By now, what should also be familiar is hearing, from the Stand Firm bloggers at least, the warning not to set your expectations too high. Actually, that should read: Not to set your expectations high at all. In fact, whenever we're talking about statements drafted by a committee, on which bishops sit, the best advice is to look at your expectations knob very carefully, ensure that it's in working order, and dial it down to its lowest setting.
Scattered reports coming out of Jerusalem indicate that, at least for the moment, there is disagreement between federal conservatives and communion conservatives on just how hard a line the conference's statement should take, and what kinds of actions should be on - and off - the table for orthodox Anglicans as we try and make our way through this crisis.
Disagreement between fed-con and com-cons is nothing new; neither is disagreement about what an Anglican communiqué should contain. The real question for GAFCON is: Will there be a ‘plan' at all?
We've already been given The Way, the Truth and the Life; we know where the conference attendees stand theologically, and I think it's safe to say that none of us has any problem with that document. But we've also been given statement after statement that GAFCON is not an alternative to Lambeth, not a boycott mechanism, and that the conservative primates and bishops gathering in Jerusalem have no intention of declaring a formal schism.
However.
Christopher Johnson points out:
For all intents and purposes, the Anglican split many of us hoped for has happened.
Let's be honest. The Americans and Canadians are going to continue to defy the Windsor Report. And Global South bishops are going to continue to pick off American and Canadian conservative parishes in defiance of the Windsor Report.
And nothing will happen to any of them.
Dr. Williams has not withdrawn Lambeth Conference invitations to anybody. So we're left to conclude that violations of Anglican pronouncements(Lambeth resolutions, the Windsor Report or anything else) carry no penalty.
Ever.
Therefore Rowan Williams and the other Anglican "instruments of unity" are irrelevant, Anglicans are officially free to do anything they want and Anglicanism is officially meaningless. The Anglican Communion is dead.
So what? So this. My gracious lord of Canterbury has a choice. If Dr. Williams wants the office of Archbishop of Canterbury to continue to mean anything at all, he has one last chance. The upcoming Lambeth Conference had better be a good deal more confrontational than he would like it to be or that will be the end of the Anglican game.
But of course, Lambeth will not be confrontational at all, except perhaps to the extent that the revisionist fringe engages in protest over the Anglican church's "intolerance" toward gays and lesbians by way of their theater of the absurd, starting with Gene Robinson's various appearances, and no doubt featuring cameos by Colin Coward and Davis Mac-Iyalla and similar types.
Johnson goes on to say:
If Williams doesn't, conservative Anglicans are going to be begin to remake the Anglican tradition in whatever way they wish regardless of what the Archbishop has to say about it. The gap between liberal and conservative Anglicans will grow into an unbridgeable chasm and Dr. Williams or one of his successors will eventually find themselves the holders of a title that has no power and even less influence in Anglican affairs.
Let me go Christopher one better, and say that Rowan Williams has already surrendered whatever power may have been resident in the office of Archbishop of Canterbury - and it was never much to begin with, really. When Williams issued Lambeth invitations to precisely the people whom the Windsor Report said should excuse themselves from such bodies; and let Tanzania's September 30 "deadline" pass without so much as a whimper, he once and for all settled the question of whether he, and perhaps the See of Canterbury itself, will ever again possess anything resembling power over Anglican affairs. The answer was an unequivocal ‘no.'
The histories of the American presidency, the English monarchy, and the Roman emperors, just for starters, are case studies in the axiom that power is like a muscle, and it must be exercised or else it will die. Those histories show that the power in, and influence of, the offices wax and wane according to the man who occupies it and the peculiar situations in which his nation finds itself, so it's certainly conceivable that the nature of power office of Archbishop may one day evolve into something more than merely titular; but in the hands of Rowan Williams, it's hard to see how it is anything other than doomed.
The problem with the office of ABC is that, unlike our other examples, the Anglican Communion is a weak alliance to begin with, and has not proved itself to be terribly good at self-repair. The fortunes of robust nations with treasure and land to protect, and military might to project, tend not to rise and fall in lockstep with a particular leader's talents or ability to exercise his power. When strong emperors, kings and presidents coincide with certain moments in history, nations can certainly be catapulted into greatness they didn't previously enjoy, but they don't seem to be so vulnerable in the opposite direction; Lord knows Rome, England and America have survived, and occasionally thrived, under some miserable leaders.
But the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury derives almost entirely from the influence and reach of the church over which he presides. The ABC wields no military power; he commands no expansive fortune. Three centuries ago, being the established church of the British Empire was quite sufficient in the way of influence and reach. Today, to be a significant corporate Christian presence, one must have numbers, and be global in scope, in a way entirely unlike how the British Empire of the 17th and 18th centuries was global. To use today's corporate lingo, one must be "multi-national."
Rowan Williams' dithering throughout the greatest crisis in the church's history - punctuated by moments of aggressive incoherence such as the sub-group report in Tanzania, and the issuing of Lambeth invitations last summer - has allowed, indeed probably hastened, the split in the communion. The result - the estrangement of half the world's Anglicans, located mainly in Africa - will mean a See of Canterbury whose scope is once again back to that mainly of England and three of its white, western former colonies; and it won't even enjoy the loyalty of all the Anglicans in those places, as sizeable minorities begin doing in micro what the Global South is now doing in macro: Going about the business of disregarding what Canterbury wants and says, and as Christopher writes, "remaking the Anglican tradition in whatever way they wish." They won't be the first, though. Disregarding Canterbury's advice - in all its forms, from the casual to the formal, advisory to legalistic - is precisely what revisionists in America and Canada have been doing for the last few decades (the last five years especially) and what has triggered this schism.
The time is past for anyone to be asking, "What will the Archbishop of Canterbury do?" It no longer matters what he does. Even if he were to do an about-face, realize that he is staring the death of the global communion in the face, and make the hard choices necessary even to have a chance at saving it… what do we really think would happen? Do we really think the Episcopal Church would fold their tent, say "That's that, then… au revoir, Anglicans!" Do we really think that the ACO wouldn't ratchet up its schemes to defeat whatever discipline threatened to be imposed on 815? Do we really think that anything would be terribly different from the way it is now?
At any rate, we don't have to speculate about what Rowan Williams might do, because we have the long, sad history of what he has done as our guide to what he will do in the future.
He called together the primates in October 2003. They signed a stern warning. Frank Griswold returned to serve as chief consecrator for Gene Robinson. What was William's response?
He impaneled the Lambeth Commission, which eventually produced the Windsor Report. It contained some very precise recommendations, around which the Anglican Communion Office and 815 promptly began maneuvering, and successfully so. When it was clear that the Episcopal Church intended to drag its feet indefinitely on responding, what was William's response?
He stepped back while the primates at Dromantine made it very clear what Windsor meant, and when it expected a response. That "response" came at General Convention 2006, and consisted of what can only charitably be called a "non-response." General Convention half-heartedly said it would "exercise caution" on doing the thing (consecrating non-celibate gays to the episcopacy) that the primates in October '03 warned would "tear the fabric of the communion at its deepest level." It left completely unanswered Windsor's recommendation regarding same-sex blessings. What was Williams' response?
In Tanzania the following February, it was to stand in front of the world's Anglicans and declare that the Episcopal Church had met Windsor's requests. When the patent absurdity of his declaration was brushed aside like so much lint by a block of Global South primates, and a deadline of September 30 imposed on the Episcopal Church to say, "we're in" or "we're out," what was Williams' response?
In summer 2007, he went ahead and issued invitations to Lambeth, to all of the bishops who had consecrated Gene Robinson - thereby dealing a death blow simultaneously to Windsor and Tanzania.
Now, roughly 200 bishops, mainly from Africa, will not be present at Lambeth, because they are tired of the dithering, and unconvinced that the conference will accomplish anything meaningful. As one insider characterized it, they are "tired of winning on paper, only to lose later on the ground."
But would it have been much different had Williams not invited them? I submit that the answer is ‘no.' Whether membership in the communion is technically defined as attending Lambeth, or receiving an invitation to attend, amounts to so many angels on the head of a pin. It really doesn't matter whether +Akinola, +Orombi, +Kolini or +Nzimbi received invitations to Lambeth. They're not going. It hardly makes a difference to the real-world meaning of an Anglican communion whether +Rowan actually wants them there. And frankly, he doesn't care whether they attend or not.
And so, here we are. A fourth of a global church's bishops not attending its flagship gathering, and a host archbishop who couldn't give a damn.
There are no more "what ifs," folks. There's no more value in pondering whether the communion might split, or what it would look like if it did. There's no sense in speculating what lies "over there," beyond the schism. We're already "over there." This is it. Chaos, disorder, disunity, and no indication that anyone has any authority to do anything about it, much less the will to do so even if the authority existed. There is no other shoe that's going to drop, so if you're still waiting for it, stop.
Early on, I described the Windsor Report as "an attempt by a church that is held together by trust, to deal with a member it has decided it can no longer trust." That attempt has failed, because all egalitarian organizations - and like it or not, that's what the Anglican Communion really is - are only as stable and coherent as their least stable and coherent members. In our case, that happens to be the "church" that has declared homosexual behavior a holy thing, gives its unqualified support to abortion up to partial-birth, and denies the uniqueness of the savior on whose Word it was once founded, and who made it very clear that He was the only way to the Father. Along the way, the Archbishop of Canterbury enabled, coddled, and covered up for this "church," and in the process he has made himself irrelevant.
Now the question of relevance turns to the primates gathered in Jerusalem.
If they don't intend to announce a formal split, what exactly was the point of GAFCON? Was it simply to underscore the fact that they're unhappy with the way things are? With all due respect, gentlemen, we've known that. It didn't take GAFCON to make that clear.
Was it a trial run to see which primates and bishops were ready to support which kind of plan? If so, I cannot imagine a bigger roll of the dice at this point in the crisis. Have they really gathered in Jerusalem, unaware of what everyone is wiling to get on board with, hoping to hammer out their differences in the span of a week? If so, then we are in for a tremendous disappointment.
Was it to "try on" a replacement for Lambeth - to see what it would "feel like" to go it alone? There's value in that, I suppose, but not for an event that was at first rumored to be the alternative Lambeth, the bona-fide split, then not, then something else, then something else again.
At this point, GAFCON's leaders need to announce what they intend to do on the big questions: Are they staying, or are they going? If they're going, then what are the next concrete steps to cutting ties with the old communion and setting up a new one? If they're staying, what are the next concrete steps to carving out a meaningful - and honorable - place to exist within it, and to reforming the whole into something we can, if not be proud of in our lifetimes, at least have reason to hope that our children and grandchildren might one day be proud of?
If they're staying, what is to be done about the American and Canadian revisionists currently running their provinces? Are we simply to ignore their heretical antics, while trying as best we can to "differentiate" ourselves? By what means are we to achieve that differentiation? Is it structural? And what does "structure" mean anymore, anyway? GAFCON leaders wrote that they're not interested in unity if it means surrendering the Gospel; at what point does their tolerance of TEC heresy become surrender?
One thing GAFCON leaders could do is realize - indeed, embrace - the idea that the lack of consequences for "prophetic" actions, which seems to be the rule of the day in the Anglican church, can work both ways. It could, if it wished, put some facts of its own on the ground, especially here in North America, and especially designed to reclaim and reform this diseased church, and rejuvenate a very tired, but very resilient, community of faithful Christians.
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Comments:
Agree 100%.
The most destructive mechanism is not that of TEC’s heresy, which is clear to see and should be the spark for a renewed church on the part of the faithful. The most destructive force is the inability of many orthodox leaders to speak honestly of the split that has already occurred, and to take decisive action.
If this window of opportunity is missed, there will simply be no hope substantial, nation wide Anglican styled presence in the US. Sure, there will be pockets of healthy churches, like at Falls Church, Truro and the 15 or so other larger GS connected churches scattered about. But these will slowly drift to congregational status, while smaller Anglican churches will die for lack of a clear identity. The remaining orthodox presence within the Episcopal Church will continue its slow but sure death.