17 September 2015 A.D. Archbishop of Canterbury plans to loosen ties of divided Anglican communion
17 September 2015
A.D. Archbishop of Canterbury plans to loosen
ties of divided Anglican communion
Brown, Andrew. Archbishop of Canterbury plans to loosen ties of divided Anglican communion
-
Justin Welby to suggest looser organisation of worldwide body
- New group
would no longer be linked by a common doctrine
- Liberal US and conservative African churches argued over sexuality
The
archbishop of Canterbury is proposing to effectively dissolve the fractious and
bitterly divided worldwide Anglican communion and replace it with a much looser
grouping.
Justin Welby has summoned all the 38 leaders of the national churches of the Anglican communion to a meeting in Canterbury next January, where he will propose that the communion be reorganised as a group of churches that are all linked to Canterbury but no longer necessarily to each other.
What
is the Anglican communion and why is it under threat?
Justin Welby’s vision for communion is solution to
seemingly irreconcilable differences between churches
He
believes that the communion – notionally the third largest Christian body in
the world with 80 million members, after the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox
churches - has become impossible to hold together due to arguments over power
and sexuality and has, for the past 20 years, been completely dysfunctional. A Lambeth Palace source said the archbishop felt he could not leave his eventual successor in the same position of “spending vast amounts of time trying to keep people in the boat and never actually rowing it anywhere”.
Welby believes that his proposal will allow him to maintain relations with the liberal churches of north America, which recognise and encourage gay marriage, and the African churches, led by Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, who are agitating for the recriminalisation of all homosexual activity in their countries. Both will be able to call themselves “Anglican” but there will no longer be any pretence that this involves a common discipline or doctrine.
Asked
whether this represented, if not a divorce, a legal separation, a Lambeth
source said: “It’s more like sleeping in separate bedrooms.”
Instead,
they may be able to cooperate on matters such as climate change and
inter-religious violence, which are desperately important to many of the poorer
churches. As well as the obvious religious tensions in the Middle East, 200
churches in south India were burned to the ground by Hindu extremists last
year. These issues seem more urgent to the archbishop than the interminable
wrangling about sexuality.
Welby’s
decision represents a complete abandonment of the strategy pursued by his
immediate predecessors, Rowan Williams and George Carey, both of whom were
committed to getting the liberals and conservatives to work together globally.
The
archbishop is determined to rescue what he can from the schism over sexuality.
He spent much of his life before becoming a bishop working on missions of
reconciliation in countries including Nigeria, and values very highly the
unofficial low-level contacts between churches in different countries.
But
the feuding over sexuality, which started in the US in the mid-90s, has become
completely unmanageable.
All the Anglican bishops around the world are meant to meet up every 10 years in Canterbury at the Lambeth conference. Nearly 250 out of 800 stayed away from the last meeting, in 2008, in protest against the supposed liberalism of Williams. Welby has already announced the indefinite postponement of the next conference.
Welby’s
decision is a gamble with high stakes. If the African conservatives, grouped in
an organisation called Gafcon, decide to withdraw altogether, they will put
pressure on English conservative evangelical churches to withdraw formally from
the Church of England and align themselves with Gafcon.
Some
smaller groupings have already done this. But the archbishop is betting that
the conservatives, some of whom are personal friends with tight links to the
church network where he was nourished, will draw back from churches such as
Uganda’s, which support laws that would reintroduce the death penalty for gay
sex.
A
large, formal schism has already taken place in the US. The Anglican churches
of Nigeria, Rwanda, and Kenya have all established what they call missionary
congregations in America to take worshippers away from the liberal churches.
American conservatives have been given jobs in the new organisations and have
in some cases written the speeches and manifestos for the African conservative
groups.
In
his most controversial proposal, Welby will ask the American conservative
grouping Acna, which has been locked in bitter lawsuits over church property
with the mainstream liberal American Anglican church grouping, TEC, to attend
the meeting in January, but not as a full member.
If
the meeting goes well – and Lambeth sources put the possibility of catastrophic
failure at about 25% – Welby appears determined to foster practical cooperation
among the churches that are still speaking to him, if not to each other.
He
hopes to hold a meeting of the new body in 2020. One member of his staff said:
“If so few people want to come that we could hold it in a telephone box, fine,
we’ll hold it in a telephone box.”
The
Rev Andrew Symes, of Anglican Mainstream, the largest conservative grouping
organisation in the Church of England, said: “There is a difference between an
institutional unity and a confessional unity. It is not just the sexuality
thing. There are underlying differences about our understanding of the bible
and of God.
“Archbishop
Welby is trying to square the circle. He can’t bring the thing together. This
will strengthen the resolve of Gafcon to keep on the journey that they’re on.”
The
Rev Sally Hitchiner, one of the most prominent gay members of clergy in the
church, said: “The churches now have the opportunity to relate like grownup
siblings. This is a positive move for all sorts of reasons. We can’t hold
together from a place like England – where an archbishop of Canterbury could be
in a gay marriage, possibly in my lifetime – to somewhere like Uganda, where
they want to imprison people for gay sex.”
The
bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson, said: “He can’t be planning to break the
thing up because there’s nothing there to break up. It is all independent
churches.”
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