldn’t have any meeting at all.

The progressive activists, the liberal-supportive media, and Lambeth Palace rhetoricians have had a difficult time with all of this. On the one hand they wished to feign indifference and pretend that it was—again—a Tiny Tiny Minority Meeting and of little account. In the meantime, the ACC and Lambeth moved heaven and earth to encourage people not to attend the Tiny Tiny Minority Meeting. On the other hand, The Triad did desire to cast Gafcon as a Vicious, Large, Primitive, Cabal of Schismatics . . . which is a hard sell once you’ve gone with the Tiny Tiny Minority Meeting line.

And finally, of course, there was the Eager Hope—nicely revealed in the actual “journalism” that came out of the meeting—of the TEC progressive activists and Anglican Communion progressive activists that in fact the CCP primates and others of the Tiny Tiny Minority, Vicious, Large, Primitive, Cabal of Schismatics would leave. “Our enemies’ eminent departure” was desperately grasped as possible, nay probable, according to the progressives. The fact that journalists—and those behind the scenes feeding them the “news”—finally didn’t even trouble to obscure that Eager Hope is quite telling. But that’s another article.

At any rate, as I plodded through my work week [and my trail runs] I mused about what I would hope for if I were, in fact, a Common Cause Anglican. What could be my hopes for that gathering were I on the other side of that fence? Later on, mid-week, after the news came out that the GAFCON meeting might be pondering structures of working within the Communion, my mind also turned to what I could hope for that might come out of the meeting that would even be “good” for us Communion Conservatives. What would be the healthiest thing that could come from this international event for the Communion as a whole?

Suppose you’re one of several adult siblings in a family that has an alcoholic Dad. Dad’s alcoholism has steadily worsened over the years. He’s driving drunk with the grandkids, spending all of his money into the ground, has a looming liver disorder that will likely someday kill him, and the list grows every three to six months or so. Your Mother has always been an enabling co-dependent, and still thinks that if only Dad would just “ease back a bit on the bottle” things would improve. One of your adult siblings is well on her way to being just like Dad, only the Young Energetic Version of Dad. And the rest of you don’t know what to do.

At any rate, yet another family meeting is called, this time to deal with Dad’s latest drunk-driving event.

The meeting goes terribly wrong. The Dad is surly and unrepentant. The Mother bursts into tears and says that her children “don’t love Dad to treat him this way.” Dad throws a glass at your second-born brother which misses and hits the beloved sideboard which now has a scar in the wood, and a general melee is barely averted. What you had hoped to gain—taking away the car keys from your Dad, with your Mother’s support—is not granted, since your Mother turns on all of you and supports Dad instead.

You leave that meeting sick at heart and conscious that things cannot go on as they have.

You dearly love your family, including your Dad. But life as you have known it has changed. In the old days, your childhood was one of deep shame, as all of your family struggled to contain and hide your Dad’s bouts with the bottle, your family’s struggles with bills and his work, the occasional bouts of violent temper, your Mother’s depression.

But suddenly, in a strange sense, after this latest disaster of a “family gathering” you feel . . . free . . . for you acknowledge that your family—a healthy family—is irrevocably lost.

You are still a part of the family, of course. But short of a miracle, Dad—and your own beloved, kind, enabling Mother—will not change. They are trapped, and they are carrying the rest of the clinging family down with them.

You call your siblings and let them know that you will not be attending family meetings as they are presently structured in the future. You are . . . done. You weep on the phone with a sense of failure and loss—indeed, your two remaining healthy siblings weep with you as well. But when you hang up . . . you still feel . . . free.

You still love the family, you care about the family, and you will do all in your power to help your family . . . but it will be from a distance. You are moving on, to establish a new family, a new household . . . and you are determined that by God’s grace you will not carry your family’s dysfunction and sickness into this new family.

You will allow the old dyad of your Mother and Father to carry the consequences of their behavior. When Dad gets drunk and convicted of another DUI, you will not help with another lawyer, another bailout. When your Mother calls you—after she’s forgotten or forgiven you for the latest “family meeting”—to complain about Dad’s latest outrages, you will love her, commiserate with her . . . . and gently disengage from the conversation at the appropriate time. She is unwilling to help establish order and she is, in her own way, as sick as Dad is.

And life goes on. Your heart breaks for your Mother, for your sister, for your Dad, and for the other comparatively healthy siblings . . . but there is nothing further that you can do for your family.

You now focus on what you can do. You can stop helping your Mother to enable Dad’s behavior. You can try to engage in good relationships with your current healthy siblings. You can love Dad, even . . . from a healthy distance. You can pray, and work on your own behavior. And even though you disagree with some of your own siblings—who wish to maintain involvement in the family dynamic to a greater extent than you—you can encourage them and advise them as best you can. And recognizing just how sick you yourself have become in trying to engage with the family on your parents’ terms, you determine to repent and go on a month-long retreat with a spiritual director for the time being, to learn how to best combat what you have experienced in childhood and adulthood from the dysfunctional and sinful behavior of your family, which you in fact are a part of and which is also a part of who you are.

It seems to me that this metaphor is the current state of the FedCons and the GAFCON movement in the Anglican Communion.

With that as my controlling metaphor, let me move on with what actions and attitudes that I think would be most helpful to come out of GAFCON.

—Acknowledge that you cannot control TEC’s actions nor those of the enabling Archbishop of Canterbury, but you do control your own actions.

—Acknowledge that Anglicanism cannot actually hold together with solely a theological confession and thus a See is important as another focus of unity in order for Anglicanism to hold together. Despite Dad’s behavior, TEC is valued and loved. Despite Mom’s behavior, families need Mothers. Families need parents, even if the children are now adults. The death of our parents—no matter how crazy or even sinfully damaging as they may have been—is one of the most seminal and life-changing events for human beings.

—Grieve that the current occupant of the See of Canterbury is not willing to help the Communion exercise discipline over errant provinces. It is tragic—but it is true, and that fact has inescapable consequences.

—Determine to no longer enable Canterbury’s codependency with TEC, and move forward with plans to unify a cohesive structure within the Communion as much as possible, given Canterbury’s regrettable dysfunction.

—Focus on the healthy members of the family and your relationships with them. Work on healing and building those relationships further.

—Begin to set up the structures of good order and belonging that all organizations—even a sub-organization within the Communion—need. These would include a covenant, a Primates Council, a means of discipline, an annual meeting, and many other such structures of organization and discipline.

—Establish a means whereby dioceses and provinces may vote to sign on to the structure and become a part of such a sub-organization within the Communion. This would include both dioceses and provinces within and without the Anglican Communion.

—Maintain eucharistic fellowship with those provinces and dioceses and parishes who maintain a theology and practice in keeping with the covenant of the new sub-structure—even if they are not a formal part of that sub-structure

—Acknowledge broken eucharistic fellowship with those provinces and dioceses and parishes who do not maintain a theology and practice in keeping with the covenant of the new sub-structure.

—As your consciences decide, understand that many will choose to withdraw from the various failed structures within the Communion that depend on Canterbury’s actions—this is a part of acknowledgement that one cannot depend on Canterbury’s actions any longer, and thus many will decide that it is a healthy and good thing to no longer be a part of such structures. This would include the Anglican Communion Primatial meetings and the ACC and the Lambeth Meeting. In short, some will decide that the various “family meetings” that are ruled by Dad’s behavior and Mother’s enablement are no longer healthy places to be.

Were Gafcon to produce something this mature, healthy, and careful . . . were Gafcon to cultivate such an alternate, sub-structure within the “family” that would enable fruitful relationships within the Communion—and without—then it could only be a good thing for both the FedCons who are leaving or have left TEC, and the ComCons who remain within.

Certainly, some FedCons might be angry about not being able to entirely “cast off the shackles” of the family. And certainly some ComCons might be angry that certain members of the family refuse to be a part of family gatherings with the Dad/Mom dynamic . . . but both sides would, I think, be strengthened and matured through these decisions.

I say all of the above with a consciousness that GAFCON is largely for a group that I’m not a part of . . . and so I do say all of this with a sense of unworthiness.

They have pulled off something wonderful for them, and whether they stay or go, and no matter what happens with the Communique, I know that they are Anglicans. Better than that, I know that they adore Jesus Christ and His gospel and I want the best for them, even if they leave. I believe that God will bless them if they cling to Christ, and repent, . . . as we all should do in this particular room of the house of God.

I am guessing the Communique is late because they are busily trying to incorporate Sarah’s wishes into it.

Unworthiness? I don’t think so.
Thank you for a thought-provoking piece. I remember when I first left TEC I felt so daring, the first in dozens of generations (except that pesky Methodist branch) of Liverpudlians to abandon the communion. And for some reason it was a comfort to me for weeks as I fell asleep. I would think “I’ve left..I’m safe..” as a very comforting mantra. I think, had I toughed it out and stayed (I don’t have the emotional fortitude for that; I’d probably stroke out at vestry) I would be feeling what you are feeling. God bless you.

Thank you, Sarah Hey, for an excellent metaphor. The GAFCON group has pulled off something wonderful not only for us, but for all Anglicans. God Bless, RL Harrell

Sarah,
Thank you. As a writer I admire your analogy as the best attempt to date to describe the dysfunction and denial in the AC and the roles of the various “family members.” As a cradle Episcopalian who is now a member of an AMiA church I felt both honored and encouraged, as well as edified, by your characterization of those who have chosen to leave “home.” It also gave me a new way to think about my “siblings” who have decided to stay in closer relationship with ‘mom’ and ‘dad.” Finally, you show how a sub-communion with it’s own structures, theological agreements, etc. might give hope to those who have decided to stay within their traditional jurisdictions.

With considerable changes in details but not the overall situation, I have lived the family scenario you outlined, and did precisely as you describe. I made a special trip, easily the most difficult in my life, to explain that however much I loved them, they were on their own in sorting out the messes they had made. There is no point in recounting that conversation, and the subsequent phone calls in which I said “Sorry to hear about that. Let me know how it works out. Click.” (I did not chose this path without consultation with both secular and spiritual substance abuse professionals. And a lot of agonizing prayer.)

What is worth recounting is that after a dishearteningly long time people hit bottom, got their lives both spiritually and financially together, and made a remarkable comeback. While the medical damage was always a factor in subsequent times, the last twenty years were those of a loving, functional family.

Sarah,
May the Lord lead you to a Church where you will find joy, feel at home, be nurtured and fulfilled. You have worked so hard throughout this long war. It’s been fun to see the many gifts you have employed in His service - wit, writing, video interviews. Thank you so much for all you have done.

Thanks, Sarah, for this excellent piece from a fellow ComCon. I do think that much of your analogy of the church to a dysfunctional family is quite a propos. I can tell you from experience about a parish or two that the term “dysfunctional” was and probably still is the best description. You do the best you can for them, and then after a while you realize you’re being drawn in and have become part of their dysfunction. The best thing to do is to leave and to try to use it as a learning experience.
Rudy+

I would like to see them go to Lambeth and make their points in the majority. Failing that, hurry up so I can go to bed.

Nah - should be: prayerfully and humbly ask God for his guidance for the future of His Church, for it is only He who is our guide and our redeemer, and we can do nothing without Him.

Sarah:
Your analogy to a dysfunctional family spoke to me directly. Even a clergyman’s family can be dysfunctional as mine was. When I could finally leave home to go to college one of the first things I did was take confirmation in the PECUSA. This was in the 50’s when it was still a great church and it healed much of the pain I carried with me out of my family. When the Church changed, I struggled with it for as long as I could and then left. It took most of my adult life to heal from my family of origin, but I have (I have outlived most of them). I don’t think I can ever outlive the loss of the Church that healed me and then hurt me.
Dumb Sheep.

Thank you Sarah. I think you will find a great many people care about you wherever your pilgrimage takes you.

[Comment deleted. LP, those of who who have chosen to stay this long, and fight this fight, in the Episcopal church are not compromising our faith. I know I am not, and I will certainly not sit by and let our other visitors be characterized that way. This is a violation of our long-standing comment policy specifically about this matter. Please keep your comments on topic.- Greg]

I recognise the AC as a disfunctional family, but is TEC/ACoC really ‘Dad’? Are we not perhaps talking about 2 small, sickly, but delinquent children. Mother’s insistence on protecting them instead of applying ‘tough love’ has broken up and divided the council of senior family members who met with Mother and agreed the way forward. We are a one-parent family because the Romans have a ‘Dad’ but we are more conciliar. Mother needs to be read the riot act and if she won’t discipline then the older family members need to. If the delinquents will not contract to behave then they must go and stand in the corner for a while.

We also need to protect the other children who are knifed and terrorised by the delinquents. Hopefully something GAFCON will do since Mother in incapable or unwilling to deal with this.

Personally, I think we can adjudge Gafcon a success if, on July 1, 2009, there is less alphabet soup in the Communion than there is today. If we have clear lines of Communion and interdependence, then we will have less need to form another acronym every time 3 bishops meet in a hallway. Hopefully, we will have people identifying as “Common Cause” or “New Province” and not “St. such and so’s parish, of the TEC diocese of blank, a former Windsor diocese, although the parish joined the Network after that, and then left TEC altogether to join CANA which makes us allies with others in Common Cause” (a sort of paraphrase of an email I received recently).

Greg, that is a misrepresentation of what I said. The bulk of my post was simply on “what I’d like to see”—giving the answer “clear and enforceable norms” and explaining why.

Moreover, my comments that certain GAFCON members or jurisdictions maintain practices or beliefs which are incompatible with the anglocatholicism of the Continuum isn’t an accusation that they are “compromising the faith”, but a mere statement of an objective fact: there are elements of incompatibility.

Thus the only thing I can possibly imagine you are reacting to is my friendly and joking comments at the end, in a single paragraph, which were enclosed with simley-faces and “big friendly grin” brackets, to show it was said in friendly and fraternal joshing. I didn’t think that would offend or upset anyone.

But if you really believe people are so hypersensitive that they’d take such friendly banter amiss, why not simply delete that final joking paragraph and leave the rest of the post, which was all very pertinent an on-topic, specifically answering the very question posed by this thread?!

I hope, too, that you will—to be fair, consistent, and even-handed—also go back and remove all posts by other members (which, to date, have been allowed to stand without criticism or editorial comment) where anglocatholics are told (and without smiley-faces or “big friendly grin” alerts), for example, “to hive off or go back to Rome.”

I will be happy to repost my comments with that “friendly banter” final paragraph deleted if you would like… for surely you can agree that “clear and enforceable norms” is a perfectly legitimate and on-topic response to the thread’s question?

I wasn’t at all peeved with the “friendly banter” line . . . but since basically the entire comment was taking the post off-topic, I’m very glad Greg deleted it. I don’t have any interest in discussing lay presidency or WO or the differences between Continuing Catholics/AngloCatholics/Evangelicals.

That and the fact that—once again—you continue to misrepresent Communion Conservatives who wish for the Anglican Communion to be reformed and have little interest at all for TEC to be reformed.

I would ask that we all notice the charity and generosity with which Sarah describes those who are in a different camp from her own, a rare thing these days. I also appreciate her call for us “dearly departed” to focus on what we CAN do. Maybe the Serenity Prayer is in order here.

I quite clearly said that I thought that “ComCon” position was the right one, but that I thought, to be “solid”, it needed to be based upon a solid declaration of theological principles and norms for being “in communion.” (In fact, I didn’t even say things in terms of FedCon or ConCon… all I said on those terms, and I quote, was “this whole FedCon/ConCon division (which I continue to find confusing)”!!!) Someone should have read more carefully before hitting the big “DELETE” button.

At any rate, seeing the Jerusalem Declaration has now been released, I find that it has—or sets the ground for—two of the major desiderata I gave in my post (the one GG deleted)—points which were, in fact, the whole thrust and message of that post, answering this thread’s question—to wit:
* a statement of faith (which can serve as a “norm” for “being in communion”)
* an explicit rejection of the authority of (and communion with) the apostate jurisdictions.

Such differences between “GAFCON” and the “Continuum” as I mentioned were there only—and quite explictly only—to make clear that it was for the GAFCON movement’s own sake (and NOT in expectation that those differences would be resolved) that I thought those two points were essential. That I thought they needed to be there for the “angloprotestant” future to be solid… not because I thought they would turn it into an “anglocatholic” one.

And—praise be to God—it seems the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration agreed!

RE: “I quite clearly said that I thought that “ComCon” position was the right one, but that I thought, to be “solid”, it needed to be based upon a solid declaration of theological principles and norms for being “in communion.””

No, actually, LP, you did not. You called the ComCon position institutionalist and stated that they were interested in reforming TEC—something that has been FOR YEARS stated otherwise.

Based on this piece and the contents of the GAFCON statement, you must be pleased with it overall, Sarah.

I also recognize a good bit of Cloud and Townsend’s boundaries stuff in your metaphor and think it is on rock solid footing.

Sarah, It seems that you got an awful lot of what you want, perhaps even all. This old Prodigal Con is very happy with the result as well.

Well, it seems to have turned out to be also for the Nearly Departed (and we can guess who they are) as well as those like me, the Wearily Departed. Praise the Lord, but keep the ammunition a-comin’...

Sarah,
Funny, I though I was a Comcon and that we wanted to see TEC reformed (not that I was holding my breath or anything). If Comcon’s don’t want TEC reformed and aren’t happy with TEC’s apostacy but have no interest in any other Anglican bodies either existing or proposed, what DO “they” (and again, I’ve always considered myself a Comcon for whom communion with Canterbury is important) want?

I am a Communion Conservative because I wish to be in the Anglican Communion and do believe that Anglicanism will not hold together otherwise.

I believe that I have made myself clear in numerous and frequent essays that there is no chance [short of course of Elijah’s God pouring out fire on the sacrifices on the wet altars of Baal] of TEC being “reformed” since all levers of power at the national level are owned by revisionists.

If you have in mind that TEC will be reformed, could you tell me your plan regarding the national church—the HOB, the HOD, Executive Council, and General Convention, along with the dozens of national committees that are brimming over with radical foaming at the mouth progressive activists?

Note that I don’t discount that dioceses and parishes and whole clusters of regions may be reformed, but that won’t have a thing to do with the national church.

Indeed, we can safely say at this point that the leaders at the national level believe a diametrically opposed gospel from a huge proportion of people at the lower levels . . . and that dysjunction will continue for the foreseeable future.

It’s like tectonic plate shifts . . . and the resulting friction and oppositional movement will ultimately destroy TEC.

Hi Sarah,
You are an enigma to me. I’m sure you have touched on everything I will say in previous posts of yours. You, without a doubt, love the Anglican Communion. And, I believe, you also love TEC dearly. And you have acknowledged that TEC will not turn back. But yet you stand fast. You say it is inevitable that the time for you to leave will come and that when you leave it will be completely out of the Communion. Being simple and basic I just can’t understand why you can’t join us on the path we’re taking. I respect your view and decisions but I don’t understand them. You are witty, very articulate,& knowledgeable .... the Communion would be a much lesser place without you. IMHO

Sarah,
Thanks for the prompt reply. I thought I had responded, but got a note from Greg that I’d screwed it up somehow so here goes again.
What do you see the future holding for those who share the outlook you describe? I quite agree that the HOB, General Convention and 815 are,short of direct divine intervention, determined to continue their present heretical course. Conservative parishes in revisionist dioceses will only last until their rectors retire. Revisionist bishops will never approve anothe conservative rector. This happened in my parish. Likewise, conservative dioceses will only last as long as their current bishops are in office. Consents will never be given for another conservative bishop. Does one then remain in the now revisionist parish in the now rvisionist diocese in an urepentant TEC? How else, in your view, does one remain in the Anglican Communion? I really am curious as to how you see this unfolding.

I, along with the huge majority of my former parish and all of its vestry, had to go to Uganda. As an Anglo-Catholic, I don’t like being ther (despite my great affection for my Ugandan bishop and respect for ++Orombi), far preferring to be in a domestic diocese in a domestic province in communion with Canturbury. I hope that such will come to pass. Do I understand you to say that if such a domestic US Anglican province comes into being and it is recognized by Canturbury, you would not join in preference to TEC, but would instead join a nondenominational church instead? If so, why?

You are my favorite blogger, hands down, and I have been informed, entertained and inspired by your writings over these last few years, but I truly don’t understand this.

Evan Miller’s first question is precisely my own.
And I also share his last sentiment.

Sarah has not been elected to office here where she is personally accountable to every Anglican everywhere. I think she’s been perfectly forthcoming with her reasoning. I don’t see a problem with challenging one another or asking. If you don’t get an answer, perhaps it is time to respect her personal boundaries. I’m just speaking for myself here. She needs no defense.

Monologistos,
Of course Sarah needs no defense. She’s not being attacked, and if there’s anyone in the blogsphere who can take care of herself, it’s Sarah.
I was simply asking for her reasoning behind a position she’s stated that I simply don’t understand. She’s certanily free to ignore my question, which I hope she understood was asked respectfully by one who is a great fan of hers.

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