A Conference of Anglican Leaders Confronts Deeply Divisive Issues

It was not the most joyous of starts for the Lambeth Conference, the once-every-10-year gathering of the bishops of the 77 million-member Anglican Communion in Canterbury, England. Speaking last Sunday at the formal opening ceremony in the city's storied cathedral, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, observed that the global association of Anglican churches, including the Episcopal Church of the United States, faced the most serious challenge of its history.

650 bishops attended a service in Canterbury Cathedral before the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference began.

The absence of roughly one fourth of the Communion's 880 invited bishops underscores his words. It reflects the growing schism between conservative and liberal factions with strongly differing views on tradition, doctrine, and Scripture, particularly as they touch on the hot-button issues of homosexuality and women in the clergy.

The scholarly archbishop had sought to design a conference that would be as healing as the last one proved divisive. Under the aegis of Williams's predecessor, the Most Rev. George Carey, the 1998 conference passed resolutions denouncing the practice of homosexuality and advising against the blessing of same-sex unions or the ordination of any member of a same-sex union. Seen as a triumph of the more conservative voices of the Communion, many hailing from African provinces that now boast the largest Anglican followings in the world, the resolutions were put to a test when Gene Robinson, an openly gay clergyman, was consecrated as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003.

In response, Anglican primates at various gatherings called on the U.S. bishops to reconsider their actions, even threatening the expulsion of the American church from the Communion. But when the U.S. church issued only vague assurances that it would not do the same again—assurances that some say will not be upheld—conservative Anglican leaders stepped up their protests. Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria and other leaders of "Southern Cone" Anglican provinces asserted that they could no longer remain in fellowship with those parts of the Communion that ignored "orthodox" teaching, whether on homosexuality or the qualifications for priesthood or the accepted truths of Scripture.

And many conservative Episcopalians, outraged by the direction of their church, led congregations out of American dioceses, reorganizing them either as independent churches or as part of foreign Anglican jurisdictions. Established in 2005, for instance, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America consists of some 60 congregations that became a missionary extension of the Church of Nigeria. The Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns, a former rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, Va., a breakaway congregation, was consecrated as CANA's missionary bishop in 2006.

But growing resistance to the hierarchy of the Anglican Communion took most forceful expression in the Global Anglican Future Conference, held in Jerusalem only weeks before the opening of Lambeth. While its organizers insisted that theirs was not a counter-Lambeth, the meeting of 1,148 lay and clergy participants (including some 300 bishops and archbishops) produced a final statement that proclaimed a "fellowship of confessing Anglicans" opposed to the promotion of a "different" or "false" Gospel.

Since the main promoters of that false Gospel were the American and Canadian churches, the statement declared, and since the Communion's top hierarchy chose to ignore the objections of the majority of the Communion, particularly those coming from the "Southern Cone," the framers of the statement claimed that the only possible conclusion was that "we are a global Communion with a colonial structure."

The authors went on to declare that a torn Communion could not easily be mended. But they also said that confessing Anglicans would remain within the Communion, though no longer acknowledging the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury to determine Anglican identity. That identity, they said, was to be demonstrated through adherence to 14 tenets of orthodoxy, including "the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family."

Such tenets, says theologian and GAFCON attendee Os Guinness, are nothing more or less than what the great Christian writer and apologist C. S. Lewis called "mere Christianity."

But liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians object to what they say is not orthodoxy but a selective and highly literalist (if not literal) reading of the Bible. "The conservatives are providing their interpretation of Scripture and saying that it is not a matter of interpretation," says Frank Kirkpatrick, author of The Episcopal Church in Crisis and a professor of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut.

Equally troubling even to some conservative or evangelical Anglicans was GAFCON's proposal of a Primates' Council with the authority to recognize confessing Anglican jurisdictions, including, most controversially, new ones created in already existing jurisdictions "where churches and leaders are denying the orthodox faith or preventing its spread." That would include, presumably, all dioceses of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

The Rt. Rev. N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham (United Kingdom) and a self-described evangelical and orthodox Anglican, has praised the "energy and vision" that GAFCON has brought to the wider Anglican Communion but objects to a Primates' Council that in his view could promote structural divisions within that fellowship.

Defenders of the GAFCON proposal counter that the Primates' Council would only create appropriately representative leadership for the majority of Communion members, who are underrepresented by the 650 bishops attending this Lambeth Conference. And it is hard to refute their claim that the 300 bishops at GAFCON represent close to 40 million members of the Communion, while the 650 at Lambeth shepherd only about 15 million (excluding the 24 million claimed by the Church of England but who are mostly nonpracticing).

Such delicate demographic realities may largely account for the format of the current Lambeth Conference, a structure emphasizing small-group discussions aimed at "transformed relationships" among Communion members rather than large sessions hammering out potentially divisive resolutions.

Defending the format against critics who say that it is an attempt to avoid tough decisions and replace substance with process, Williams in his opening speech noted that few resolutions passed by Lambeth Conferences since the first in 1867 have been acted upon. Efforts to give the Conference and the Communion more institutional authority over its member provinces have generally fallen by the wayside, Williams pointed out.

Yet Williams, often faulted for his overly analytical, somewhat obscurantist style, made it abundantly clear that he believed the GAFCON proposal to create new jurisdictions in direct geographic competition with existing ones would, if acted upon, produce a meaningless federation: "A federation of such variety that different parts of it could be in direct local competition is not really a federation at all," Williams said, "and would encourage some of the least appealing kinds of religious division." Furthermore, he warned, "a centralized and homogenized Communion could be at the mercy of powerfully motivated groups from left or right who wanted to redefine the basic terms of belonging, so that Anglicanism becomes a confessional church in a way it never has been before."

Defenders of what might be called the Anglican Middle Way, including Williams, say that the Communion has long contained conflicting strains, whether between Reformed Protestantism and Anglo-Catholicism or between more literalist readings of Scripture and more allegorical, figurative, or historical ones. Yet conservatives say that such internal pluralism was contained within certain doctrinal and theological limits that liberals have sought to tear down in recent years. And it is not only in relation to homosexuality, openly same-sex clergy, and the ordination of female priests, or even the Church of England's recent endorsement of female bishops. It is, the conservatives say, a casual disregard for all scriptural teaching, including the belief that the acceptance of Jesus is the only road to salvation.

But the issue of sexuality looms largest, despite the desire of Williams and others to try to focus the Communion's attention on global concerns such as poverty and HIV-AIDS. While Bishop Robinson was not invited to Lambeth (nor, for that matter, were Bishop Minns or the former bishop of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga, a supporter of Zimbabwe's despotic president, Robert Mugabe), Robinson has made his presence felt at various informal gatherings and at churches near Canterbury. Preaching at one church, he charged that his foes' preoccupation with sexuality was "at best unhelpful—and at worst idolatry."

For the rest of this conference, clearly, and certainly beyond, the Middle Way will be hard to preserve.