The crises in the Anglican Communion in recent years have revealed two distinct problems confronting the Communion, one theological and one structural. The two halves of faith and order. The theological problem is whether the Communion has theological coherence on major questions of faith and practice. Slowly over the last decade and a half an affirmative answer to this question has been evolving. In particular, on the presenting crisis of human sexuality the Communion does have a common mind that has been expressed repeatedly by all four Instruments. The extent to which this has happened is reflected in the report of the Joint Standing Committee in late 2007 after the meeting of TEC’s House of Bishops in New Orleans:

The Communion seems to be converging around a position which says that while it is inappropriate to proceed to public Rites of Blessing of same-sex unions and to the consecration of bishops who are living in sexual relationships outside of Christian marriage, we need to take seriously our ministry to gay and lesbian people inside the Church and the ending of discrimination, persecution and violence against them. Here, The Episcopal Church and the Instruments of Communion speak with one voice.

TEC’s Presiding Bishop concurred in that report, but she has since served as the chief consecrator of Mary Glasspool and TEC’s General Convention has authorized the development of liturgies for public rites of blessing.

The extent to which the theological question has been answered is also reflected in the steps already taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury to begin removing TEC representatives from Communion bodies responsible for faith and order and the acknowledgement by the Secretary General that TEC does not “share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion.”

Also evolving, albeit more slowly and less certainly, are solutions to the structural problem: whether the Communion has the structural coherence to deal with these kinds of crises. A number of well known studies have addressed this issue, including the Virginia Report, the Windsor Report and the Report of the Windsor Continuation Group. But the Communion response has not been limited to the publication of reports. There have been two concrete responses to the structural problem and the recommendations in the various studies, and both have come to fruition in the past year. One is the Anglican Communion Covenant, now under consideration by the member churches. The Covenant was under development for several years in a largely transparent process. Three drafts were published and open to public debate and comment. Regardless of one’s position on the Covenant, there can be no question that its contents are known and have been scrutinized by all interested parties.

The second response to the structural problem is the constitutional reform of the Anglican Consultative Council. This response has also been under development for several years and is motivated both by purely legal issues and by the recognition of needed institutional reform, but unlike the Covenant the constitutional reform of the ACC has largely proceeded outside of public view. This feature has been compounded by the fact that many of the issues involve technical legal matters that have implications that are not readily apparent and, in some cases, were not even applicable until late in the process. This has made informed consideration by the member churches and Instruments difficult, if not impossible.

This process is now nearing completion. On July 12, 2010, a certificate of incorporation was issued for a new UK company, the Anglican Consultative Council. Accompanying the certificate were the Memorandum and Articles of Association of this new company. These documents were made public by the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales although they were not disclosed publicly by the Anglican Communion Office until July 24. With the registration of this new company with the UK Charity Commission, the transformation of the ACC is now complete. The ACC is now a company regulated under both UK Companies and Charities laws.

We will examine below the provisions of the ACC’s new constitution, its Articles of Association, and the implications these Articles have for the structural problems of the Communion. We will also consider the extent to which the new ACC constitution presents a future for the Communion compatible with that of the Covenant. In summary, our conclusions are as follows:

• By making the ACC an English company, the new constitution subjects the ACC, one of the Communion’s Instruments, fully to UK and applicable EU law, including equalities legislation that the Church of England itself has resisted.
• The new constitution reverses the historic relationship between the ACC and its Standing Committee, making the Standing Committee the primary legal entity and giving it greater authority than the Council as a whole.
• The new constitution infringes on the traditional authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates’ Meeting, which are separate and independent Instruments of the Communion that do not derive their authority from the ACC constitution.
• The new constitution reduces the role of the member churches in the governance of the ACC.
• In these ways, the new constitution is inconsistent, both in vision and in detail, with the Covenant.

Because this document has been held outside of public view until very recently, we write without the benefit of comment from English lawyers. If correction on that account is in order, we expect it will be voiced. Many things, however, seem straightforward enough and it is important that the nature and extent of the changes brought about begin to be appreciated.

1. The ACC Is a Corporation Governed by UK and EU Law

The starting point in a review of the new constitution is to note that the ACC is now an English company, subject to UK and EU law like all other English companies. A certificate of incorporation has been issued in the name of “The Anglican Consultative Council” and the new Articles make clear that this new company is now governed by the Companies Act 2006. We will consider below to what extent the new legal entity is the same body as that traditionally understood as the ACC. For the present, however, it is important to recognize the significance of the fact that the ACC is now a corporation governed by UK and EU law.

The initial Lambeth Conference resolution calling for the establishment of the ACC and proposing its initial constitution (1968 Res. 69) did not specify any legal structure or entity for the ACC. It was just a body to be defined by its constitution. As such, the ACC was what is generally regarded as a voluntary association. Traditionally, such associations were not recognized by the law as legal entities distinct from their members. The essence of a corporation, on the other hand, is that it has a legal personality distinct from its members or shareholders and its legal rights and duties are determined not solely by agreement of its members but by the governing law.

At its second meeting in 1973, the ACC approved the establishment of a limited legal structure (a trust) under UK law, but its specific purpose was to hold property located in the UK and the resolution indicated clearly that the ACC itself and this trust were not identical, but distinct entities—the trust holds property “on behalf of” the Council. Resolution 2:33 (1973):

Legal Status

1. The Council approves that a Trust be set up in the United Kingdom the object of which shall be to advance the Christian religion in accordance with the terms of the Constitution of the Anglican Consultative Council which may hold on behalf of the Council all property and funds situated in the United Kingdom.
2. The Council delegates full responsibility to the Standing Committee to approve on its behalf the final form of the said Trust and to appoint the necessary Trustees.

In 1999, the ACC began the process of changing this status. Resolution 11:6 provided in part:

That the Standing Committee consider, and if it thinks fit, adopt an appropriate legal structure for the ongoing work of the council within the framework of a limited company in accordance with legal advice and any directions of the charity commissioners for England and Wales, but so far as possible in all other respects in accordance with the existing constitutional arrangements.

Although this resolution only called for “an appropriate legal structure” “within the framework of a limited company” and did not specify that the ACC itself would be incorporated, it was clear by ACC-13 in 2005 that the intent was for the ACC itself to become a charitable company governed by UK law. We are now at the endpoint of this process, and the Articles of Association forming that company are the new constitution of the ACC.

We do not question the underlying legal advice that the appropriate legal structure for the entity responsible for managing the Communion’s UK assets is a company limited by guarantee. We are not at all persuaded, however, that this legal entity should be one of the Communion Instruments itself and that the fiduciaries charged with overseeing these charitable activities should be the same as those comprising one of the bodies responsible for faith and order in the Communion. Whatever the complex legal issues may have been, the practical result for the Communion of this legal transformation of the ACC will be to return and consolidate legal and ecclesiastical power in London and to insure that no important decision can be made without consulting UK lawyers and complying with UK law.

The potential for resultant legal problems is obvious. Some charities affiliated with other churches, both in the UK and elsewhere, are either ceasing operations or converting to secular control—hardly an option for the ACC—to avoid regulations restrictive of religious freedom. And one can readily contemplate future mandates on UK companies designed to enforce UK policy objectives in other countries, including gay rights, e.g., embargoes on transactions with countries (most of the Communion) not complying with European equality regulations. It is incongruous that in the last year the bishops of the Church of England were voting in the House of Lords against proposed equalities legislation because it would restrict religious liberty even as steps were being taken to incorporate the ACC under UK law and possibly subject one of the Communion’s Instruments to that same legislation. Significantly, the new Articles contain no “ethos statement” or statement of required standards of conduct or faith for ACC officials, and Article 6.5.2 already refers to the possibility that Standing Committee members might have civil partners.

2. The ACC Is Now Defined Legally by Reference to the Standing Committee with the Full Council Playing a Secondary Role

Under the old ACC constitution, the powers of the Standing Committee were derivative of those of the Council itself. The Council consisted of its members, who were appointed directly by the member churches. The Standing Committee had the power to act for the Council between meetings of the full Council and to execute matters referred to it by the Council. The nature of the Standing Committee’s legal role as derivative of (and lesser than) the full council is shown by Article 8 of the former constitution:

The Standing Committee may exercise all powers of the Council as are not by this Constitution required to be done specifically by the Council, and in particular may borrow money and mortgage or charge the Council assets.

Under the former constitution, the members of the Standing Committee also served as trustees of the Council for charity law purposes.

The ACC’s new Articles of Association essentially reverse this relationship. It is the Standing Committee that has primary management authority and it is the full Council that has a lesser and secondary role.

By adopting the corporate form, the ACC has fundamentally altered the foundation of its governance. The principles of governance of an unincorporated association are those chosen by the members themselves. Indeed, as already noted, traditionally the law has not recognized such an association as having a legal personality apart from its members. Corporations, on the other hand, are created by the law and their governance is prescribed in the first instance by the corporate law. The ACC company was formed and got its legal personality only when a Certificate of Incorporation for company number 07311767 was issued by the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales.

Corporations are juridical persons, entities created by the law. As such, the corporate law defines in detail the fundamental governance of the corporate entity, including who the members are, how votes are to be taken, how meetings are called and who is responsible for the management of the company. Choices as to these matters are permitted, but are subject to the parameters established by company law. For English companies, the most recent corporate law is found in the Companies Act 2006, a 700 page statute that specifies the basic rules of company life. In general, English company law specifies that

• non-written resolutions can only be passed in “general meetings” of the members, including the familiar “annual general meetings” required of public companies and often held by private companies;
• who must be given notice of such meetings and how notice is to be given;
• what kind of majorities are required to pass “ordinary resolutions” and “special resolutions” and what constitutes each; and
• how members can designate others, “proxies,” to vote on their behalf.

These concepts are well known to corporate lawyers, but may be less familiar to ordinary Anglicans around the Communion. The ACC’s new Articles explicitly adopt the meanings of terms defined in the Companies Act 2006.

Applying these concepts to the ACC’s Articles, we see that the most important provision for understanding the ACC’s new structure is Article 7.5:

The Trustee-Members shall constitute the membership body of the Council for the purposes of the Companies Acts and as Charity trustees they shall have responsibility for management of the Council’s property and funds.

Thus, the legal membership of the company consists of the Trustee-Members. And they are defined in the definitions of Article 1 as follows:

Trustee-Members means the individual members for the time being of the Standing Committee of the Council (and “Trustee-Member” or “Trustee-Members” has a corresponding meaning), the Trustee-Members being also the members of the company for the purposes of the Companies Acts….

Put simply, the membership body for legal purposes is the Standing Committee, not the full Council. This is reflected throughout the new articles in other more technical provisions. For example, Articles 12, 13 and 16 make clear that it is the meeting of the Standing Committee that constitutes the “general meeting” and “annual general meeting” of all members specified in the Companies Acts as the meetings at which the company can pass resolutions. And Article 3.1 specifies that it is the Standing Committee members whose personal liability is limited. If the company had other members, their liability would be unlimited since they are not included in the limitation in this article.

This constitutes a significant change in structure from that of the former constitution. Under the old constitution, the members of the ACC were the persons directly elected by the member churches. And the former constitution provided for “meetings of the Council” at intervals of every two or three years, and “meetings of the Council” meant meetings of the members elected by the member churches. What is the role of these “members” under the new corporate structure?

In the new Articles, the persons elected by the member churches are still identified as “Members” but this is largely definitional and of limited effect since the Articles also specify that for legal purposes–that is, for purposes of the Companies Act under which the Council is now organized–the members of the Council are now the members of the Standing Committee. And the meetings of the full Council are designated under the new Articles as “Plenary Sessions of the Council” and are said to be “in addition to” the general meetings and annual general meetings of the Standing Committee, the latter being the meetings of members recognized under the new Companies Act structure. The Plenary Session is in fact an extra-corporate body whose primary legal role is the exercise of a right, provided for in the Articles but not mandated by company law, to elect the members and trustees of the company—the Standing Committee—and to advise the company on certain, but not all, matters that the Standing Committee has the legal authority to do.

Does any of this matter in practice or is it mere legal formality? In fact, it has real practical consequences. One important feature is the relative scope of the authority of the Standing Committee and Plenary Session. As already noted, in the past the authority of the Standing Committee was derivative of, but less than, that of the full Council. The Standing Committee could do much of what the full Council could do, but nothing more, except to the extent they were acting solely in their capacities as trustees of a charity. But under the new Articles, the Plenary Sessions have a separate limit on their authority that is not applicable to the Standing Committee. The “Objects” or purposes of the ACC have been revised in the new Articles to include three objects: to advance the Christian religion; to promote the unity of the Anglican Communion; and to promote the purposes of the Anglican Communion. The Standing Committee, as the legal company, is authorized by law to pursue all of these objects. But the authority of the Plenary Sessions is limited to the contractual rights granted to them in the Articles. And under Article 16.1 they can only meet “to promote the unity of the Anglican Communion” and can only consider other matters “in that context.” The Standing Committee has no such restriction on its authority, i.e., it need not consider matters only in the “context” of unity.

Given the controversies in the Communion and the provisions of Section 4 of the Covenant this becomes a real, not a theoretical, issue. Can the recognition of “relational consequences” that diminishes the role of a member church in some way be considered by the Plenary Session as a matter promoting the unity of the Communion? Or is this something that can only be done by the Standing Committee?

Another important issue that has been the subject of recent controversy is the manner in which amendment of the ACC’s constitution is accomplished, and in particular amendment of the constitutional schedule specifying its membership. The Articles treat amendments to the main body differently from amendments to the membership schedule, but each case requires action by a body other than the Standing Committee. In the case of amendments other than to the membership schedule, Article 27.3 provides for a vote of two-thirds of the plenary members. In the case of the membership schedule, amendment is by the Standing Committee with the consent of two-thirds of the Primates. But the Companies Act mandates that amendment of the articles must be accomplished by a vote of 75% of the full membership of the company, i.e., the Standing Committee. As we understand it, the Companies Act thus imposes an additional requirement to amend the Articles that in effect gives any four members of the Standing Committee a veto over the proposed amendment. In other words, the full Council could vote overwhelmingly to amend the Articles, but the decision could be blocked by a minority faction on the Standing Committee. And this possibility is not merely hypothetical. We know there have been allied blocks on the Standing Committee, we have seen them in action in Jamaica, and ACC officials have publicly bemoaned recent Standing Committee meetings to the point of resignation and extreme frustration (the “worst meeting of my life”).

As noted above, the Plenary Session is not part of the legal membership of the ACC. The plenary members therefore possess no statutory rights as members of the incorporated body, but only those rights granted in the Articles. These rights are contractual in nature; unlike the Standing Committee, the plenary members have no inherent legal authority to manage the ACC. It is important therefore to recognize the extent to which the new Articles restrict the authority of the plenary members even over the Plenary Sessions themselves and transfer significant control over these Plenary Sessions to the Standing Committee. New Article 16.5 now gives the Standing Committee the power to adopt rules governing the conduct of business at the Plenary Sessions. And it is not even clear whether the Plenary Session itself could change such rules even with an overwhelming majority vote and the consent of the ACC President, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The wording of Article 27.2 suggests not. Under the old rules, the Standing Committee had no such role in adopting procedures for meetings other than its own. (Old bylaws 1(c) and 2(b).)

Similarly, Article 8.2.3 now gives the Standing Committee the ability to give directions for the conduct of elections for Standing Committee membership, as well as elections for Chairperson and Vice-chairperson, and Article 27 gives it general authority to adopt rules and guidelines broader than its previous authority, which was limited to the Standing Committee’s own proceedings. (Compare Article 27.1 with old bylaw 2(b).)

Not only are the Plenary Sessions downgraded in importance relative to the old structure and subject to significant control by the Standing Committee, the Standing Committee is given additional ability to influence the proceedings through exercise of the right to appoint up to six members in addition to those elected by the member churches. Under the old constitution, authority to appoint these additional members (previously called co-opted members) was given to the Council itself.

And in addition to exercising all the membership rights, the Standing Committee members, as “Trustees,” also exercise the rights of directors of the company under the Companies Act. As a matter of law, directors have the primary management responsibility for the company.

In short, the reversal in the legal structure making the Standing Committee primary and the full Council secondary is also reflected in specific rules that give the Standing Committee significant control over the Plenary Session—what was formerly thought of as the ACC.

3. The New Articles Infringe on the Prerogatives and Traditional Authority of Other Instruments.

To this point we have looked at the ACC’s new constitutional structure only from the perspective of the ACC itself. The changes in the nature and governance of the ACC are significant and obvious. But the new Articles also take the first steps toward asserting legal control over the other Instruments thereby radically changing the traditional understanding of those Instruments as independent bodies or offices.

The starting point is the definitions section in Article 2, which appears to be an attempt to define and thereby control the membership of the Primates’ Meeting by reference to the ACC’s membership schedule rather than the Primates’ Meeting’s own self-definition:

“Primates” means the principal Archbishop, Bishop, Moderator or Primate of each of the bodies listed under paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 of the Schedule appended to these Articles.

“Primates’ Meeting” means the gathering of the Primates convened time to time by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This is an important, if technical, point. The former ACC constitution contained a definition of “Primates” identical in substance to this definition but with a qualification that the definition was “for the purposes of this Article,” which was the article on determining ACC membership. But this definition now applies not just when changing the ACC’s own membership but to “these Articles,” and as we will see next, the new Articles purport to regulate, at least in part, some decisions of the Primates’ Meeting.

This attempt to define the Primates is now broadened because the new Articles also purport to define the Primates’ Meeting itself. This definition partly mirrors that used in the Covenant, reflecting the traditional understanding (that the Primates’ Meeting is “convened by” the Archbishop of Canterbury), but there is an important difference. Under the new Articles, the Primates’ Meeting is the “gathering of the Primates” and “Primates” as we have just seen is a defined term that is defined by reference not to the Primates themselves or the Archbishop of Canterbury, but to the ACC membership schedule, which is controlled by the Standing Committee.

Following the traditional practice, the Covenant specifies that it is the Archbishop who “gathers” the “Primates’ Meeting” and there is no qualification on his discretion as to which Primates to gather—no reference to the ACC membership or any other list. Indeed, in the past the Archbishop has not in fact used the ACC list as the basis for gathering the Primates. For example, he has invited the Archbishop of York notwithstanding the fact that he would not be included among those defined by the ACC list. In addition, the Archbishop has not invited the senior bishop from Ceylon despite the fact that the extra-provincial Church of Ceylon was listed on the ACC schedule. And in 2007, the Archbishop made clear that invitations were within his discretion when he announced that “I have decided not to withhold an invitation to Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as the elected Primate of the Episcopal Church to attend the forthcoming meeting. I believe it is important that she be given a chance both to hear and to speak and to discuss face to face the problems we are confronting together.”

By attempting to define the Primates’ Meeting as those on the ACC schedule as opposed to those whom the Archbishop of Canterbury chooses to gather, the ACC is encroaching on matters within the domain of two other Instruments.

But the ACC Articles go further. They purport to regulate and control decisions the Primates make about their own leadership. Article 8.2.1 provides:

In electing the Chairman, Vice Chairman and other Trustee-Members [Standing Committee members] the Members and the Primates (as the case may be) shall have regard (particularly in the process of nomination) to the desirability of achieving (so far as practicable) appropriate regional diversity and a balance of representation between clergy and laity and between the genders. (Emphasis added.)

What this article purports to do is impose diversity criteria on the Primates’ election of members to their own standing committee since those members become “Trustee-Members.” Whether these criteria are laudatory is not the issue. It is for the Primates to decide on the qualifications they will consider in electing their standing committee. For example, although they have not yet chosen to do so the Primates might wish to adopt selection criteria that focus on proportional representation or theological coherence with the Communion’s faith and order rather than regional or gender diversity. We hope the Primates will robustly resist these initial efforts to control their decision making.

The new articles further encroach on the historical prerogative of the Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint members of the Communion’s commissions and similar bodies. New Article 5.5 gives the ACC (the Standing Committee) the authority to establish Communion commissions. We have already seen this developing in recent years without any legal authority, but this now formalizes that practice. Will the Standing Committee next claim that the Archbishop cannot appoint such commissions without its consent? It does not bode well that the Standing Committee recently interrogated the Archbishop on decisions taken concerning some of these commissions and the explanation given was that he had conferred with the Secretary General, who possesses no authority in these matters.

As a final example of the ACC’s encroachment on other Instruments under these Articles, we note that the procedures for determining the membership of the Inter-Anglican Finance Committee have been changed to place sole appointing authority in the Standing Committee. Former bylaw 4 provided that the committee would consist of at least five members, of which at least two would be appointed by the Primates’ Meeting and at least three would be appointed by the Council. Now the Standing Committee, not the full Council, is the appointing body for all members, with both the Primatial and non-Primatial members of the finance committee appointed separately from among the members of the Standing Committee. (Articles 14.1 -14.2.) The “at least” language on the number of members is dropped, fixing the size of the committee and ensuring that there will be a majority of non-Primatial members.

In each instance just described, the changes made were small and in some cases technical. But they reflect an assumption that the other Instruments can be governed in some way by the ACC’s Articles and may be claimed as a precedent for that in the future. Given the Standing Committee’s control over these Articles, this is a dangerous precedent for the Communion and its Instruments as traditionally understood.

4. The New Articles Reduce the Influence of the Member Churches on the ACC.

In many ways the reduced influence of the member churches follows from the facts we have already noted. The members elected by the member churches are no longer the legally recognized members of the ACC. But there is one other way in which the influence of the member churches has been reduced. The former requirement that amendments to the constitution be ratified by two-thirds of the member churches has been removed. Amendments now require only a two-thirds vote of one Plenary Session and, under the Companies Act, a 75% vote of the Standing Committee.

It is ironic that one of the legal arguments TEC has made in litigation it instituted against its former dioceses is that its General Convention possesses legal supremacy because it can amend TEC’s constitution. But TEC’s constitution requires that amendments be approved at two successive meetings of the General Convention and that formal notice of the proposed amendment be transmitted to the diocesan conventions between the two votes. And when the vote is taken at the General Convention, it is cast in the House of Deputies by dioceses that have equal representation and vote as a unit in both the clergy and lay orders with each diocese having one vote in each order. This is considered a vote by dioceses by TEC’s own constitutional commentary.

Under the new ACC Articles, however, amendments do not require two readings, are not sent formally to the provincial synods and are not voted on at the Plenary Sessions by member churches as a unit with each church having one vote. They are voted on in one session by the individual members, including the members appointed by the Standing Committee, which gives disproportionate representation to the western churches. This reduces further the input of the member churches in the functioning of the ACC.

5. The Structure of the Communion Reflected in the New ACC Articles Is Not What Was Contemplated In the Covenant.

We have identified above the distinctive features of the transformed ACC. We now must ask to what extent this ACC response to the Communion’s structural problems is compatible with that found in the Covenant finalized only seven months ago?

To start it is helpful to revisit the fundamental principles of our Anglican identity as expressed in Section 3 of the Covenant:

First:

Churches of the Anglican Communion are bound together “not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference” and of the other instruments of Communion. (3.1.2.)

Second:

[Each Church affirms] the central role of bishops as guardians and teachers of faith, as leaders in mission, and as a visible sign of unity, representing the universal Church to the local, and the local Church to the universal and the local Churches to one another. This ministry is exercised personally, collegially and within and for the eucharistic community. (3.1.3.)

Third:

In addition to the many and varied links which sustain our life together, we acknowledge four particular Instruments at the level of the Anglican Communion which express this co-operative service in the life of communion….It is the responsibility of each Instrument to consult with, respond to, and support each other Instrument and the Churches of the Communion. Each Instrument may initiate and commend a process of discernment and a direction for the Communion and its Churches. (3.1.4.)

These principles can be summarized as recognizing that the Anglican Communion (1) is not tied to a single “central authority”; (2) is one in which its bishops play “the central role” in essential areas of leadership; and (3) is led by four distinct Instruments of Communion, each of which “may initiate and commend a process of discernment and a direction for the Communion and its Churches.”

None of this is novel. As the Covenant itself notes in the Introduction:

To covenant together is not intended to change the character of this Anglican expression of Christian faith. Rather, we recognise the importance of renewing in a solemn way our commitment to one another, and to the common understanding of faith and order we have received, so that the bonds of affection which hold us together may be re-affirmed and intensified.

It must be emphasized that the “we” of the Covenant are the member churches of the Anglican Communion that sign the Covenant together with the other churches who may join them in that agreement. The Covenant is their commitment to each other and the historic Instruments of Communion they recognize in their re-affirmation of their common faith and order. The Instruments derive their authority in the Communion not from their own internal legal processes, but from the recognition they receive from the Communion’s churches.

The Covenant thus becomes the foundational document for the Communion. It does not derive its authority from any of the Instruments. Rather the reverse.

One can see at a glance that the new ACC Articles present quite a different vision at key points. They unquestionably establish a “central executive authority.” Indeed, in its recently posted Q&A this is explicit:

The Standing Committee is the executive arm of the Anglican Consultative Council, charged with advancing its work between its three-yearly plenary meetings. It also incorporates the Standing Committee of the Primates’ Meeting, and has responsibility to oversee the implementation of requests from the Lambeth Conference. So, for example, it takes responsibility for organising meetings of the Instruments, and co-ordinates the work of the various Networks and Commissions which serve the Communion in a wide variety of ways. The work on Theological Education came from an initiative of the Primates’ Meeting; the Relief and Development Alliance was a proposal from the Lambeth Conference of 2008.

The ACC Articles, moreover, do not sufficiently acknowledge the central role of bishops and the bishops in conference. The Lambeth Conference of bishops appoints none of the members of the Standing Committee, and it is the ACC that elects the majority of the Committee members. Although the ACC can and does elect bishops from among its members and bishops will always comprise a large part of the Standing Committee, there is no formal recognition of a “central role” for bishops and the stated criteria for appointing Committee members include “a balance of representation between clergy and laity.” In the larger, if now less important, Plenary Session, there is no vote by orders, which would guarantee a special role for bishops, and the membership criteria encourage lay, not episcopal participation.

And as noted, the ACC Articles assert the legal authority to define and regulate in some respects the other Instruments of Communion. The Covenant’s oft-expressed vision is of a Communion in which each Instrument is distinct, co-equal and responsible for its own membership decisions. A possible trajectory of the new ACC Articles, if now only in its earliest stages, is that of a Communion in which all the Instruments are governed by a single legal constitution subject to UK law.

Indeed, a threshold question is whether the new ACC Articles and the Anglican Covenant are even talking about the same Instruments. The Covenant defines the ACC with reference to its former constitution and specifically refers to the membership schedule, indicating it considered the Council to be the body comprised of the members elected by the member churches, not the smaller body comprising the Standing Committee. This accords with the original Lambeth Conference resolution that specified the first constitution of the ACC. It also defined the Council by reference to the members elected by the member churches and said of the Standing Committee only that:

The Council shall appoint a Standing Committee of nine members, which shall include the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Council. The Secretary General shall be its Secretary. The Standing Committee shall meet annually. It shall have the right to call advisers.

Is this even the same body as the new English company whose members and directors consist of the Standing Committee only and not those elected directly by the member churches?

Similar questions arise with respect to the committee defined in Section 4 “to monitor the functioning of the Covenant…on behalf of the Instruments.” Among other duties, this committee must be “responsible to the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting” and “make recommendations as to relational consequences” to “the Instruments of Communion.” The Covenant identified that committee as the “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.” In its public materials, the ACC Standing Committee identifies itself correctly as “The Anglican Consultative Council-Standing Committee.” This accords with its legal definition. By its own account, last December it “adopted” the title used in the Covenant of “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion” but has since thought better of that idea and decided to stick with “ ‘the Standing Committee,’ as per the new ACC Articles of Association.”

Whatever else can be said of this confusion, one thing is clear: when the Covenant defined a committee to monitor “on behalf of the Instruments,” to “be responsible to” the ACC and the Primates’ Meeting, and to “make recommendations” to the Instruments, it did not contemplate that this role would be filled by a group that constitutes the entire membership and governing body for legal purposes of one of those same Instruments.

6. Conclusion

In light of these developments, we draw the following conclusions:

• It is not appropriate for one of the Communion’s four Instruments to be an English company regulated by UK and EU law like any other UK company. To repeat what we said above, we do not question the need for the proper and efficient management of the Communion’s charitable assets by fiduciaries complying with all relevant laws. We are not convinced, however, that this role should be confused with the historic role of the Instruments of Communion in “the discernment, articulation and exercise of our shared faith and common life and mission” and in particular with the role of the Communion’s Primatial leadership, which bears special responsibility for “doctrinal, moral and pastoral matters that have Communion-wide implications.” (Covenant 3.1.4.)
• We urge the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates not to cede their independent authority to the corporate charter of the ACC, but to insist that their authority cannot be infringed by the ACC.
• It is now beyond doubt that the newly transformed and empowered ACC Standing Committee cannot function as the committee required by Section 4 of the Covenant.
• The Covenant remains the only hope for preserving the traditional faith and order of the Anglican Communion. We call upon member churches of the Anglican Communion to adopt the Covenant with all deliberate speed and, having done so, to make proper arrangements for the responsibilities assigned to the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion in Section 4 to be undertaken by a body that has both the competence and ability to assess threats to the Communion and recommend appropriate action.

We have written often about the Anglican Consultative Council and its Standing Committee over the last year. After the chaotic session in Jamaica in May 2009 we noted that the ACC had not followed its own rules in conducting the crucial vote on the Covenant with the result that the vote to defer Section 4 probably did not effectively pass the Council. And we also noted that in the confusion in Jamaica, it is doubtful that the members sufficiently understood what they were actually voting on to make that vote even morally authoritative. ACC officials suggested that a move away from western parliamentary procedures placed great weight on decisions of the chairman, who could discern the sense of the meeting, but in fact the chairman was actually corrected twice during the crucial vote—once when he ruled the controversial “Trisk amendment” out of order and then later when he ruled that a second vote was required to pass the resolution as amended. This confusion was televised over Anglican TV (and later transcribed) so the debacle is preserved for all to see. From that moment on many Communion members lost all confidence in the ACC as a viable and representative Instrument of Communion.

In the year since the ACC meeting in Jamaica, it has become increasingly clear that the problems so evident there were not isolated events but are endemic to the operations of the Council and its Standing Committee. We have written about this repeatedly in recent months, including publicly here, here, here and here. The most recent news concerning resignations from and dubious appointments to the Standing Committee, released nearly simultaneously by the ACNS and TEC’s Episcopal News Service, once again present these issues in acute form.

1. Transparency

In his December 18, 2009 letter formally transmitting the Anglican Covenant to the member churches of the Communion, the Secretary General referred to a document then publicly unknown to explain key procedures for determining membership in the ACC. This document has since come to be called the “new” or in some cases, “secret,” constitution. We noted this in our essay posted a few days later on December 22:

Thus, there apparently is a new ACC constitution (now referred to as Articles of Association) that changes the membership procedures for the ACC.  This new constitution (which has not been made public) also applies in some way to the adoption of the Covenant by other churches.

When the Secretary General was subsequently queried by TEC progressives about this, he explained the background to the reorganization of the ACC, amended his letter to the member churches after the fact to refer to both the “new” and the existing constitutions and stated that as of January 6, 2010, the ACC was still awaiting approval by the UK legal authorities to implement the new constitution. All of this is helpful information, but it was disclosed in private correspondence to TEC bloggers, not posted on the Communion website.

The new constitution still has not been made public; the constitution posted to this day on the Communion website is the “old” one. Nor is this an administrative oversight. As recently as April of this year, the old constitution was publicly posted with erroneous membership provisions, then removed for several days altogether and finally replaced with a corrected version of the “old” constitution. And as recently as last month, those inquiring of the ACO were told based on legal advice that the “old” constitution was “the existing” one, but that the “new” constitution was “similar.”

And  now on the eve of another Standing Committee meeting we are informed (by ACNS and ENS) of resignations that have not been previously announced by those involved and controversial appointments that were made at the last meeting over six months ago. We will turn to the substance of these announcements next, but this lack of transparency has itself become a contributing factor to the crisis in the Communion, a crisis so acute that even the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledges that maintaining “outward unity at a formal level” is no longer a “good thing” and the Secretary General states that key discussions are “at a point of collapse.”

2. Failure to Follow the Rules

The point is often made by those who would promote the ACC as the paramount body of the Communion that it is the only body with a written constitution. Indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself called attention to this constitution in his Pentecost letter when he noted that membership on both the ACC and its Standing Committee is governed by the ACC constitution. But if these bodies are governed by formal rules, it is imperative that those rules be followed. And it is becoming ever more evident that not only are the rules ignored, they are applied unevenly to benefit some provinces and disadvantage others.

As already noted, we and others have written repeatedly about the numerous constitution and bylaw provisions being flouted by TEC in an effort to keep Bishop Ian Douglas on the Standing Committee. We will not repeat those points here, but only note that during the recent Executive Council meeting, the President of TEC’s House of Deputies and Vice Chair of the Executive Council described both TEC’s clerical and episcopal seats on the ACC as “open” and noted that there were contested elections for both seats. The implications of these facts under the ACC constitution and bylaws are straightforward: (i) when the clerical seat formerly held by Douglas became “open” he automatically ceased to be a member of the Standing Committee under Article 2(f) of the ACC bylaws; and (ii) under Clause 4(c) of the ACC constitution, Douglas cannot re-join the ACC itself for six years.

Similar issues arise with the Standing Committee’s attempt to appoint the Rev. Janet Trisk of Southern Africa to replace a lay representative on the Standing Committee. The ACC constitution provides that the ACC members of the Standing Committee are to be appointed by “the Council.” Article 7 of the bylaws supplements this constitutional article by providing that in the case of vacancies between meetings “the Standing Committee itself shall have power to appoint a member of the Council of the same order as the representative who filled the vacant place.” If, as seems reasonable, the bylaw is a lawful supplement to the constitution and is not itself unlawful, the Standing Committee is clearly authorized only to appoint someone of the same order. It is not given any power to go beyond not only the constitution but even the additional authority granted in the bylaws by appointing someone such as Trisk who is not of the same order as the previous member. The attempt to appoint Trisk, therefore, was ultra vires and ineffective. And, lest anyone claim the Trisk appointment is valid under the “new” unpublished constitution, it should be emphasized that it was done last December when the old constitution was unquestionably still in effect.

It cannot escape notice, moreover, that Trisk was the proponent of the controversial amendment at ACC-14 in Jamaica that effectively stripped Section 4 out of the Covenant to be revised. If permitted to serve on the Standing Committee, she would join several others, including Bishops Katharine Jefferts Schori, Ian Douglas and Phillip Aspinall and Dr. Anthony Fitchett who have criticized the Covenant or who sought to block or delay its adoption. Yet this is the very body that has taken on the primary role in administering that same Covenant.

And the announcement that two Primates from Africa have resigned and that the Primate of Bangladesh has become a “member” raise more questions than they answer. As to Bishop Mouneer’s replacement, Bishop Paul Sarker, the ACC constitution requires that the ex officio Primatial members also be members of “the body known as the Standing Committee of the Primates of the Anglican Communion in each case for so long as they shall remain members of such Standing Committee.” In his letter of resignation, Bishop Mouneer stated that “I hereby submit my resignation from the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion….I would like to assure you that my resignation from the SCAC will not stop my commitment to the Primates’ Meeting….” There has been no public announcement that Bishop Mouneer has ever resigned from the Primates’ Standing Committee (as opposed to the ACC and its Standing Committee).  We do not know whether he has or not, but if he has not, on what basis can Bishop Sarker be made a “member” of the ACC or its Standing Committee?  The ACC constitution defines “alternate member” as someone “invited to attend a meeting if the ordinary member is unable to be present for a whole session of the Council.” Is Bishop Sarker a member or alternate member of “the body known as the Standing Committee of the Primates”? If merely the latter, how can he become a member of the ACC or its Standing Committee?

The same questions arise with respect to Archbishop Akrofi. Was he ever a member (as opposed to an alternate) of the Primates’ Standing Committee and thereby a member of the ACC and its Standing Committee? If not, how can he resign?

Finally, until this point, Archbishop Orombi has insisted publicly that he has not resigned from the ACC’s Standing Committee even though he has refused for reasons of principle to attend meetings. Has he changed his position? We do not know. But given his previous public position the question may arise whether a provision in the “new” constitution (not contained in the existing constitution) that permits a trustee director to be removed for failure to attend two meetings has been applied prematurely to remove Archbishop Orombi without his consent? It is at points like these that questions of the proper application of the rules and questions of transparency become so blurred as to be inseparable.

3. Application of the Moratoria

In his Pentecost letter, the Archbishop of Canterbury recognized that Communion churches that do not share the faith and order of the Communion as a whole cannot represent the Communion on bodies responsible for faith and order. The internal bodies with this responsibility include the Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order, but the Archbishop stated explicitly that there are other internal bodies implicated as well, and indirectly identifies the ACC, its Standing Committee and the Primates’ Meeting as among them.  The Secretary General recently reiterated this conclusion in remarks reported in the recent communiqué of TEC’s Executive Council, which noted:

Canon Kearon’s statement that The Episcopal Church does not “share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion.” He also responded to concerns about incursions by other provinces of the Communion. He acknowledged that the Archbishop of Canterbury considers certain activities of the Province of the Southern Cone to constitute an incursion, but is awaiting clarification about the extent of these activities from the primate of that province. However, such ongoing breaches of the moratorium on incursions do not rise to the same level of departure from the faith and order of the Communion as does the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Christians.

The ACC’s Standing Committee had already addressed these very issues in May 2009 on the eve of the Council meeting in Jamaica when it considered who was “qualified” to serve as an ACC member. At the last minute the Standing Committee, reportedly at the request of TEC, reversed the prior determination of the Secretary General and ruled that Uganda’s alternate clerical member was not qualified to serve as an ACC member. The Secretary General explained the decision as follows:

The Joint Standing Committee has discussed this at length. We understand that the Revd Philip Ashey’s relationship with the Church of the Province of Uganda is as a result of a cross provincial intervention, and note that such interventions are contrary to the Windsor Report and other reports accepted by successive meetings of the Instruments of Communion, including Primates’ Meetings which you have attended. Therefore we regret to inform you that Mr Ashey’s current status means that we cannot regard him as a ‘qualified’ member according to Section 4(e) of the current Constitution.

TEC acknowledges that the leadership of the Communion does not regard the matter at issue in the Ashey precedent as rising “to the same level of departure from the faith and order of the Communion” as TEC’s own repudiation of the Communion’s moratoria. Yet TEC still claims the right to have its representatives seated, not as one-time alternates or even as ordinary ACC members, but as members of the ACC’s Standing Committee. And the two representatives concerned, the Presiding Bishop and Bishop Douglas, are personally and directly responsible for TEC’s departures from Communion faith and order: the Presiding Bishop as chief consecrator of Mary Glasspool and Douglas as one who permits in his diocese public blessings of same sex unions and marriages. It should be noted that under the Connecticut policy, blessings are available to all parishes in the diocese and thus its policy is even broader than the policy in New Westminster in Canada about which the Windsor Report concluded:

We believe that to proceed unilaterally with the authorisation of public Rites of Blessing for same sex unions at this time goes against the formally expressed opinions of the Instruments of Unity and therefore constitutes action in breach of the legitimate application of the Christian faith as the churches of the Anglican Communion have received it, and of bonds of affection in the life of the Communion, especially the principle of interdependence.

4. Unrepresentative Nature of the ACC and Its Standing Committee

The problems addressed to this point are only exacerbated by the unrepresentative nature of the ACC and its Standing Committee. This problem is structural and pervasive; it is not a function of the vagaries of the last elections or recent resignations, although they do not help the problem to be sure.

The structural problem starts with the constitutional membership schedule of the ACC. Several western and European churches, including TEC, Canada and Australia are guaranteed three members, while large African churches such as Kenya, Sudan, West Africa and Burundi get only one or two. Indeed, TEC (with weekly attendance of approximately 750,000), Canada (with 325,000) and Australia (fewer than 180,000) probably do not equal the size of the church in Kenya even when combined, yet each of these western churches has three ACC members while Kenya has only two. Wales, with 50,000 weekly churchgoers, has the same ACC representation as Kenya and Sudan (with millions of members each), and twice as many as Burundi and West Africa, which dwarf Wales in size.

The ACC is the body that elects the majority of members to the Standing Committee, in part through a method of cumulative voting (single transferrable votes) that permits the concentration of voting power to benefit a small number of candidates. These ACC procedures are reinforced by the practice of the Primates to elect their five members by a regional voting scheme that allocates three of the five seats to regions having only 20% of the Communion’s active membership and limits the largest region, Africa, with over half the Communion’s active members, to one seat.

The cumulative effect of these provisions is demonstrated by the list of the thirteen members scheduled to attend the next meeting of the Standing Committee. Three are from the UK, two from the US, and two more from Australia and New Zealand. The other six members, fewer than half of the total, are spread among the churches of the Global South, which comprises approximately eighty percent of the Communion.

5. Can This Standing Committee Function as the “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion”?

It is beyond doubt at this point that this Standing Committee as currently constituted does not enjoy the confidence of a majority of the Communion. There have been five resignations in less than a year. One of those resigning, Bishop Mouneer, called on the entire committee to resign. Archbishop Orombi has also stated publicly his lack of confidence in the committee as currently composed. Archbishop Ian Ernest, Chairman of CAPA and one who has long supported the Communion’s Instruments, who attended the Lambeth conference and who was part of the Conference design team, has stated that he will no longer attend Primates’ Meetings if TEC’s Primate is present.  And the Singapore communiqué of twenty Global South provinces explicitly upheld the positions of Archbishops Mouneer, Orombi and Ernest and called for the Standing Committee’s responsibilities for Covenant oversight to be transferred to the Primates. It is difficult to conceive of a more categorical rejection of this Standing Committee by a majority of the Communion.

The problems with the ACC’s Standing Committee go well beyond the current controversies, however, and are themselves structural in nature. As the Archbishop of Canterbury himself has acknowledged in his Pentecost letter, the Standing Committee is “governed” by the provisions of the ACC constitution. All of its members, including the Primatial members, are members of the ACC and their duties on the Standing Committee are determined by the ACC governing instruments. Indeed, one of the Standing Committee’s primary fiduciary responsibilities under UK law is the administration of charitable assets held by the ACC, soon to be a UK company. The ACC-elected members on the Standing Committee have no responsibility to the Primates’ Meeting comparable to the fiduciary duties owed by the Primatial members to the ACC.

And even if we ignore this structural problem, it is difficult to see how this committee could function as the standing committee of the entire communion when the majority of its members (9 of 15) are elected by the ACC, a minority (5) are elected by the Primates and not a single one is elected by the oldest and most important of the conciliar Instruments, the Lambeth Conference of bishops. Still further issues arise when we note that this committee like the ACC as a whole is being increasingly subjected to UK law even as the bishops in the Church of England are raising alarms over the threat to religious liberty posed by UK and European laws and regulations.

Our colleague, Ephraim Radner, has stated that it was never understood by the Covenant Design Group that such a committee totally governed by the ACC would have primary responsibility for administering the Covenant. Nor has it been approved by the Communion’s conciliar Instruments. Although the deliberations at the Primates’ Meetings are not public, Archbishop Orombi has stated:

There is, however, no “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.” The Standing Committee has never been approved in its present form by the Primates Meeting or the Lambeth Conference.

It is in fact questionable whether the ACC’s Standing Committee’s role as “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion,” with the greater responsibilities that title implies, has been approved even by the ACC, which did not use that name for its Standing Committee when it amended its constitution in Jamaica.

All this leaves the current committee ill-defined and ill-equipped legally to perform the new duties arising under the covenanted Communion, especially in the face of widespread loss of confidence in both its membership and its commitment to observe legal requirements. In fact a legal challenge has already arisen from within the Standing Committee itself. One of its members, Anthony Fitchett of New Zealand, has requested legal advice on the “appropriateness” of one section of the Covenant based on possible conflict with the ACC constitution. Dr. Fitchett makes no effort to disguise his own distaste for the Covenant:

Section 4.2, on the other hand, contains provisions that are punitive, controlling, and completely un-Anglican, and reflect the movement towards centralized, Curia-like control that was rejected by the Lambeth conference…over a century ago….

Regardless of Dr. Fitchett’s personal opinions of the Covenant, his question serves only to highlight the dubious nature of the assumption that the ACC Standing Committee is the appropriate committee to administer the Covenant. For as we have pointed out, if the legal advice is indeed that the Covenant provision is not appropriate under the ACC constitution, this would not affect the Covenant, which is a separate legal instrument not subordinate to the ACC constitution, but would instead prove beyond doubt that the current Standing Committee is legally disqualified from acting as the Covenant requires.

6. Conclusion

A year ago, after analyzing carefully the chaotic vote on the Trisk amendment in Jamaica, we expressed the “hope that this will further demonstrate to the Communion the corrosive effect the current conflict and the efforts of those who seek to defeat or disable the Covenant are having in the Communion.” We have to conclude, however, that in the past year this hope has not been realized and the corrosion has only spread. Many of the primary players at Jamaica are now on the Standing Committee itself and they freely denounce and try to subvert the very Covenant they are to administer. TEC’s Presiding Bishop, like Dr. Fitchett calls the Covenant “un-Anglican,” challenges the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of Pentecost and dismisses canonical requirements of the Church of England as “nonsense.” In reply, a Lambeth Palace official noted pointedly that one of the statements made by the Presiding Bishop was not true. The Secretary General notes that TEC does not “share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion” and that some Communion discussions are “at the point of collapse.”  The Secretary General interrupted his vacation to meet with TEC’s Executive Council at its request only to be treated rudely while he was there and ridiculed after he left. Five resignations have been reported by the ACC Standing Committee in the last six months, and the Secretary General described its last meeting as the “worst meeting” of his life.

The Communion can hardly tolerate another year like the last one. It is essential that the Communion have structures that work in the midst of ongoing crises in several churches of the Communion. The corrosive effect we spoke of a year ago must now be addressed as a matter of urgency. Five things are needed:

• ACC processes must be transparent; if the Communion churches are to give proper consideration to the Covenant, they must know what the ACC constitution and bylaws are.
• At a time of great stress, membership and procedural rules must be scrupulously followed; having two members of the Standing Committee serve in patent violation of the published rules should be unacceptable to anyone concerned with the rule of law.
• TEC must be disqualified from serving on any bodies concerned with faith and order, including the Primates’ Meeting and the Standing Committee so long as it insists on departing from the faith and order of the Communion and repudiating the agreed moratoria.
• The ACC and its Standing Committee must begin the process of reform to make them representative of the entire Communion and the Primates’ Standing Committee must also be made more representative.
• Given the structural and practical problems besetting the ACC’s Standing Committee, a provisional advisory committee enjoying the confidence of the Communion must be established to assume initial responsibility for Covenant matters. If the Standing Committee itself refuses to designate such a committee, the member churches should do so themselves. The opportunity to restore the Communion through the Covenant is a last chance that cannot be wasted.

Presiding Bishop Schori’s response has criticized Archbishop Williams’ decision on several grounds.  Here, let me address just three of her objections: first, that the Archbishop’s actions represent a move towards “centralization” within the Communion, viewed especially in terms of the application of “sanctions” against member churches;  second, that in removing TEC members from the Communion commissions in question, the Archbishop has somehow acted as if the proposed Anglican Covenant now before the Communion’s churches were already in effect when it is not;  third, that a proper understanding of the Communion’s life would entail the maintenance of diversity among Anglican churches, rather than the (punitive) pursuit of “uniformity”.

A common framework for ecclesial relationship?

These are all substantive issues, which I shall address one by one in a moment.  But to do so requires some larger common framework by which to understand the kinds of terms in use.  In this case, let me suggest a category for ecclesial relationships that is now known as the “Lund Principle”, named after the 1952 Third Conference of Faith and Order held in Lund (Sweden) where the “principle” was first enunciated.  The principle is this:   Christian churches should do together all things that can be done together, and do separately only that which must be done separately.  This appeal was made, in the Lund Report, not as a normative rule, but as a descriptive one that must be understood in terms of the greater Christian vocation to unity in all things, and “separation” in as little as possible.  Indeed, Lund was challenging the churches to a concrete unitive life, not the acceptance of the status quo of division:  “a faith in the one church of Christ that is not implemented by acts of obedience is dead”, the Conference wrote.

So, for Lund, the issues here had to do with the fullness of Christian life, not just compartments of it; and thus, “acting together” was a matter of faith and order – ministerial order and discipline – and vice versa.   Furthermore, “acting separately” was viewed as something that, for whatever granted convictions, stood as a barrier to unity.  (The division within the early ecumenical movement between “Life and Work” and “Faith and Order” is, in this light, deemed obviously artificial and ultimately misleading.)  Indeed, Lund over and over challenged the churches to self-criticism over these matters:  the “compulsion” to “act separately” was often one that grew out of sin, rather than a pure conscience. So the Lund Principle is as much (or, even more)  a negative judgment on the churches as it is a permissive direction.

I bring up the Lund Principle for a simple reason: TEC formally accepted it (as did the Lambeth Conference), and agreed to its application to all facets of its life.  Hence, its terms and meanings, at least in theory, represent a shared framework for assessing ecclesial relationships.  At the General Convention of 1976 (A034), TEC resolved the following:

And in the spirit of the “Lund Principle” approved by our church’s delegates and others attending the World Conference on Faith and Order in 1952 and affirmed by the 1968 Lambeth Conference, that the Episcopal Church at every level of its life be urged to act together and in concert with other churches of Jesus Christ in all matters except those in which deep differences of conviction or church order compel us to act separately; and be it further

Resolved, That in all future presentations of budget and program to this General Convention, consideration be given to what efforts have been expended to secure data ecumenically and to plan ecumenically; and be it further

Resolved, That the dioceses be urged to establish a similar policy of ecumenical review and planning.

(I note that the final two “resolves” direct both the national office and diocesan churches to frame their lives – “budget and program” – in terms of ecumenical consultation and planning, precisely a matter at issue in the last 10 years of TEC’s life.)

In her June 2 Pastoral Letter to TEC, Presiding Bishop Schori noted the following:

The Episcopal Church recognizes that [its] decisions [regarding Glasspool’s consecration] are problematic to a number of other Anglicans. We have not made these decisions lightly. We recognize that the Spirit has not been widely heard in the same way in other parts of the Communion. In all humility, we recognize that we may be wrong, yet we have proceeded in the belief that the Spirit permeates our decisions.

Using the Lund Principle framework, we can see that TEC’s Presiding Bishop has now made it clear that TEC feels “compelled to act separately”.  The significance of this declaration cannot be overstated.

In itself, this declaration need not involve a “value judgment”, for it is but a description of a church’s actions vis a vis other churches.  More than that, however, such a description entails the ordering of an altered relationship with these other churches.  Recognizing this helps us see that Presiding Bishop Schori does not seem to grasp that such separate actions may not be coherent with continued unity in its fullness, but that, for whatever justified local “compulsions”, they must affect the kind of unity that will be enjoyed with others. Add to this, however, that Communion leaders have in fact judged TEC’s actions to be unacceptable Scripturally and doctrinally, and TEC’s desire to “go ahead” anyway makes the “separateness” of their decisions unavoidably compromising of unity, whatever TEC’s own judgments of the matter may be.

This is not a matter of evaluating in advance what is “essential” and what is “non-essential” to ecclesial unity  – that, after all, is a matter that only the whole church can decide.  It is rather a matter of stating the obvious:  insisted separateness must imply embodied separateness of a kind, and such separateness is not the same as unity. That is the Lund Principle at work!  One might even go further, as Archbishop Williams wrote in his Pentecost Letter: “To maintain outward unity at a formal level while we are convinced that the divisions are not only deep but damaging to our local mission is not a good thing.”

Ecumenical discussions, of course, presuppose that such separations exist – if they did not, there would be no discussions in the first place.  But as Lund itself stressed, no church can escape responsibility for such separations, however conscientiously pursued or maintained.  Ecumenical engagement demands such sobering honesty, as well as every effort to resolve the challenges posed by those actions about which honesty is required.

But it is also clear that the parallel between ecumenical relations and relations within the Anglican Communion can be misleading:  the Communion’s churches, so the very notion of “communion” entails, exist in a real “oneness” in an ecclesial sense;  while ecumenical relations derive from an acknowledged imperfection within and obstacle to such oneness.  Still, the line of difference between the two is historically ever shifting, as we see today.  And in both cases – within ecumenical relationships and within Anglicanism as a “Communion” — the ecclesiological standards of communion are understood as being the same.  If they were not, the difference between a communion on the one hand, and an ecumenical relationship that is challenged to go further, on the other, could never be made.

Thus, one confusion in the current debate within Anglicanism is that the Communion is often treated (as by the Presiding Bishop) as an ecumenical partnership; another, is that the principles that govern “communion” and “ecumenical partnership” are not properly identified.  This has led, on the part of Presiding Bishop Schori for instance, to a fundamental misunderstanding, it seems to me, of the ecclesiological reality of communion:  contra Schori, in a “communion it is not up to one member to declare that their actions are without meaning to another or to the majority or to the whole.  Such a member can only say that it “must do” what it does, and thereby accept the fact that it has acted separately, with all the consequences of such separation. Within the civil sphere, this is called “civil disobedience”: citizens who share a commonwealth, yet disagree in conscience with some fact of its ordering, “disobey” an aspect of that ordering; at the same time, they accept the responses of the state made to their disobedience,  precisely because they acknowledge and submit to the civil society’s common embrace of their lives.  In the Church, such conscientious separation entails the acceptance of developing degrees of disunity as embodied in one’s own relationships with others.

Yet the Presiding Bishop’s letter, and subsequent statements, seems to ignore these ecclesiological meanings, in favor of another theology of the church, which one might call a theology of “pneumatic diversity” that has little bearing on questions and realities of unity.  This may indeed be a theology that has coherence in the long run – although I do not see how it can, on both Scriptural and historical grounds –but it certainly is not a theology that undergirds the ecumenical understandings of communion that TEC has, in the past, upheld and undertaken to uphold within the Anglican Communion.

And it is important to grasp this novel notion the Presiding Bishop has put forward, of diversity as unity, rather than “separated action as disunity”, because its novelty explains the otherwise incoherent arguments Schori makes regarding TEC’s drift away from representative standing within the Communion.

In this light, let us look at Schori’s objections to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s decisions regarding the removal of TEC members from ecumenical and faith and order commissions.

Centralization and sanctions

The Presiding Bishops accuses Williams of seeking some kind of “centralized” authority, and exercising it in an “unanglican” manner.  This objection ignores a host of historical and ecclesial realities.  Most importantly, the particular issues dealt with have to do with TEC’s representative character within the Communion; but Schori has herself admitted that there is nothing representative about TEC’s views on these matters at hand:  TEC has chosen to act “separately”, which is by definition to act “on its own”.

That the Communion has always understood its character as a gathered body to be one based on some kind of fundamental common face to the world is historically uncontroversial.  It finds its expressed origin in the beginnings of TEC itself, as it sought to order its life, newly independent of the Church of England.  The need for recognition of shared doctrinal and moral standards, without “stumbling blocks”, goes back to the 1786 letter from Canterbury and the English bishops to the new Episcopal Church, a letter that affirmed such shared standards as necessary for e.g. providing ministerial testimonials, and thus for the sake of continued “communion” (“spiritual” in this case).  The American Prayer Book’s Preface reiterated this general understanding of related identity (using the term “discipline” in the way that “order” is used today),  and the church passed, in 1786, an “Act of General Convention” “declaring [TEC’s] steadfast resolution to maintain the same essential Articles of Faith and discipline with the Church of England.”  Soon after, these kinds of matters were ensconced canonically, in something like the 1789 canon (IX) on the matters of recognition of orders and of episcopal “authority” of a [foreign] bishop, upon whose “testimonial” to the mutually understood doctrinal integrity and “moral” character of clergy depended “communion” with TEC.  Successive Lambeth Conferences (beginning with Lambeth 1867, Resolution 8 ) reiterated in different ways the fact that to be a member of the “Anglican Communion” embodied shared doctrinal and practical commitments, bound genetically to the Church of England’s original bequest.  And just on this basis, TEC itself affirmed, at its General Convention  in 1868, the first Lambeth Conference’s Encyclical regarding that common bequest.  It defined the bequest in terms of an “acknowledgment” of “one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, […] connected by common Formularies,” and expressed in the Scriptures, Creeds, commitments of the “primitive church” and agreements of the first four General Councils. (These elements have informed the some of the Covenant’s substance.)

Indeed, TEC at the time joined in the kind of “sanctions” Presiding Bishop Schori now decries as “unanglican”, by “reminding” observers of its common repudiation of the South African bishop, John William Colenso’s, erroneous views regarding Scripture:  “this Church accepts the full spiritual validity of the deposition and excommunication of Dr. Colenso, pronounced by the Metropolitan and Bishops of the South African Church ; and we will regard him as deposed and excommunicate accordingly, until he shall so turn from his errors, and be restored to full communion by the Church of South Africa, which God of His infinite mercy grant” (1868, 20th day).  In doing this, TEC’s House of Bishops was announcing what they had already effectively done as a gathered body of “communion” bishops at the Lambeth Conference of the preceding year: upholding the actions of the Canterbury Convocation with respect to South Africa on a world-wide Anglican basis of shared episcopal discernment and decision.  The interplay of unity, recognizability and separateness is here clearly at work.

By 1868, then, the Rev. William Lamson, who headed the new American Episcopal congregation in Paris, could report to the General Convention on the gathering of American and English bishops and priests at his church the previous year:  this was a symbol, he announced, “of the essential oneness and complete intercommunion of these two branches of the Church. By an alteration of services in both uses, and by the conjoint ministrations of the Bishops and Clergy of both Churches, this unity was completely declared”.  That Lamson was describing this “Church” in terms of the Communion itself is likely.  But in any case, it was recognized and interchangeable ministries that marked this “essential” oneness, a oneness that expressed itself in the earlier Lambeth Conference’s gathered life in action.

TEC’s own understanding of her identity in this regard has been consistent with this, until very recently, as the 1967 Preamble to the Constitution (drawn from the language of the 1930 Lambeth Conference) makes clear:  the Preamble defines TEC primarily, not as an American denomination at all, but in terms of her membership in the Communion, and in relation to an “historical faith and order” that it shares with other members of this “fellowship”, bound to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

And so, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has, after more than 7 years of consultation with various groups and commissions and “instruments of unity” within the Communion, merely stated a consistent judgment regarding TEC’s actions:  they are actions that, in contrast to a given identity from the past, have now been taken “separately” from the Communion’s common self-presentations.  In removing TEC representatives from ecumenical and faith-and-order groups within the Communion, he has hardly pressed towards a “centralization” of control over the Communion.  Rather, he has thus articulated a fact that is well-known and admitted by Schori herself:  TEC has acted, in conscience, separately from others.   And in doing this, the “unity” of the Communion’s life has been altered at least in this regard.  It makes perfectly good sense for TEC to engage in any discussions it may desire with other Christians, as they in turn are willing to engage;  but it no longer makes any logical sense for TEC to speak out of the unity of the Communion’s views, such as they are.  Canon Kearon’s own remarks regarding such discussions in light of TEC’s actions – that “they are at the point of collapse” — indicate that the larger Communion’s ecumenical partners understood this the same way.

Is the Archbishop preempting the Covenant’s adoption?

It should be clear that the Covenant, in this regard, does not represent the invention of a new set of dynamics.  Rather, as has been the claim from the beginning of the Covenant’s formulation, it seeks to express the character of the Communion already in place, if not always defined explicitly.  To describe the actions Archbishop Williams’ decisions, let alone of the Covenant’s proposed common accountability, as based on a “punitive” model of the Church seems, again, historically in error, as noted above:  the “bonds” of “communion” among what became the Anglican churches, were those of “acting in unity”;  their solidity has been measured inversely to concrete actions made in “separation”.  And such “separation”, when it is accomplished through deliberate action, is a term of description, not of punishment.

Do the churches of the Anglican Communion need to wait for a Covenant to know this?  Hardly.  For how could we thereby make sense of e.g. TEC’s 19th-century affirmation of the Church of England’s and South Africa’s excommunication of Bp. Colenso, and its engagement at the Lambeth Conference in these matters?  Indeed, it is important to realize that the Anglican Communion’s emergence as an entity – referred to for the first time, it seems (and by Americans first of all?) only in the 1850’s – gathers decisional substance only bit by bit, with discussion but without rancor or dispute, because the character of unity in doctrine and discipline was a presupposition, rather than an invention, to the members of the growing Communion.  And, as a presupposition, the conditions of its meaning demanded ongoing fashioning of methods for its formal sustenance and definition, i.e. “standards” and structures.

But the standards and structures were expressive of, not creative of, a prior ordering of life. There were no constitutionally organized Communion legislatures that set up the Lambeth Conferences, or the ACC or the Primates’ Meeting, let alone consistent means by which Anglican representatives were chosen to head the Faith and Order movement (as Anglicans like Charles Henry Brent and William Temple did) and other bodies in an astonishing succession of world ecumenical leadership. Invitations were offered;  ad hoc suggestions were made and channels of decision-making proposed and followed.  No one questioned these gatherings, emerging structures, and representative choices as being without legislative foundation, largely because their articulation came out of an already acknowledged “unity”.   It was only as decisions in separation were made by Communion churches (and here we do need to note that other churches besides TEC are representing the Lund Principle at work1), not once but in consistent repetition, that the question of “legitimation” was self-consciously posed, posed mostly, however, by those like TEC whose actions no longer engaged the coherent self-identity of other Anglican churches.   But, as with Colenso’s appeal to the civil powers of England proved, such questions are raised in demonstration of the distance apart that churches had already moved, one from another.

It is not the case, therefore,  that the proposed Covenant has somehow been prematurely implemented “against TEC”;  the dynamics of unity and separation have been well-known within the Communion for some time.  Rather, the ongoing character of Communion decision-making continues, without yet the regularized features a Covenant may provide.  But when these features are provided, they will organize something already given.

The character of communion and diversity

Is all “diversity” of viewpoint the same thing as “separation”?  The Presiding Bishop is right to bring up the question of appropriate “diversity” within the Communion.  But it is also a question that Archbishop Williams has long grappled with as well. Only recently, he spoke in Durham (January 2009) on the ways that Anglicans have, from the early 16th-century, always sought ways of discovering and employing a shared language of consensus, that could properly place diverse particulars of religious commitment in a more universally recognizable framework.  This has been an Anglican commitment and tradition, so that “while no external authority can be invoked to coerce the local church in the realm of England, this does not imply that that church’s doctrine and discipline are no-one’s business but its own”.  In his November 2009 Willebrands Lecture at the Gregorian University in Rome, he challenged Roman Catholics to take more seriously such shared consensus about central ecclesial claims, not allowing a “diversity” in understandings of ordained leadership to undermine the deeper agreements Anglicans and Catholics have reached regarding the character of communion as a common means of “filial holiness” in Christ and with one another.  This argument demonstrates a far subtler approach to the question than Schori acknowledges, for it realizes that there are diversities that do not undercut certain recognizable agreed-upon commonalities;  by the same token, however, such distorting diversities do exist.  The point is to take the trouble together to make these distinctions, which cannot be assumed and require the work of consultation.   And thus, in the recent Pentecost letter to which Schori objects, Archbishop Williams sought to emphasize how diversity and “recognizability” within the Communion are not always, as now, mutually supportive characteristics, and that such consensually “acceptable” recognizability of shared faith and order must inform the Communion’s representatives as they seek common understandings with other Christians.

But the whole question of diversity and communion more broadly has been a consistent Anglican concern, at least since the late 18th-century English bishops required of the nascent Episcopal Church that she reorder her Prayer Book (e.g. replacing those parts stricken from the Americans’ proposed version of the Apostles’ Creed), if she wished to have her ministers and bishops “recognized” through a process of continuous succession with the English Church.   It was still a question when the first Lambeth Conference met and resolved that “it is necessary that [newer Anglican churches] receive and maintain without alteration the standards of faith and doctrine as now in use in [the Church of England]”, echoing in this instance TEC’s initial commitments from 1786.  The bishops then explained that, nevertheless, “each province should have the right to make such adaptations and additions to the services of the Church as its peculiar circumstances may require”.   Immediately, however, the bishops noted a proviso, “that no change or addition be made inconsistent with the spirit and principles of the Book of Common Prayer”, a standard that, if rather loose, at least pointed to a text.  Further, the bishops insisted more concretely, “that all such changes be liable to revision by any synod of the Anglican Communion in which the said province shall be represented”.   And here, obviously, “representation” is not viewed as a veto power for one’s own interests, but rather as a participatory role bounded by unitive action.

One can argue whether this Lambeth resolution was consistently followed through in a strict sense.  And so, with respect to the broader diversity-unity question, the Communion has tended to address difficult issues on this score as they have arisen, rather than through a strict censorial mechanism, whether constitutional or confessional.  But does this lack of a defined template that can measure when diversity becomes “too much”, or when the “recognizable becomes unrecognizable” indicate that in fact there is no means of discernment at all?  Certainly not, since the dynamic of recognition – unity and separation — has performed this task quite adequately:  when one church is no longer recognized as representing other Anglicans before the world, diversity has exceeded the measure of unity.

And, indeed, if the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, based on whatever means by which he has made this determination (in this case, years of consultation) no longer recognizes TEC as representative of the Communion that – for TEC and many other Anglican churches – is substantively defined by their bonds with him, then it is a simple descriptive fact that TEC’s particular convictions have undercut common Communion commitments.  There is not some other mechanism that awaits application to reveal this fact.   Indeed, the claim made by the Presiding Bishop that a Covenant is needed first before this can be done, — and therefore it cannot be done now — only underscores TEC’s choice to move to the side of previously acknowledged means of discernment regarding appropriate Christian diversity with the Communion, and to claim a kind of Communion chaos on this matter that even more desperately seeks some kind of covenantal resolution.

Finally, what are we to make of the fact that the Presiding Bishop and other leaders of TEC have long sought to undercut the strength of local diversity within the American Church – there are vast swaths of no-go zones in TEC for traditional and conservative Episcopal clergy and scholars, imposed quite consciously by bishops and the committees they lead?  Or that they have now put in place disciplinary canons (the revised Title IV rules) that would give the Presiding Bishop the arguably unconstitutional power to inhibit fellow bishops without prior consultative permission?  None of this suggests a stable understanding of the relationship between diversity and Christian unity, despite claims to the contrary in her Pastoral Letter.   While the diversity-unity question deserves (and has received) significant Scriptural and theological scrutiny, its practical import is nonetheless contained within these kinds of “actions”, as Lund put it:  one judges the character of a tree of unity by its fruit, if always somewhat retrospectively.

Owning one’s own actions with grace

In a real sense, both Archbishop Williams and Presiding Bishop Schori agree on how TEC’s actions relate to the Communion’s common life:  they are actions taken separately from that life. What they disagree on is whether these actions thereby alter the degree of unity TEC now inhabits in relation to the Communion.   Yet, as I have tried to illustrate, that alteration is an inevitable ecclesiological consequence that is bound up with acting separately, at least as such action is understood within the framework of ecclesial relationship that most churches have long accepted.   That consequence is not one of punishment or juridical coercion.  It is simply an essential aspect to separated actions.  Nor are such actions as such “wrong”, although in this case the stated consensus of the Communion is that they are Scripturally illegitimate, which makes their insisted performance something that deliberately challenges the oneness of Anglican witness.  Thus, considered by all sides, even by TEC,  they are a mark of disunity.  It is that mark, and that mark alone, that is being acknowledged now by the Archbishop.  It would be another mark, the mark of graciousness, if the Presiding Bishop could, in this instance at least, agree with him on this point and accept the meaning of this reality.

The Presiding Bishop gave Opening Remarks. She asked for a moratorium on use of “National Church” and enumerated the countries in which The Episcopal Church [hereafter, TEC] works.

Again, in her recent sermon at Southwark Cathedral, the Presiding Bishop began by giving her standard enumeration of the sixteen countries:

I bring you greetings from The Episcopal Church, from Episcopalians in Taiwan and Micronesia, in Honduras, Ecuador, Columbia, Venezuela, Haiti, our biggest diocese, the Dominican Republic, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and from the Episcopal Churches in Europe, in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

Oddly missing from this list is the United States.

It is instructive to review the average Sunday attendance of TEC’s churches in these countries using the most recent data (2008) in the order of the Presiding Bishop’s standard recitation:

Taiwan – 680
Micronesia – 138
Honduras – 12,340
Ecuador – 2017
Columbia – 1081
Venezuela – 489
Haiti – 16,631
Dominican Republic – 3058
Virgin Islands – 2041
Puerto Rico – 2342
Churches in Europe – 1302   (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland)

In her recent address to the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Presiding Bishop used the same list that she used in Southwark, but began her address to another “Episcopal Church” by defending the use of the name “The” Episcopal Church: “we’ve struggled with what to call ourselves because ECUSA is not accurate.”  In fact, the official name of TEC as designated in its constitution is“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).”  She also stated that the Churches in Europe were “rapidly becoming indigenized.”  The data show that they have declined 13% since 2003 from an ASA of 1500 to 1302.

TEC is not, of course, the only “international” church in the Anglican Communion.  Others include the West Indies, Central America, Southern Cone, Ireland, West Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, Indian Ocean, Jerusalem and the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia.

But the most international of all Anglican churches remains the Church of England.  In addition to churches extra-provincial to Canterbury in Spain, Portugal, Bermuda, Ceylon and the Falkland Islands, the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe includes parishes or missions in forty-three countries with a weekly attendance of 12,600.

Sources:

TEC Statistics 2008

Presiding Bishop:

to Executive Council

at Southwark Cathedral

at SEC General Synod

Church of England Diocese in Europe

Church of England statistics

Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

The Episcopal News Service has announced that Bishop Ian Douglas of Connecticut was elected by the Executive Council on June 18 to succeed Bishop Catherine Roskam as the episcopal representative from TEC on the Anglican Consultative Council. In addition, a presbyter, the Rev. Gay Jennings, was elected to the clerical seat on the ACC formerly held but since vacated by Bishop Douglas.

We note that until recently Bishop Douglas also held a presbyter seat on the Executive Council as well but he formally resigned that position in February in light of his anticipated consecration to the episcopate. He noted in his resignation letter that:

The reason for my resignation is my “translation” to a new order as a result of being elected to the episcopate in the Diocese of Connecticut. I thus can no longer serve as a presbyter elected by the General Convention to the Executive Council.

Although there has been public confusion on this issue, Bishop Douglas has stated that he did not send a similar letter to the ACC, notwithstanding his recognition that he “can no longer serve as a presbyter” and the confirmation now by Executive Council that his presbyter seat on the ACC is vacant and needed to be filled. Indeed, today Bonnie Anderson described both seats as “open.”

This recognition by the Executive Council that Bishop Douglas’s clerical seat has been vacated and the attempt to elect him to the episcopal seat have clear consequences under the ACC’s constitution and rules. The point at which Bishop Douglas’s clerical seat was vacated was his consecration to the episcopate in April, and accordingly he ceased to be a member of the ACC’s standing committee at that time. Restoration of the ACC’s credibility requires recognition of these facts notwithstanding TEC’s determination to flout the ACC rules.

First, the date on which Bishop Douglas’s clerical seat on the ACC became vacant was April 17 when he was “translated” to the episcopate and could “no longer serve as a presbyter.” Clause 4(d) of the ACC constitution provides:

Bishops and other clerical members shall cease to be members on retirement from ecclesiastical office.

And ACC Resolution 4:28 proves that “retirement” in this context is used in a broad sense to mean leave or vacate the office or position for any reason:

Standing Committee members take their place on the Standing Committee as from the end of the Council Meeting at which they are elected and hold their position until such time as their successors take their place or they retire for any other reason. (Emphasis added.)

Therefore, Bishop Douglas’s membership on the ACC ended on April 17 when he retired from his presbyterial office and was “translated” to a new order.

Second, Bishop Douglas also ceased to be a member of the ACC standing committee at that moment. Article 2(f) of the ACC bylaws provides:

Elected members of the Standing Committee shall hold office from the end of the Council meeting at which they are appointed until the end of the last ordinary Council meeting which they would be entitled to attend but subject to earlier termination in the event that such elected member shall for any reason cease to be a member of the Council. (Emphasis added.)

Bishop Douglas therefore is no longer a member of the standing committee, and his seat on that committee is now also vacant.

Third, under Article 7 of the ACC bylaws, the standing committee may fill this vacancy only by appointing a member of the same order, in this case, clerical, as that of the former member:

Casual Vacancies on the Standing Committee

In the event of a casual vacancy occurring in the membership of the Standing Committee between Council meetings the Standing Committee itself shall have power to appoint a member of the Council of the same order as the representative who filled the vacant place and such member shall have full voting rights for the remainder of the term of service of the former member. Such member shall, subject to his or her eligibility for continuing membership of the Council, be eligible for re election to the Standing Committee at the next Council meeting. (Emphasis added.)

Therefore, the standing committee could not appoint, even if it wished to do so, Bishop Douglas to replace himself.

Fourth, Bishop Douglas is not eligible in any event to replace retiring Bishop Roskam as TEC’s episcopal representative to the ACC. Clause 4(c) of the ACC constitution provides:

On termination of his or her period of office, no member shall be eligible for re-appointment nor shall he or she be appointed an alternate member until a period of six years elapses from the date when such original membership ceased.

Bishop Douglas may not serve again on the ACC until 2016. This rule is constitutional, not merely a bylaw or resolution.

Fifth, even if Bishop Douglas could be elected to TEC’s episcopal seat, his new term would not begin until the next ACC meeting under ACC Resolution 4:28:

those elected or appointed to the Anglican Consultative Council begin their membership as from the beginning of the first Council meeting following their election.

He would not be qualified to serve on either the ACC or the standing committee under any circumstances until that time.

Finally, unless Bishop Douglas retracts the authorization given by his predecessor to perform same sex blessings in the diocese of Connecticut, he is not “qualified” to serve on the ACC under the precedent established at ACC-14 by the refusal to seat the appointed member of Uganda. The ACC Secretary General advised Archbishop Orombi that this refusal was on the grounds that:

The Joint Standing Committee has discussed this at length. We understand that the Revd Philip Ashey’s relationship with the Church of the Province of Uganda is as a result of a cross provincial intervention, and note that such interventions are contrary to the Windsor Report and other reports accepted by successive meetings of the Instruments of Communion, including Primates’ Meetings which you have attended. Therefore we regret to inform you that Mr Ashey’s current status means that we cannot regard him as a ‘qualified’ member according to Section 4(e) of the current Constitution.

Authorization of same sex blessings is “contrary to the Windsor Report” and to the moratoria that have now been affirmed by all four Instruments of Communion, including the ACC. Accordingly, Bishop Douglas is not, consistent with the interpretation articulated by the Secretary General, “qualified” to serve on the ACC.

It is significant that the standing committee’s decision concerning Fr. Ashey was taken the day before ACC-14 began in Jamaica. Under the Clause 8 of the ACC constitution, the standing committee is authorized to act for the Council “between meetings.” Rather than refer the matter of Ashey’s qualification to the Council itself the next day, the standing committee acted at the last possible minute, reportedly at the request of TEC’s Presiding Bishop, to reverse the prior decision by the Secretary General already communicated to Uganda to accept Ashey’s appointment. This last minute reversal, which the standing committee refused to submit to the Council as a whole, meant that Uganda had no opportunity to send a replacement and therefore had no clerical representative at ACC-14.

We have written on all these matters before, but TEC has now clearly set its face against complying with either the moratoria requested by the Communion’s Instruments or the measured requests made of it to hold the Communion together in light of TEC’s intransigence. TEC requires the resignation of Bishop Douglas from its own council, but shows contempt for the rules and canons of the Communion as a whole and other member churches. The ACC can ill afford to ignore the flouting of its rules by TEC. The ACC’s credibility has been badly damaged in recent years by actions that are widely seen as favoring TEC over wider Communion convictions and sentiments. And this harm has only been highlighted by resignation and principled absence from the ACC’s standing committee. Restoration of the ACC’s credibility can only begin by enforcing its rules in the case of Bishop Douglas’s attempt to hold onto a standing committee seat that became vacant under the rules on April 17.

Clearly the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral was written in response to the Pentecost letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  In that letter the Archbishop made it clear that the recent actions of TEC raise questions about the suitability of members of our church to represent the Anglican Communion in conversations with the Communion’s ecumenical partners.  He also indicated that he, as Archbishop of Canterbury, has authority to determine the status of the Presiding Bishop in respect to the meeting of the Primates. He said as well that he intends to consult with the Primates about the most prudent course for the exercise this authority.

Among many other things, the Pentecost Letter of the Archbishop presents the distinct possibility that TEC’s Presiding Bishop will be placed within what has been called a “second track” within the Communion. If she is in fact located on the “second track” so also in some way may be TEC, the church she represents.  The Pastoral of the Presiding Bishop must be understood in large measure as a response to this possibility.  Confronted with location within a “second track” of Anglicanism, the Presiding Bishop has thought it necessary to give an account of TEC’s actions both to the members of TEC and the various Provinces of the Anglican Communion; and in so doing block the course of action the Archbishop seems to be taking.

The account she offers of TEC’s action and the response of the Archbishop is intended (1) to defend the course TEC has chosen to follow, (2) to call into question both the probity of the Archbishop and his authority to respond as he has, and (3) set forth a normative account of what it means to be a Communion—an account that runs counter to the one contained in the Covenant each of the Provinces have been requested to consider for adoption.

(1) The letter is meant first as a defense of TEC’s actions. It is from start to finish a defense of an action already taken rather than a request for the Communion and its ecumenical partners in their collective wisdom to help TEC test the spirits.  Given the fact that TEC’s action represents a remarkable novelty in the history of Christian belief and practice, one would have thought that some testing of the Spirit not just by TEC but also by the Communion as a whole is in order.  In the face of a novelty of this magnitude the burden of proof surely lies with TEC.  After all, all four of the Instruments of Unity have urged that actions like those of TEC not be taken.  In the face of such widespread opposition, it is a mystery why the Presiding Bishop fails to see that this is so.

Nevertheless, she does not, and so strongly suggests that it is up to the Communion to catch up with TEC rather than the reverse.  When it comes to TEC’s actions, it seems that she believes it is proper for the tail to wag the dog.  Thus, she starts with a fait accompli, and then marshals a bevy of arguments to show (1) that TEC has done the right thing and that (2) that the Archbishop is just plain wrong in requesting that TEC’s representatives step down from bodies that represent the Communion in ecumenical settings.

The foundation of her defense is that TEC has taken the action it has in response to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. She notes that parts of the Anglican Communion and some of TEC’s Christian partners believe the same thing, but admits that many (she should have said most) Anglicans do not.  It is at this point that her argument takes a curious direction.  She seems to believe that in some mysterious way the Spirit is leading both TEC and her opponents.

This claim is certainly incoherent.  It’s hard to see how the Holy Spirit can favor TEC’s action yet be opposed to it.  That said, the burden of her letter is that TEC has understood the promptings of the Spirit correctly.  Thus, she makes much of the Spirit teaching new things and promoting diversity.  In doing so she relies heavily on John’s saying about the Spirit teaching new things and Acts depiction of each hearing the Gospel in their own language.  The Johannine citation is intended to justify TEC’s introduction of theological and ethical novelty, and the citation from Acts is meant to justify contextualization of the Gospel in ways suitable to various languages and cultures.  She seems to be saying both that TEC’s action is a new thing taught by the Spirit and that it is suited to America’s particular cultural and “missional” situation.

My colleague Christopher Seitz, in his article “God the Holy Spirit and being led into all truth,” has shown that both these claims misrepresent the plain meaning of the texts upon which she relies.  (http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2010/06/god-the-holy-spirit-and-“being-led-into-all-truth”/) What he says is convincing in itself and there is no need to rehearse his exegesis here.  The point is that the Presiding Bishop begins with the tendentious claim that TEC’s action accords with Scripture and represents a new work of the Holy Spirit.  Here is the tail (TEC’s action) that she then uses in an attempt to wag the dog (the weight of Communion teaching, procedure, and opinion).

(2) What I mean is this.  To sustain her position she launches an attack on the Archbishop’s response.  She seeks to show not only that the Archbishop is acting to quench the Spirit, but also that he has taken a morally dubious course that violates longstanding Anglican tradition. A hallmark of Anglicanism, she says, is a form of “diversity in community” that manifests “willingness to live in tension.” This tolerance of diversity “recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree.”

I have already noted that her view of the Spirit’s leading seems incoherent.  I will leave it to the historians among us to assess her claims about the tolerant character of the Elizabethan Settlement, but it has never seemed to me that the Act of Uniformity was meant to put up a big tent, or that the treatment of Anabaptists (they were burned) showed great openness to contrary views of the Christian’s relation to the state.  The fact of the matter is that “Anglican inclusiveness” serves more as a charter myth for legitimizing contested issues than a solid historical precedent for innovation.  Anglican history, though not overly confessional when it comes to doctrine, manifests extraordinary caution when it comes to changing practice.  If anything, caution in respect to changing practice is a “hallmark of Anglicanism.”

The real issue, however, is not the claim about “diversity in community” or “willingness to live in tension.”  The real issue is what Anglican’s are to do when the action of one Province, diocese, or person within the Communion takes an official action that others do not “recognize” as consonant with Christian belief and practice.  The issue of “recognition” stands in the background of the first Lambeth Conference.  There, the question of recognition centered on Bishop Colenso’s interpretation of Holy Scripture.  Latterly, the question of recognition surfaced with the consecration by TEC of a partnered gay man.  Now it has surfaced once more with the consecration of the Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles.

The Anglican Covenant is the latest attempt on the part of the Communion to address this issue.  The Pastoral Letter of the Presiding Bishop, however, simply assumes that the diversity of Anglicanism renders the question of “recognition” moot.  Each Province should have authority to determine the Christian adequacy of its actions on its own. Each Province should be free to determine the way in which Christian belief and practice are to be rendered within its particular cultural context.

Once more, the tail wags the dog!  Most Anglicans elsewhere may not “recognize” what TEC has done as “Christianly apt.”  But TEC is best suited to be judge in its own case and other Provinces, no matter what their convictions might be, should simply be accepting of this fact.  Having arrived at this point, however, the TEC tail wags the Communion dog in yet another way.  Given the unfettered autonomy of the Provinces the Presiding Bishop assumes, she sees the letter of the Archbishop as a  “troubling push toward centralized authority.”  It seems that in yet another way Anglican tradition has been violated.  So she notes, “Anglicanism as a body began in the repudiation of the control of the Bishop of Rome.”

The statements of the Archbishop that “push toward centralized authority” put the Presiding Bishop in mind of the Anglican Covenant.  She sees this proposal also as an “instrument of control” (and so contrary to the Anglican tradition of diversity).  Thus, while the Archbishop in all his communications has spoken of “recognition” and “consequences” she speaks of an “instrument of control” that imposes “sanctions.”  Clearly, she seeks to depict the Archbishop and the Covenant as harbingers of a centralized Anglican authority like the Vatican.  Given these views, one cannot imagine those within TEC who share the Presiding Bishop’s views giving support to the proposed Covenant.

Be that as it may, I can only say in response that either she has failed to understand the Covenant proposal or she is simply distorting its plain meaning.  The dreaded Section Four she mentions does no more than lay out a procedure for recognition or non-recognition of contested action. In this procedure there is no central authority to be found.  If anything, the process is so diffuse one wonders how any common judgment can be arrived at.  A Standing Committee receives questions about recognition, assesses them and possible consequences, passes recommendations on the Primates and the ACC and these recommendations are in turn assessed by each of the Provinces.  This doesn’t look much like the Vatican to me.

So the claim is that the Archbishop’s letter lies outside the circle of Anglican tradition.  I wish she had stopped here, but she didn’t.  She goes on to question the moral probity of the Archbishop’s request.  In his attempt to limit the TEC’s autonomy, she detects a colonial attitude that “attempts to impose a single understanding across widely varying contexts and cultures.”  The Archbishop’s letter thus gives expression to “the same kind of colonial excess practiced by many of our colonial forbears.”  So now TEC is the victim of “colonial excess” by the same people from whom we broke through a revolution.  All one can say is that this is a curious charge, given the fact that the most common criticism of the Archbishop is that he has been loath to use the authority of his office to rein in TEC’s idiosyncratic actions and in his letter he proposed only the most modest consequences.

(3) Nevertheless, modest though the proposed consequences may be, they have prompted another wag of the dog’s tail.  This time, in order to place TEC’s action beyond the reach of communion reaction, she in fact proposes an account of communion that legitimates TEC’s claim to autonomy rather than the view of mutual subjection within the body of Christ that stands at the foundation of the Covenant.  She wants no checks on the actions of the various Provinces of the Communion.  By implication, mutually recognized faith and practice do not play a central role in the Communion of Anglicans.  Communion then, as her final paragraph makes plain, consists of listening one to another, continuing conversation, joint efforts in theological education, and less formal and more local partnerships in mission and ministry. As best I can determine, her view of communion does not flow from mutually recognized belief and practice but from bilateral, even multilateral assistance in mission and ministry.

I have argued elsewhere, that in comparison with that proposed in the Covenant, her view of communion is “thin” rather than “thick.”  It does not ask the Provinces to have mutually recognizable forms of belief and practice—only that they keep open lines of communication and provide one another mutual assistance.  And it appears that this view of communion stems from an attempt to justify a contested action already taken.  The tail wags the dog!

I am prepared to say also that this view of communion amounts to an attempt to export American denominationalism and in so doing remake the Communion in TEC’s image.  Americans are prone to this sort of thing. The Presiding Bishop’s proposal remakes the world in America’s image and so reduces the various Provinces of the Communion to denominated national expressions that share the same historical origins but need not see in one another forms of belief and practice they recognize.  Each is free to cooperate or not as they may see fit.

I could spend far more time and space expositing the two views of communion the letters of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop exemplify.  That discussion, however, points to the theological and practical work that lies ahead for the Communion in the coming season.  All I can do here is indicate the sort of challenges that lie before us.  Those challenges, so it seems to me, press hard upon us even now.  As I write, the Presiding Bishop has undertaken an extensive and intensive travel schedule to Canada, England, and Scotland. She appears to be in the midst of a diplomatic campaign to gain support for TEC’s actions and for her view of communion life.  So she seeks to cast doubt on the wisdom and probity of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief symbol and instrument of Anglican unity and identity.  She seeks also the call into question the proposed Covenant.  She also promotes a thin account of communion that runs counter to the proposed Covenant.  The Covenant now before the Communion sees communion as more than a means for promoting cooperation and mutual support.  The Covenant supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury is a means of maintaining commonly recognized forms of belief and life and so also a coherent and common view of the mission to which the Provinces of the Communion are called.

The central teaching of Jesus Christ in John’s Gospel concerning the Holy Spirit is found in chapters 14 and 16 of the Fourth Gospel. The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church is representative of the view that the Holy Spirit (or “the Spirit”) is responsible for endorsing a new understanding of sexual relationships as appropriate for members of the same gender. The warrant for this view more widely held is John 16: God the Holy Spirit is ‘leading the church into a truth’ the church has not known until now, and continues not to know elsewhere, as God has spoken this to The Episcopal Church  (“The Spirit does seem to be saying to many within The Episcopal Church that gay and lesbian persons are God’s good creation, that an aspect of good creation is the possibility of lifelong, faithful partnership, and that such persons may indeed be good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the Church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones”). This could either be a matter of timing – so technically God the Holy Spirit speaks only one truth on this matter, and so those who have not heard the Holy Spirit will hear the Holy Spirit leading them into new truth eventually (“Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” [John 16:12-13])  – or it could be that the Holy Spirit endorses diversity of hearings (“That growing awareness does not deny the reality that many Anglicans and not a few Episcopalians still fervently hold traditional views about human sexuality”) . This latter understanding seeks grounding in the Presiding Bishop’s understanding of the Pentecost event of Acts 2 (“Pentecost is most fundamentally a continuing gift of the Spirit, rather than a limitation or quenching of that Spirit”) as contrasted with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reading of Pentecost  as a “single understanding of gospel realities”(as she puts it) in a letter to which she is responding in defense of her own position.

We note in passing that: 1) John’s account of the Holy Spirit involves several aspects, explained in the narrative movement of his Gospel, and that any reading of John needs to be able to integrate all of these if Christ’s teaching is to be coherent as intended (hence Christ’s concern with truth); 2) the Holy Spirit can only with difficulty be seen as ‘inspiring diversity’ in Acts; the tension in the account is between a gift of foreign languages that are heard as intelligible by Jews from the widest geographical reach in their first or native tongues (so Calvin et al); or the gift is of a single tongue language that all these gathered Jews are inspired to hear as intelligible in their native languages; the history of interpretation is not uniform here. But in neither case is the point that the Holy Spirit inspires diversity, but the opposite: the Gospel is heard and received with power because the Holy Spirit overcomes the diversity that has hindered such a reception (the fact that the recipients are all Jews – with some proselytes – who have come to Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks to hear the marvelous single account of God’s giving of Torah is also missing from her account); and finally 3) an account of John as inspiring a new truth that all will in time come to hear and acknowledge cannot be squared with an account of the Holy Spirit as inspiring or endorsing diversity of hearings.

But what of the idea of the Holy Spirit (the Advocate, the Comforter) inspiring the church to receive something new? This seems to be the major biblical ‘theme’ the proponents of a new teaching on sexuality appeal to.

In chapter 14 of John’s Gospel the Comforter is to be Christ present with the church after the Ascension. The earthly Christ will take his risen and ascended life and be with the Father, but the Holy Spirit will bring that risen and ascended life to the church.  “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Comforter…I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (14:16,18).

What kind of Holy Spirit teaching can be called a ‘guiding into truth’ and ‘a disclosure of things to come’ (John 16:13)? We are given a hint of it in 16:8-11, so far as the world at large is concerned: the Holy Spirit will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgment. That is, the Holy Spirit will carry on the earthly Christ’s work after his ascension. This extension ministry of Christ will have its counterpart in the church itself (16:12). The church referred to in contrast to the world is represented by those for whom Christ is praying. Many more things are to be said, because they cannot now bear them or understand them. This theme appears elsewhere in John’s Gospel and it is a prominent one at the Cross and in the Resurrection appearances themselves (belief happens incrementally, with the beloved disciple, then Mary, then the others, then Thomas, but blessed are they who have not seen but come to belief via the testimony of John’s Gospel).

The circle of disciples around Jesus in his earthly ministry is unable to grasp the significance of all he is saying and intending. The Holy Spirit’s work is to see that comprehension of what Christ taught and intended is grasped. He takes what is of Christ, including that which was not grasped or understood, and makes it known (16:15). He has no speech of his own initiative, but hears what Christ speaks and has spoken (16:13). There is no Holy Spirit speaking that is not Christ speaking, but now in a form that can be borne and received.  John 14:26 puts it in simplest form: “But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, bringing to your remembrance all that I have said.”

What is new is capacitated understanding, which takes the form of enlarged content only because of this. What Jesus has taught but was not grasped in his earthly life is to be grasped, including the things which Christ (and the scriptures of Israel) taught pertaining to the providential life of the church beyond the scope of Jesus’s sign ministry amongst his disciples, carried out in his incarnation life. The beloved disciple is the example of such initial grasping. But the revelation of scripture (the Old Testament) as witness to Christ and the testimony of the beloved disciple in the form of the written Gospel –these will adequately convey the truth about him by the agency of God the Holy Spirit. The continuity with Christ is everywhere at the fore. (The example of the new covenant in Jer 31 is a type of this: the new covenant is the covenant given to the original disciples of Moses, but now comprehended via a new heart and understanding as to its truthful purpose).

Here we are able to see the continuity of John and Acts, in spite of their differences in narrative form and authorship, that is missing in the Presiding Bishop’s account of the Holy Spirit, where she speaks of John’s ‘new truth’ and Acts’ ‘diversity of truth’ as somehow mutually informing. When the Holy Spirit manifests His life, now with the Gentile (much favored of the Jews) Cornelius and those who heard Peter’s evangelical proclamation, Luke says that this is the same Holy Spirit at work within the household of God (Acts 10:45). So when Peter gives account of the baptism of Cornelius and those upon whom the Holy Spirit came, before the circumcised, the Holy Spirit is the central actor and warrant in his undertaking. When the Holy Spirit “fell upon them just as He did upon us” Peter says he remembered the word of the Lord, how he said “John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Here is a perfect example of what John means by the Holy Spirit’s vocation. What could not be borne, or what was not appropriate to the earthly ministry of Christ, given its providential purpose, is now unveiling its significance. It is what Jesus had said and intended. It is what the Holy Spirit takes from him and sets down as true in the providential life of the church. It can be seen in the record, can be referred to specifically, whose purpose is now taking form.

The same pattern is to be observed when a fuller account of Peter’s (and Paul and Barnabas’s) ministry among the providentially prepared gentiles is given in Jerusalem in Acts 15. Critical is continuity with the message of the Prophets (‘with this the words of the Prophets agree, just as it is written’, Acts 15:15) and the Law. There is a ‘law for gentiles’ inside the Torah of Moses, pertaining to the ‘sojourner in the midst of Israel,’ that is, those among the nations that came out of Egypt with the household of God (the injunctions laid upon the gentiles brought near are to be found in Leviticus 18-19). The laws pertaining to them were given so as to guide the apostolic decree as the Holy Spirit revealed what was God’s purpose imbedded and providentially prepared in the first covenant, “For Moses from ancient generations has in every city those who preach him” (Acts 15:21). The Holy Spirit is pleased to declare no greater burden than these (15:28). Continuity and agreement with the teaching of the Lord, on the one hand, and the revelation of God to Israel, on the other. The truth being led into is a truth given in the Lord Christ and in the LORD God, but whose purpose is now revealed. It can be cited in the record (“it is written,” “I remembered the word of the Lord”) and the Holy Spirit’s guidance is required to understand the agreement and continuity now appropriate for its time, but given of old. The same dynamic animates the canonical shape of the Book of Isaiah in its final form, where “the former thing” is appealed to in order to ground the proclamation until such time as its orienting power gives rise to perception of a new thing, in full continuity with it, but whose purpose is for a later generation able to hear because gifted by the Holy Spirit’s speaking through the Prophet.

We are grateful that the Presiding Bishop has sought to ground her appeal to diversity and new truth in a public message available for the Church’s evaluation and testing. It explains what kind of vision for the Episcopal Church she is seeking to defend. On the one hand, she believes the Holy Spirit has spoken in truthful and special (timely) ways to those who share this view in TEC. On the other hand, she believes diversity on this matter is equally a gifting warranted by the pentecostal event, explaining why the majority of the Anglican Communion and the vast preponderance of Christians worldwide (including the saints numbered on another shore) attended and attend to different Holy Spirit guidance and a different confession of God the Holy Spirit, “who spake by the prophets…who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” Her remarks help frame the matter in clear ways, which we can only pray is itself a gift of God the Holy Spirit, whose vocation is to glorify Christ and convict the world in respect of him. St Paul reveals that appeals to the Spirit and the Spirit’s manifestation required testing in the earliest Christian Churches, especially those with large gentile numbers.  Discerning the work and person of God the Holy Spirit was necessary and was an evangelical challenge.

John and Acts provide the record given to the church so that the Holy Spirit’s work might be recognised,  adjudicated, and confessed.  The Holy Spirit’s deliverances are those of the Risen and Ascended Christ, in agreement with the providential will of the Father as expressed in the Law and the Prophets, whose subject matter is Christ, latent and now patent (St Augustine). The Presiding Bishop’s account of the Spirit as bringing a truth without prior testimony or dominical warrant, which at the same time gives rise to diversity as a pentecostal gift, diverges in extreme ways from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles. It is a teaching lacking continuity and agreement with the witness of Christians in our present day, in the worldwide body, and because without biblical warrant, it is also nowhere attested in the history of the church’s teaching.

We conclude this teaching comes from a conviction already held, independently of what is customarily sought in respect of a warrant of God the Holy Spirit (see the Catechism of the BCP), because of cultural assumptions about the intentions of sexual activity in our age and because TEC has already acted on these. Recourse is therefore sought in a general way to scriptural themes, like ‘inclusion’ or the dynamic of God’s life with Israel and the apostles, independently of the specifics of the scriptural witness (the first pentecostal event was Jewish; Cornelius was not a generic convert; the rules for gentiles in Acts are from Leviticus; ‘all truth’ and ‘new truths’ are inconsistent concepts). This is not what has been held up in times past as scriptural testing, and one may doubt how central such testing really is, especially when the Spirit is being invoked as the bearer of new truth. Almost in the nature of the case such new revelations of the Spirit must be without precedent.  That is what makes them new in a way independent of questions of truth, so critical to Christ’s teaching in John’s Gospel.

This mindset is deeply tied up with the progressivistic orientation of Western consumerism, where the old is constantly to be discarded, as new, better, improved versions are marketed for our attention and our consumption. Against such a climate John’s words receive even sharper convicting force, precisely as the lines blurring the church and the world, so crucial to his account of the work of The Comforter (“this is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold him or know him” 14:17) are erased in the name of ‘new revelation.’ We begin to see an understanding of newness that is indebted to an account of time the scriptural witness is keen to distinguish from God’s electing and adopting purposes in Christ Jesus. Truthful agreement and continuity inside the work of the One God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit – this is what is testified to in the two testaments of one Christian Scripture. On the account we are being presented with in the Presiding Bishop’s Letter, this activity of God in time has been adjusted so that the Holy Spirit is taken to be a warrant for convictions already held and acted on, and has become an independent agent of ‘revelation.’ The ‘Holy Spirit’ is precisely that spirit which speaks in ways that cannot be continuous with ‘prophet and apostle’ because newness requires unprecedented testimony. This is not what the church has confessed when it speaks of God the Holy Spirit, “who spake by the prophets, and “who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.”

Bishops of the church are charged by solemn vow before God the Holy Trinity with guarding the witness of prophet and apostle and properly setting forth their teaching. The Presiding Bishop rightly understands this solemn charge as she seeks to defend her views by recourse to Christian Scripture, in respect of Acts’ account of Pentecost and also based upon John’s Gospel. In this she has clarified what she understands to be the biblical warrant for her view of the Holy Spirit as an agent of new truth. This view is however not consistent with what the witness of prophet and apostle states and the church would be in error should it follow her novel reading. We must test the Spirit, Paul says. The Holy Spirit cannot be an agent of truth not expressly warranted by Christ or a Christian apprehension of the sense of prophetic teaching in the Old Testament. This is what we see as crucial to an account of the work of the Holy Spirit in Acts and John. It is to her credit that the Presiding Bishop has sought publicly to defend her novel view and so explain how the Holy Spirit can be showing the way within TEC on matters of sexual relationships and yet speaking in precisely the opposite way to the majority of Christians in time and space. The argument must be made as the warrants for such a novel view must be found if the church’s teaching is to be overthrown.

This has not been accomplished in the Pentecost Letter though we are helped in seeing what the effort must undertake if it wishes to displace the classical confession of God the Holy Spirit as grounded in Holy Scripture. This is indeed a question before the church regarding  the work of the Holy Spirit properly understood, and she is right to focus her discussion on this crucial theological confession. This puts the argument for a change in teaching where it belongs, on a proper account of theological truth as given through the Holy Spirit’s work, as heard through the witness of Prophet and Apostle. Who is the Holy Spirit and how is He known, worshipped, and obeyed? We have rehearsed the classical position here and pointed to its biblical warrants. It will take a clear overthrowing of that confession if the church is to proceed as the Presiding Bishops urges. If not, the teaching would be opposed to the Holy Spirit’s work of unifying the church according to Christ’s prayer and the Father’s purpose in sending Him. The Holy Spirit cannot speak against Himself, and always speaks of the love of the Father for the Son. To Him be glory and honor, who with the Father and the Son is One God, world without end. AMEN.

The tearing down, in any case, is what is most obvious, perhaps, to outsiders or onlookers from within.  One by one, for instance, the so-called “Instruments of Unity” for Anglicans around the world have been eroded in their perceived integrity, and certainly in their effectiveness.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, over the past decade (from Lord Carey through Rowan Williams), has issued pleas, statements, constructive ideas, hopes.  But when, last month, a schedule conflict, not to mention in any case the ash of an Icelandic volcano, kept him from the South to South Encounter of non-Western churches in Singapore, the transient and quivering video image of his unfocused greeting was symbolically all that was left of his presence to an increasingly estranged majority of world Anglicans.  For whatever reasons – the constraint imposed on Lambeth’s voice by America’s money monopoly on Communion bureaucracy, loyalties divided between Britain and Communion, mixed convictions within his own mind, an under-appreciation of the demanded influence of his own witness? —  ten  years of people all going their own way has rendered the moral authority of his voice almost inaudible.

The Primates’ Meeting had already had several forays into declarative direction, but with each effort the mutual scorn of its members one for another, and their desire to play to their own constituencies, left their communiqués more and more gutted of persuasive substance.   So that now, to be an “archbishop” for many is to embody the antithesis to outreaching charity.

The Lambeth Conference, of course, needed only one meeting in 2008 to demonstrate its marginalization in leadership:  talking without decision, boycotted by a quarter of its most dissatisfied members, the great gathering of Anglican episcopal leaders became an inward looking and reflexive publicity opportunity for program coordinators.  It was astonishing to see how thoroughly and quickly one of the most august meetings in the Christian Church had lost its way.

And the Anglican Consultative Council?  A May, 2009 self-combustion over simple voting procedures left this “most representative” gathering of the Communion  without credibility as anything but an arena for political posturing and finagling.  The national church model that, primarily, lies behind the provincial ordering of the ACC, has instead poisoned the search for shared hope and mutual subjection among the council’s members, a subversion led by the most nationalistically aggressive of the all the provinces, the Episcopal Church.  Current attempts by TEC to manipulate its position on the ACC’s Standing Committee, seemingly abetted by the Anglican Communion Office, only underscores this sorry state of affairs.

Why mince words here?  For some years now – since even before the Virginia Report of the late 1990’s — it has been stated formally over and over again that the structures of the Anglican Communion needed redefinition and rebuilding, so as to be able to function fruitfully. Key efforts were made to give direction to such reconstruction.  A decade of failure, however, has simply borne out an already established and publicly stated fear.

But trying to set up alternative structures has not fared much better.  If the recent Singapore meeting exposed a ten-year lapse in credibility for existing Communion structures, it also put the lie to any attractive claim for alternative structures that, in the past 10 years, some portions of the Communion have so assiduously been at work to erect:  new provinces in North America; special “primatial councils” for common confessors;  extra-jurisdictional missionary fiefdoms; episcopal netwoks of alternative oversight.   Instead, the gathering proved to be what every other Anglican gathering has been in the past decade:  in addition to faithful witness and counsel, also a time for political maneuver, secretive changing of agendas at the last moment, North Americans coming in and grabbing the microphones and running meetings, disagreements over this and that strategy and doctrine.  That a common communiqué emerged at all was cause for surprise by the end;  that it expressed little tangible except a shared dislike for Communion structures and for TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada was probably the most one could have predicted, which isn’t very much, let alone particularly edifying.

There are some obvious conclusions to draw from these ten years.

First, that Anglican Communion “structuralism” – building offices and commissions and adjudicating bodies, in the wake of the 1963 Toronto Congress – is at an end, at least in its presently imagined forms.  This is true for the official structures; it is also true for the alternative structures.  The drift now between national churches and confessional bodies is too great to ensure their continued functioning and support in any energetic fashion.  Not that any of these structures, official or otherwise, are simply about to disappear; they won’t and they shouldn’t, given that they continue to provide important links to the wider Church and mission, and can, in any case, be renewed.  But fewer and fewer really care for them, no one really trusts them, no one really wants to let them have power over their lives.  If I were an employee of the Anglican Communion Office or of its shadow embodiments, I would look for a new job, if only for economic motives:  the money is drying up.

Second, the Anglican Covenant is both a product of this descending drift, as well as a response to it.  It is important to recognize both aspects and act and pray accordingly.   If the Covenant is viewed and pursued primarily as an extension of the desire to structuralize Anglicanism, in some new way or in some better way, it will go nowhere. Both liberals and conservatives have said as much, even as they try hard to control for themselves any new structures that might emerge. If, however, the Covenant is something that can grow up within such existing structures, not to destroy them but to make use of them as it is possible, and then go beyond them in their purpose, motive, and spirit, then perhaps it can flourish as a gift of renewal.  Certainly that remains my own hope. But we are currently paralyzed over the structural elements of the Covenant – Standing Committees, memberships, who gets to decide this or that, why my church can’t be a member on its own terms, and so on – that its promise for a new life based on common witness and accountability in Christ as a motivating desire is being held hostage by the old ways of self-interest.    I continue to wonder why those who are ready to live a new life together in this way do not simply go forward with the Covenant, maintaining all the while their place within the rickety scaffolding of the Communion as it is, and see what the spirit of Christ will accomplish among them and for the sake of others.  For the sake of others:  once Anglicans can realize that this is the purpose of their Christian calling and the authentic purpose of a Covenant – not self-protection – and that “obligations” assumed from and on behalf of others are not to be feared but are to be sought, then we will be able to speak of an emerging maturity among our leaders and our own ministry.

Third, the split between Global South Anglican churches and most Western Anglicans is obvious and growing, if unevenly so.  Ten years have squandered trust and fanned the flames of mutual manipulation; it has diluted mission, and loosened ties.  It has, in fact, broken communion in the most literal sense of recognized ministries, sacramental life, and shared sacrifice.  That is what waiting so long has done. For all the desire that at least “orthodox” Anglicans could gather as one, the desire itself was founded on practical fractures and pressures and political moves that could never sustain a coherent Gospel, simply because it was riddled with too much varied self-interest from the start.  And this has put a light upon the weaknesses of all – East, West, North, and South together.  Idealizations are never healthy, so it is good and proper that they be exposed;  but the shattering of perceived integrities, unless there is offered with it a means to grasp disclosed reality with hope, is hardly a form of redemption.

Fourth, in the near run, the Western and Global South ecclesial fates are simply different, and they should never have been coupled, as they were from 2000 on, as a means of ecclesial rescue or agenda-promotion.   Many Global South churches have taken their steps into full material independence, and their internal life, for all its struggles and sometimes because of the material demands that have drawn forth miraculous courage, has an intrinsic energy that will last them for the immediate present.  The Anglican churches of the West, on the other hand, are so weak that their internal connections are fundamentally unstable apart from structures.  But because the structures are failing, therefore so will necessarily unravel  the ability of Western Anglicans to stay connected in any formally effective way.

Fifth:  the failure of the national model for Anglicanism has become apparent.  and it has become apparent just when, as it were, the judgment of God has “given us up” to the very thing that is now shown to be unworkable.  But we wanted it so much, and we linked our Anglican identities so closely to our national pride – in Britain and in America at the least — that the idol has become a futile passion, much as Paul explains in Romans 1.  Since at least the 18th century, the press for a “national” church as somehow the charism of Anglicanism vied with an even deeper movement of emerging communion as a better way.  And while nationalism in the secular world left many bodies in its wake, the communion current grew yet more persistently, finally emerging as the brighter stream in the midst of nationalism’s spreading wreckage, from the late 19th century on.  And now, in the 21st century, as if in some great, final battle, the “national church” ideal – embodied in the pretensions of a sagging Episcopal Church and her self-proclaimed special grace —  now faces off with a communion vocation that Christians around the world have clamored after and ecumenical confessors have prayed for and missionaries have long witnessed to.   But it is an enfeebled sword that aging nationalism wields., and she will wither, God willing.

So, sixth, and most important practically:  for the moment the Western Anglican churches are being left to their own devices. And this is as it should be.  The Anglican Communion structures and anti-structures have proven impotent and, even if they do not disappear (and they probably will not, on both sides) they are weak reeds to lean upon.  Nonetheless, what is now emerging as a fact in our midst in the West is a kind of new congregationalism, irrespective of theology.

I mean this not in terms of ecclesiological commitment, but rather in terms of simple practice:  congregations are basically “on their own” now with respect to the ordering of their fruitful lives.  Perhaps it has always been thus to an extent in Western Protestantism (and now in Western Catholicism increasingly). We know that it was the case in pre-Revolutionary America for decades. But the new issue is that this is how it must be, in the face of the collapse of unitive structures or at least of their credibility, of their discursive force and persuasive resources.  Western Anglicans have been pressed into the same place as all their Protestant brethren in the West, and all their pretences to catholicity or “communion” are shown to be just that.  Anglican liberals in North America now claim this independence as their right – “locality”! – forgetting how once they fought for the opposite view; Anglican conservatives, while still fussing over international structures, have long been struggling with the practical inevitabilities of “being on one’s own” for some time, outnumbered by often hostile brethren and a larger culture inimical to their commitments. And to this extent, we Christians in the West are all in the same boat now – hence, if “congregationalism” is where we have been pressed, it is a shared condition that fits a historical and social moment.  And we must be Esthers here, “for just such a time as this”.

For all this represents a kind of historical-truth-telling:  you have insisted on your own way, now you must live it, as God proclaims to Israel through the prophet Samuel (1 Sam. 8).  But because history is God’s, it is also a divinely historical challenge: what can you offer in return, He asks?   God took the Israelites’ rebellious demand for a king, and turned it into a transfiguring promise, all the while holding accountable the people for the very forms of life they had insisted upon – accountable, through the midst of a matrix of divine mercy and continual renewal that, for all its low gratings, its defeats and exiles, its discipline, turned into the “new creation” of an Incarnate Messiah Lord.  What will Anglicans do with it?

This is not a futile question issued in denial of a failure of grave sorts.  It is the kind of question Christians are called to ask because their hope is in the Lord and because that Lord is the Lord of heaven and earth and therefore not far even from the very forms of our faults.  While I am sometimes incredulous to meet and hear of young people who seek now to become Anglicans in North America, eager and inspired yet well aware of the troubles we are in, it is a sinful incredulity on my part.  They come – and there are many of them! —  because their eyes are open, and they can see with the prophet’s vision the surrounding armies of the Lord that the frightened servants cannot and will not (2 Kings 6).  And they can see that He is leading us to a greater promise.  We need to listen to these younger and newer brethren among us.

For it is just in this newly isolated and enforced congregationalism that Anglicans in North America do have resources that are peculiar, and that the larger atheizing culture secretly thirsts after.  One is never truly “on one’s own”, in any case, just as Elijah was pressed into recognizing (1 Kings 19);  and a demanded seclusion and wandering is given by God always for the building up of a people who do not otherwise know how properly to assess their gifts for the world, for others.

And so, indeed, Anglicans in North America have been well equipped for this time of pilgrimage.  We have our prayerbooks and forms of common life (locally!); our rhythms of corporate formation; most centrally, our sense of accountability to Scripture – which is given us first of all in Christ! —  and the larger Church (though we feel now so separated from them);  our vast storehouse of learning and reflection;  and practically, our long understanding that, however locally matters may be colored, their hue is given for a larger canvas, a “common” life that now needs to be discovered anew, but not for that less pressing.  God has become our Gamaliel (Acts 5) – to every Christian and unChristian congregation in North America – giving us the local space we demanded, and allowing us the room to have our true colors disclosed.

North American priests and lay leaders, faithful priests to the people of Christ,  will need to become, not simply “mission-minded”  – that is already an old saw, that has had its teeth blunted in the wake of now decades-long infomercialized marketing ploys – but minded and hearted towards a mission that is persevering and formational at its root.  The “conversion of the barbarians” is now a task renewed, and with the same long view (and scattered strategies bound to extravagant self-giving most of all) that we know, at least retrospectively, was necessary the last time round, in the 6th through the 9th centuries.   This is, after all, the refrain I hear over and over from younger priests who wonder at the vocation they have assumed in their often isolated cures or beleaguered church plants, within the encroaching confines of a forgetting and increasingly desperate atheistical culture:  how shall our people learn for the long haul? I realize now that I was not sent here for today or tomorrow, but for the Third Day, as it were, for the walk that reaches Jerusalem as its end (Lk. 13:31ff.). They will learn by a substantive, patient, and ecumenically engaged catechesis.  There will be no shortcuts to Zion.

And Anglicans have all the tools to do this, should they recognize again this calling.  Priests must come together, across distances as necessary, and work these kinds of programs out; they must recruit and form catechists from among their congregations as a first order of business; they must pray with and for each other;  and they must have the rootedness of a prayerful existence bound to God of their own such that they can live this vocation to its end, over the generations.  Daily office?  Any priest or lay leader who does not engage this in some form, is chaff for the winds. The Eucharist as the end of common prayer?  Without reaching that end, ever and again, and forming for that end, baptizing and raising up and serving for that end, and being formed through that end, there are left only the excuses of those who do not understand what a divine invitation really is (Mt. 22).

But do not bishops count, or their dioceses, and all the orderings of the primitive church down through the ages?  Is this not an essential part of the Anglican self-identity? Of course; nor has this ordering disappeared, and nor should we allow it to do so.  I am not suggesting a new ecclesiology here, but rather a way we must face into the one we believe is given by God for the ordering of our lives. Because, for the moment, in North America, the bishops have become the Levites singing before a God who seeks another sacrifice altogether.  Bishops will have to learn to be pastoral witnesses, rather than be reliant upon the expectations of an office (figuratively and in some cases, literally).  They will need to don their own white robes, so that their song at the altar is one with all the people of God who have gone through that tribulation we are called into. And this they will do; and this they can be helped at doing by the people who call them out and who have themselves been formed among the Lamb’s great throng.  The grand worries over bishops and their powers, the gnawing demands that our agreements or disagreements monopolize our energies, the nostalgia over integral structures – these have eaten away at the more radical calling that congregations, priests, and bishops all have to give themselves over to the task of Christian conversion and formation that is, quite frankly, capable of transcending such worries, demands, and nostalgias in the first place.  Ecclesiology is not the issue; what is at issue is faithfulness that will not be distracted, so that the forms of the Church can be truly seen and rejoiced in.

Many traditional Christians fear that congregations and priests are not strong enough to resist the onslaught of secular antagonists from without and ecclesial opposition and faithlessness from within.  How can we form a people in a converting and enduring faith when many of our own bishops will not support the congregational efforts this demands, or when their self-regard consistently undermines stability and credibility?  But this is a forgetful people who voice such anxieties!  John Henry Newman long ago pointed out that the Church survived the 4th century mainly through the witness of her laity and priests, even while her leaders proved, for years in many places, to be incompetents, idolators of greed, or heretics (“On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine”, 1859).  It was an astonishing recognition for many in Newman’s time – and frightening to some bishops! — and it seems to remain so today.  But there is no reason to despair about such a task set before us, precisely because we can look back and see the challenges and triumphs of the past in similar and even more parlous circumstances.  The times have not changed, in many respects;  what is different now is perhaps the accepted dilution of a people’s courage and resilience, not to mention sheer faithful acuity.  And that, of course, can be met and overcome with the prayer and practice of renewal.  Such is our calling and promise;  and such is the history of the Church.

The Anglican Communion has, for some years recently, known all this in a way:  projects for catechesis (thus far taken up in the Global South), for theological education, for episcopal renewal are all on the burners.  And they should remain there and be stirred and served as long as there are ways and monies to support them.  These projects have emerged as important matters because in fact the life of congregations does move outwards and does actually live across often unseen networks of relation that do really form a  “communion” of divine life.  It is only that now, the foolishness of relying on such networks as the foundation of communion rather than as its fruit has been exposed.

To be sure, this is not a matter of giving up on the particular ecclesial goals we have worked so hard for over the past ten years:  more trustworthy councils; honesty and transparency in decision-making, unflinching patience bound to unswerving faith; a renewing covenantal self-offering to others. I for one wouldn’t dream of it, as if one could “go do ministry” (as one often hears) in ignorance of or by dismissing the necessary attempts to forge honest and fair councils, consistent and faithful discipline,  and a reordered ecclesial context that actually supports the work of a Western mission of reconversion in a credible manner.   This is work that must continue and never be disdained, in part out of a sense of hope for the future as much as out of a need for help in the present.  But it is, nonetheless, only a part, and an often modest part, to the larger task;  to have allowed it to represent the sole focus of our hopes themselves, so that their disappointment must mean the undermining of faith itself (as it has for many), has proven a destructive confusion.  The presenting, and enormously important, problem of our Christian sexual identities and callings will not be faithfully resolved, we now know, primarily through structural change.  Rather, such a resolution is founded on a reconversion to and formation in the Christian Scriptures through the life of the Spirit, that is a far broader and deeper task than we had imagined.  But it is also a tremendously exciting service.

So, after ten years (and more) we are thrust back to our roots.  The Anglican Communion is hardly dead, although she is demonstrably weak. But her weakness has as much to do with the immaturity of her vigorous branches as with the senescence of her original members.  The past ten years have shown that the younger churches need more growing up and steadied charity;  and that the older churches need to nurture their own children in their midst, rather than abandon them on the stoops of aging and pusillanimous expectations.  A good and necessary lesson!  If each could be free and brave enough – God give the grace! – to pursue such vocations without being drawn into the competitions of control, then the very thing that the Devil fears the most – that the scattered children of God might indeed be gathered (Jn 11:52) – will actually come to pass, here at the center of a rebellious people.  By all means, let the structures of the Communion carry on, honestly and humbly and faithfully, as they are able; but their full transformation cannot precede our own.

The primary correction is that Bishop Douglas has resigned Executive Council. He will at some point not be the ACC clergy member from The Episcopal Church, but when is still in question.

Although Fr. Harris changed his original statement that “Bishop Douglas announced his resignation from the ACC position as clerical member from TEC at the February meeting of Executive Council,” he does not in fact indicate whether that statement was true or false as originally reported. Indeed, even in his revised post, Fr. Harris continues to say that:

It is entirely in order that Bishop Douglas both resigned from the one [ACC] seat and be nominated for the other….

[T]here are times when a person moving from one order to another, could be a candidate for a second position in the new order to which he or she is a member. But for a brief time (in this case four months) that person is not strictly a member of ACC. (Emphasis added.)

We are left to guess therefore whether Dr. Douglas announced his resignation from both the Executive Council and the ACC in February, but some concern has arisen about disclosing this; or announced his resignation from the Executive Council only.

In any event, Fr. Harris continues to acknowledge that Bishop Douglas “will have to vacate the ACC position as clerical member from TEC.”  In fact, as we noted in our previous piece, Bishop Douglas was disqualified from serving as “the clerical member” from TEC upon his consecration to the episcopacy in April. Whether he is elected to the episcopal seat in June, contrary to the ACC constitution, does not bear on this disqualification.  And whether Dr. Douglas resigned from the ACC in February as Fr. Harris originally stated or was disqualified in April under the ACC rules, he “will have to vacate” his clerical seat and the consequences of that vacancy are as outlined below.

*************************************

In our last post we noted that Bishop Ian Douglas was ineligible under the rules of the Anglican Consultative Council to continue serving on the ACC and its standing committee upon his consecration to the episcopacy in April. In a blog post yesterday, Father Mark Harris, a member of TEC’s Executive Council, discloses that Bishop Douglas in fact resigned from the ACC in February and announced this to the Executive Council at its February meeting. According to Fr. Harris, (then Fr.) Douglas recognized that he would not be permitted to continue to hold his clerical seat on the ACC upon his consecration. The fact of Douglas’s resignation had not been disclosed previously and greatly simplifies the analysis of what the ACC rules require in this situation. The implications of Bishop Douglas’s consecration and his resignation are now plain.

First, from the date of his resignation in February, Bishop Douglas ceased to be a member of the ACC standing committee. Article 2(f) of the ACC bylaws provides:

Elected members of the Standing Committee shall hold office from the end of the Council meeting at which they are appointed until the end of the last ordinary Council meeting which they would be entitled to attend but subject to earlier termination in the event that such elected member shall for any reason cease to be a member of the Council. (Emphasis added.)

Bishop Douglas therefore is no longer a member of the standing committee, and his seat on that committee is now vacant.

Second, under Article 7 of the ACC bylaws, the standing committee may fill this vacancy only by appointing a member of the same order, in this case, clerical, as that of the former member:

Casual Vacancies on the Standing Committee

In the event of a casual vacancy occurring in the membership of the Standing Committee between Council meetings the Standing Committee itself shall have power to appoint a member of the Council of the same order as the representative who filled the vacant place and such member shall have full voting rights for the remainder of the term of service of the former member. Such member shall, subject to his or her eligibility for continuing membership of the Council, be eligible for re election to the Standing Committee at the next Council meeting. (Emphasis added.)

Therefore, the ACC may not appoint, as Father Harris suggests, Bishop Douglas to replace himself.

Third, Bishop Douglas is not eligible to replace retiring Bishop Roskam as TEC’s episcopal representative to the ACC. Clause 4(c) of the ACC constitution provides:

On termination of his or her period of office, no member shall be eligible for re-appointment nor shall he or she be appointed an alternate member until a period of six years elapses from the date when such original membership ceased.

Bishop Douglas may not serve again on the ACC until February 2016. This rule is constitutional, not merely a bylaw or resolution.

Fourth, even if Bishop Douglas could be elected to TEC’s episcopal seat, his new term would not begin until the next ACC meeting under ACC Resolution 4:28:

those elected or appointed to the Anglican Consultative Council begin their membership as from the beginning of the first Council meeting following their election.

Finally, unless Bishop Douglas retracts the authorization given by his predecessor to perform same sex blessings in the diocese of Connecticut, he is not “qualified” to serve on the ACC under the precedent established at ACC-14 by the refusal to seat the appointed member of Uganda. The ACC Secretary General advised Archbishop Orombi that this refusal was on the grounds that:

The Joint Standing Committee has discussed this at length. We understand that the Revd Philip Ashey’s relationship with the Church of the Province of Uganda is as a result of a cross provincial intervention, and note that such interventions are contrary to the Windsor Report and other reports accepted by successive meetings of the Instruments of Communion, including Primates’ Meetings which you have attended. Therefore we regret to inform you that Mr Ashey’s current status means that we cannot regard him as a ‘qualified’ member according to Section 4(e) of the current Constitution.

Authorization of same sex blessings is “contrary to the Windsor Report” and to the moratoria that have now been affirmed by all four Instruments of Communion, including the ACC. Accordingly, Bishop Douglas is not, consistent with the interpretation articulated by the Secretary General, “qualified” to serve on the ACC under clause 4(e) of the ACC constitution.

Bishop Douglas seems to understand that the ACC rules involved required his resignation, and we are grateful for his wisdom in following them to this point.  Our argument has been that the legal requirements governing the ACC and its standing committee are matters to be taken seriously, not just for their own sake, but because of the grave challenge the Instruments as a whole are facing to their credibility in a critical time for the Communion.  Although simply following the rules will not by itself resolve these challenges, it is one necessary element in the much more difficult task of moving forward in a trustworthy fashion that takes the concerns of the broader Communion seriously.  And to this end, we pray that all of us work faithfully, tirelessly and transparently.

The Reverend Canon Professor Christopher Seitz
The Reverend Dr. Philip Turner
The Reverend Dr. Ephraim Radner
Mark McCall, Esq.

Reports this week from the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia indicate that it passed a resolution approving in principle the first three sections of the Anglican Covenant, but requesting legal advice on the “appropriateness” of Paragraph 4.2.8. The relevant clause of the resolution as passed reads as follows:

Requests the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion to obtain an opinion from the Legal Advisor to the Anglican Consultative Council and from the Chancellors and Legal Advisors Committee of this church regarding the appropriateness of the provisions of Clause 4.2.8 of the proposed Covenant in relation to decisions regarding membership of the Anglican Consultative Council….

Although this request for legal advice applies only to Paragraph 4.2.8, it is clear from the vote and the debate that the dissatisfaction in New Zealand extends to Section 4 as a whole. The resolution was authored by Dr. Tony Fitchett, who was the chairman of the resolutions committee at ACC-14 in Jamaica that drafted the resolutions on the Covenant debated at that ACC meeting. Since ACC-14, Dr. Fitchett has served on the standing committee of the Anglican Consultative Council, the body that approved the final text of the Covenant last December. Whatever Dr. Fitchett’s views of the Covenant were in December, he is now very much opposed to Section 4:

Section 4.2, on the other hand, contains provisions that are punitive, controlling, and completely un-Anglican, and reflect the movement towards centralized, Curia-like control that was rejected by the Lambeth conference…over a century ago….Though the language used has been moderated, and has become fuzzier, in successive drafts, the general thrust of Section 4.2 remains as it began: that a Communion-wide body…can discipline a province and recommend its exclusion from Communion structures.

While not stated in the resolution, the theory on which Dr. Fitchett and the General Synod are proceeding is readily apparent. Paragraph 4.2.8 requires that members of churches that have not adopted the Covenant recuse themselves from Communion bodies, including the “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion” as defined by Section 4, on matters related to the Covenant:

(4.2.8)  Participation in the decision making of the Standing Committee or of the Instruments of Communion in respect to Section 4.2 shall be limited to those members of the Instruments of Communion who are representatives of those churches who have adopted the Covenant, or who are still in the process of adoption.

By requesting legal advice from the ACC’s legal advisor on the “appropriateness” of this paragraph, New Zealand is inquiring whether this provision may be unlawful under the ACC constitution and UK law (under which the ACC is in the process of incorporating), presumably because it would impose a restriction on the members of the Standing Committee when considering ACC membership that is not found in the ACC constitution or UK law. If the legal advice in fact is that such a restriction in the Covenant cannot bind the Standing Committee under the ACC constitution, Dr. Fitchett and his allies will argue that Paragraph 4.2.8 is “inappropriate” or “ultra vires,” i.e., unlawful and unenforceable.

One point to note at the outset is that the appropriate time to request and receive legal advice on this matter from the ACC’s legal advisor was in December before the Covenant text was approved by the ACC’s standing committee and sent to the member churches for adoption.

More fundamentally, however, in questioning the “appropriateness” of 4.2.8, New Zealand is asking the wrong question. The relevant question is not “Is Paragraph 4.2.8 appropriate or lawful under the ACC constitution and UK law?” but rather “Is the standing committee of the ACC as governed by the ACC constitution and UK law legally permitted to perform the functions required of the ‘Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion’ as defined by Section 4 of the Covenant?” The Covenant and the ACC constitution are independent documents. Neither is subordinate to the other. The ACC constitution can no more render “inappropriate” part of the Covenant than the Covenant can amend the ACC constitution. If the ACC standing committee cannot legally do what 4.2.8 requires, it cannot act as the committee defined by Section 4. But that does not make 4.2.8 inappropriate or unlawful; it merely disqualifies the ACC standing committee from serving as the Section 4 committee. Thus, the relevant legal advice is not on the question of the “appropriateness” of Paragraph 4.2.8; that is a question for the covenanting churches, not lawyers. The legal question is whether the ACC’s standing committee is disqualified from acting as the Standing Committee defined by Section 4 of the Covenant absent amendment to the ACC constitution.

It must be emphasized that the “Standing Committee” governed by the ACC constitution is the standing committee of the ACC. Indeed, this is tautological. The Standing Committee established by Section 4, however, is not defined by reference to the ACC constitution, but by the duties this Committee must perform under the Covenant. We at ACI have been concerned from the outset about the qualifications of the ACC’s standing committee to act as the Committee defined by the duties specified in Section 4 of the Covenant. In January, shortly after the Covenant text was finalized, we noted that:

Contrary to a widely shared assumption, Section 4 does not in fact explicitly identify this “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion” with any pre-existing committee. It does, however, define the Committee’s responsibilities and thereby determines the qualifications for any committee that would fill this role….

The working group that revised Section 4 seems to have assumed that the recently reorganized standing committee of the ACC would function as the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion, and the ACC committee itself appears ready to assume the functions of the committee defined by Section 4 of the Covenant. But it is increasingly doubtful that this assumption, which has not yet been explicitly and publicly ratified by any of the Instruments, is consistent with the text of Section 4 or acceptable to a large part of the Communion.

***

[W]hen the legal reorganization of the ACC is completed, the members of the ACC standing committee will have duties and responsibilities to an entity, the ACC, governed by UK law. These duties and responsibilities will be determined by UK law and will be owed to the entity, the ACC, on whose standing committee they serve. Can the members of the ACC’s standing committee function in the way contemplated by Section 4 for the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion? Can the committee be “responsible to” the Primates Meeting? Can it consistent with its legal duties ever act contrary to the advice or direction received from the ACC and accept instead the advice of the Primates or the covenanting Churches? If the legal advice is that this would not be inconsistent with the fiduciary duties imposed under current UK law, how might future court decisions or legislation change this advice? How will substantive provisions of UK and EU law, such as non-discrimination regulations, affect the deliberations of this committee on Communion disputes?

http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2010/01/the-anglican-communion-covenant-where-do-we-go-from-here/

If the legal advice in response to New Zealand’s request is that the ACC’s constitution does not permit its standing committee to act in compliance with the requirements of 4.2.8, this will establish beyond question that not only has the ACC’s standing committee failed to obtain the consent of the Communion’s Instruments and churches to act as the Section 4 committee, it is in fact legally incapable of doing so. Accordingly, we renew our call for a provisional Standing Committee comprised of the Primate (or an ACC member) of each church adopting the Covenant that will be charged with organizing a “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion” pursuant to Section 4 of the Covenant and with performing the functions defined under Section 4 until such time as a permanent Standing Committee is duly constituted and approved by the covenanting churches.  Such a committee would by definition deal only with matters arising under the Covenant; it would not in any way interfere with the constitutional duties of the current standing committee of the ACC.

If, on the other hand, the legal advice is that the ACC’s standing committee can in fact comply with Section 4, including Paragraph 4.2.8, under current UK law, it nevertheless leaves unanswered the other questions that have been raised concerning the ability of this committee to function under Section 4 with the confidence of the Communion.  One of our concerns expressed in January was that a committee legally governed by the ACC constitution and UK law cannot meet the requirements of the Covenant text itself, which is not governed by UK law or subordinate to the ACC constitution. We noted particularly the requirement that the Section 4 committee is to be “responsible to” the Primates’ Meeting and to take advice from the covenanting churches and Instruments of Communion. Whatever answer is given to this query from New Zealand, raised before the Covenant has even been adopted, the query itself proves our point that this issue will be an ongoing source of legal controversy and potential conflict of interest. And recent events have only eroded further the credibility of the ACC committee in the eyes of much of the Communion. At a minimum, therefore, urgent action is necessary to address this widespread loss of credibility.

Accordingly, even if New Zealand’s question is answered contrary to its hope, we would continue to view some kind of provisional committee as essential and would propose the following two step solution to the Standing Committee problem. The first is to convene an “Advisory Committee” to “advise” the Standing Committee (assuming it can lawfully function as required under Section 4) on Covenant matters. This advisory committee would be the initial decision maker on all Covenant matters coming before the Standing Committee in the next few years during the implementation process. We would suggest that the Advisory Committee consist of the three ex officio members of the ACC standing committee (Archbishop Williams, Bishop Tengatenga and Canon Elizabeth Paver) and one member (either the Primate or one of the ACC members) selected by each church when it adopts the Covenant. This would assure that this group has the confidence of those who support the Covenant. It cannot be appointed as in the past so as to have substantial representation by those who are in fact hostile to the Covenant’s purposes and are seeking to undermine it.

Both the ACC’s rules and Section 4 of the Covenant contemplate such an advisory committee. The ACC bylaws (2.d) state that “The Standing Committee may delegate any of its powers to committees as it thinks fit and any committee so formed shall, in the execution of the powers so delegated, conform to any requirements imposed on it by the Standing Committee. Any such committee may call advisers.” Moreover, Paragraph 4.2.2 of the Covenant provides that “the Standing Committee shall be supported by such other committees or commissions as may be mandated to assist in carrying out this function and to advise it on questions relating to the Covenant.” So there would be no legal or procedural obstacles to such an advisory committee.

The second step is equally necessary, however, and that is to remove the two TEC members of the current standing committee. Even with an advisory committee, the ACC standing committee would retain legal authority under this hypothesis, and it will never have the confidence of a majority of the Communion with the two TEC members on it. Fortunately, there are legal solutions to this problem readily to hand. If the Presiding Bishop is not invited to the Primates’ Meeting, she should be automatically disqualified from serving on the Primates’ standing committee (since she is no longer a member in good standing of the Primates Meeting she is to represent) and consequently from serving as an ex officio primatial member on the ACC and its standing committee.  This decision is within the discretion of the Archbishop of Canterbury since under the Covenant the Primates’ Meeting is “convened” by him and he is the one who “gathers” the Primates to their meetings. Paragraph 3.1.4 of the Covenant gives him exactly the same authority in relation to the Primates’ Meetings that he has in relation to the Lambeth Conference, from which his authority to withhold invitations is undisputed.

In the past the Archbishop of Canterbury has acknowledged indirectly that he has this authority. When he wrote the Primates in December 2006 concerning the upcoming meeting in Dar es Salaam, Archbishop Williams advised them that: “I have decided not to withhold an invitation to Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as the elected Primate of the Episcopal Church to attend the forthcoming meeting. I believe it is important that she be given a chance both to hear and to speak and to discuss face to face the problems we are confronting together.” He indicated in this letter that this was his decision based on open questions about TEC’s response to the Windsor Report. Those questions have now been conclusively answered by TEC, and a different decision is now required if the Communion is to survive.

Separately, when Ian Douglas was consecrated bishop he was disqualified from membership in the ACC (and its standing committee) since that would give TEC two bishops among its three members, which is not permitted under the ACC constitution. As The Church of England Newspaper reports, both TEC and Douglas take the position that he can be elected in June to the episcopal seat of the retiring Catharine Roskam (who continues to serve under ACC rules until just before the next meeting) and thereby remain on the ACC standing committee. But this result would violate ACC rules, and this position entails in any event the recognition that his current clerical seat has been relinquished by his consecration to the episcopacy.  In other words, his seat on the ACC standing committee is already vacant, and he cannot resume that seat if he is elected to Roskam’s seat, which would not take effect until the next ACC meeting in any event under ACC rules (Resolution 4:28). Under the ACC bylaws (Article 7) the standing committee is now required to appoint a clerical member to fill the seat on the standing committee formerly held by Douglas.

Indeed, there is a precisely analogous situation in Canada to that of Douglas and TEC.  Stephen Andrews, like Douglas, went to ACC-14 in Jamaica as a clergy member for his first meeting.  After ACC-14, Andrews was consecrated bishop by the Anglican Church of Canada.  Canada understands that Andrews ceased to be a member of the ACC upon his consecration and therefore that he has now been replaced by his clerical alternate.  Indeed, Andrews was elected bishop before ACC-14, but his consecration delayed until after the meeting in Jamaica (we are told) precisely because Canada understood the ACC implications of his consecration.  If TEC is permitted to circumvent the ACC rules to keep Douglas on the ACC and its standing committee, especially after the decision to disqualify Uganda’s chosen ACC representative at Jamaica, any remaining trust in the ACC will be lost forever.

We take no pleasure in these observations. What is at stake, however, is not the identity of individuals in institutional bureaucracies but the fate of the Anglican Communion.  Will the Communion survive?  If it does, it will be as a communion with autonomy and accountability.  The Anglican Covenant with a robust Section 4 establishes such a communion. A TEC that consecrates Mary Glasspool against the expressed mind of all four Communion Instruments is a body determined to see that no such communion will exist.  We continue to believe that a communion with autonomy and accountability is not only desirable, but necessary.  And the only means to such a communion are the steps, however painful, described above.