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.
Why the far distance?
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?
Here's the metaphor that I've been working with.
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.
Whatever the GAFCON group decides, I wish them God's peace and love and joy.
I am proud of them and I love them.
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.
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Comments:
I am guessing the Communique is late because they are busily trying to incorporate Sarah’s wishes into it.