Tony Clavier has posted the text of a lecture that he gave a few years ago on the history and the present state of the Anglican Communion. It’s a very good lecture that works hard to identify the root causes of what is going on at the moment.
Link: Fr. Tony Clavier.
Here’s a small part of what he has to say about the Communion in the near-future:
Mercifully I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet. I can’t look forward and see whether, at the moment Anglicanism has reached its greatest worldwide strength, it is about to implode into at least two segments. Yet I am convinced that if we enter conversations on the basis of which side will win, of self-justification we will all lose.
I want to suggest that our older ethos still contains within itself the means for us all to remain one, and to prosper as a worldwide Communion and as a local national church. While I sympathize with some, perhaps many of the causes espoused by ECUSA during the last forty years, I have to say that the politicizing of our church has done unintended but dreadful harm. General Convention, an element in authority, has become THE element of authority. The older process by which we were open to change – and to the insights of the past made new – has been replaced by the ethos of secular government. We change now in a process whereby an ascendant party “wins” by majoritarianism. The older comprehension, whereby mutually opposed constituencies were given space to prosper or decline, under the judgment of Gamaliel, has been replaced by a comprehension with a permanent under-class.
The old social compact by which no one party was given the power to alienate the consciences of others has gone. In short unity, once the obsession of Anglicans, has been replaced by a struggle for hegemony. Nor may I say that I think matters would be any different if conservatives, traditionalists, by whatever name, were the predominant force in General Convention.Anglicanism has always been a difficult space for crusaders. The very fact that we are so different placed limits on just how adventurous the institutional church, might be at a given moment. That is not to say that “prophets” have not always been known among us.
Anglicanism has been peculiarly open to movements and developments. Yet in the past the force or otherwise of reformers among us has not been politicized.Ironically, the distress among the leaders of our church after the last Lambeth Conference was in part occasioned because a majority of bishops from across the globe challenged them. Majoritarianism is catching!
There’s much more where this comes from – and it’s worth the time to do the reading.
There is much to commend itself in this post which, as usual, contains Fr. Claviers usual depth of both insight and experience.
I would disagree that the problem is majoratarianism in and of itself. If this is an issue, it is the by-product of the choices made by those who wish to slow down the “innovations” or “insights” of the Episcopal Church over the past thirty plus years.
Some in the minority, who viewed with dismay the rise of the ordained ministries of women, and the change in the church’s view relative to the ordination of gays and the potential for change in the blessings of same sex unions, decided that they could not win in the ballot box and they would not settle for either compromise or the slow change of the church over time.
Instead, they have set upon–and for the most succeeded in–setting up a process where the minority in this Church seeks alignment with those who agree with them outside this Church. This alliance seeks to trump local processes and either stop our Church in it’s path or have them expelled from the Anglican Commuinion in the process.
Majoritarianism is one of the consequences of their strategy.
Party-mindedness is another consequence.
The Comprehensiveness that we have known in the past is the chief victim.
The people who have forwarded this approach have counted on moderates who remember what that comprehensiveness was like and value it to seek to find a way to accomodate rather than speaking up against the approach of the dissident and breakaway groups, whose approach has been tried before in our history with terrible results.
I agree with the problem, but see the source differently.
thanks!
Dear Andrew:
I’ll grant you that the “right” has sought to delay things in GC. However its voting power has been minimum.
The left has been coy in that it has sought to advance the idea of “blessings” rather than marriage. Leaving aside the problem of state law, I think things might have been cleaner if a spae had been called a spade from the outset.
Again perhaps what I perceive to be a growing authoritarianism has removed the space in which movements in the past worked among us. Once we were much less worried about permission from on high. Despite everything top down seems to have replaced bottom up, if I may be so indelicate? Remember how shocked Newman was when the last Tract brought down on him episcopal rebuke?