Times
of England: Anglican face split
by Ruth Gledhill
The Anglican Communion will be split tomorrow when conservatives representing
more than half its total membership will announce the formation of a new orthodox
body to be a stronghold against liberal views. It will be schism in all but
name.
The new global Anglican fellowship will act within the legal boundaries of provinces such the Church of England that make up the existing Communion but, in North America, it will declare its independence from the ultra-liberal Episcopal Church and from the Anglican church in Canada.
The fellowship represents a direct challenge to the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, and the Primate of the US Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.
Millions of Anglicans and entire provinces in the Global South - an Anglican grouping of 20 provinces that embraces India, Africa, the West Indies and the Middle East - want nothing more to do with their former colonial masters who have adopted a theology that they find too liberal.
The new fellowship represents the most severe blow to Church unity in the West since the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.
It will shake up the structures of the Anglican Communion and could force it, in order to survive, to become a federation of provinces - a model that has been fiercely resisted by Dr. Williams who is staking his archiepiscopacy on retaining unity under the present worldwide Communion of 38 provinces with him as "primus inter pares", or first among equals of the primates of each province. Archbishops and bishops, mainly from the Global South provinces of Africa and Asia, have been meeting in Jerusalem to draw up plans to deal with an unrepentant liberal wing of the Anglican Communion. Jerusalem was chosen for the founding of the new Anglicanism as a place that represents a Christianity older than that of Canterbury.
One province, Nigeria, has already deleted all reference to Canterbury from its constitution.
The 300 bishops and archbishops in Jerusalem, of whom more than 100 are boycotting the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury in July, claim that they do not want to form a separate church and have no plans to "walk away" from the 80- million-strong Anglican Communion.
Instead, they insist that it is the liberals in the churches of the West who have broken unity by walking away from Biblical truths and the teachings of orthodox Christianity.
Legal structures in provinces such as England, where the Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church, and in Australia, make schism practically impossible. Any parish that chose to leave would sacrifice property and recognition.
So instead fellowship policy is to reform from within, and to attempt a take-over of the Church by evangelicals working inside existing structures.
Significantly, the new fellowship will include many churches that have split from the Anglican Communion in the past over earlier doctrinal disputes.
Those meeting at the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem include bishops from the Church of England in South Africa and the Reformed Episcopal Church in the US. It also includes bishops such as Martyn Minns and David Anderson, consecrated by the Church in Nigeria to serve conservative U.S. parishes but not invited to the Lambeth Conference by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ironically, this means that the new fellowship will enhance unity by bringing back into the fold many of those who have left or, as they would see it, been forced out.
In England liberal parishes that have embraced the "no-bodily-resurrection and no-Virgin-birth" theology of the late 20th century are failing, while evangelical, Bible-based churches such Holy Trinity Brompton, St Helen's Bishopsgate and All Souls in Langham Place in London are bursting at the seams. For years they have been engaged in "church planting" - founding new outposts of conservative orthodoxy in the heart of dying liberal parishes. The program is likely to be stepped up under the new fellowship.
More than 600 Church of England clergy representing almost as many parishes are expected to swear allegiance to the new body when they meet on Tuesday at All Souls, Langham Place, which is regarded as Britain's evangelical flagship.
The fellowship was given
a boost in North America on Friday when a judge ruled that a group of 11 parishes
in Virginia could keep their property after breaking away from the Episcopal
Church. Lawyers from the Episcopal Church will appeal, but the case is being
watched closely by dozens of other parishes and at least three dioceses that
also plan to break away.
The trigger for the new
movement was the 2003 consecration of an openly gay bishop, the Right Rev'd
Gene Robinson, in New Hampshire and the authorization of same-sex blessings
in the New Westminster diocese in Canada.
But to the conservatives,
these events were merely the logical conclusion to years of movement away
from the Christianity of the Early Church Fathers - the writers and teachers
in the first five centuries of Christianity - the Anglicanism of the Reformation
and the enthusiasm of the 19th century revivals of Anglo-Catholicism and evangelicalism.
The prime movers in the
new fellowship are the Bishop of Rochester, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Archbishop
of Uganda, Henry Orombi, the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr. Peter Jensen and the
Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Rev'd Benjamin Nzimbi, who led the committee
drawing up the final communique in Jerusalem.
Bishop Gregory Venables
has also played a leading role. His Southern Cone diocese encompasses six
countries in South America and he has already taken one U.S. diocese, San
Joaquin, in California, into his province and is in negotiations with Pittsburgh
and Forth Worth. Significantly, Bishop Venables is a close friend of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, who is understood to regard the Jerusalem proceedings with
equanimity. Unlike many of the bishops at the Jerusalem conference, Bishop
Venables will be at the Lambeth Conference.
Dr. Jensen and Archbishop
Orombi will be among the new fellowship's leaders at the All Souls meeting
in London on Tuesday to recruit England's conservatives. Dr. Jensen said:
"American revisionists committed an extraordinary strategic blunder in 2003
. They did not think that there would be any consequences.
"Now if they did not believe
that there would be consequences, that is an arrogant thing, I have to say.
But I don't know them, so I really cannot say. The consequences have been
unfolding over the last five years. Now their church is divided; it looks
as though there will be permanent division, one way or the other. "All around
the world the sleeping giant that is evangelical Anglicanism and orthodox
Anglicanism has been aroused by what happened in Canada and the United States
of America. It was an act of folly."
The fellowship will draw
up its own Book of Common Prayer, devoid of what it sees as the liturgical
inanities embraced by many modern Anglican service books. Instead it will
be loyal to the original formularies outlined by Thomas Cranmer, the 16th-century
Archbishop of Canterbury and incorporated into the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
The fellowship will also
decree an orthodox approach to reading the Bible and will draw up a universal
catechism, a feature central to Roman Catholicism but lacking from modern
Anglicanism.
—Ruth Gledhill is the religion correspondent for The London Times.
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