Communion With Autonomy And Accountability

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

We at ACI have often written in recent years about the autonomy of dioceses within the constitutional polity of The Episcopal Church. Indeed, as we have noted elsewhere, TEC's polity mirrors that of the Anglican Communion as a whole.  That is, the churches of the Communion are autonomous in the sense that they are self-governing, but by tradition, now articulated in the Anglican Covenant, they are bound one to another by mutual subjection in the Lord.  In The Episcopal Church our dioceses, by constitution, are autonomous. What we all too often have not practiced either in our internal or external relations is mutual subjection. This is not a new problem. In his volume on TEC's governance in "The Church's Teaching" series, Canon Dawley, who recognized that the "independence" of the diocese and its bishop "in respect of the rest of the Church is almost complete," went on to caution: While there may be many good reasons for not changing the constitutional arrangements which have resulted in this diocesan independence, it must be recognized that at times it has seriously handicapped the effort of the Episcopal Church on the national level. Parochialism, or the absorption of the people of a parish with their own affairs to the exclusion of their responsibilities to the whole Church, is a common temptation every Christian community must face; there may also be an equally self-absorbing 'diocesanism." (p.116.) And as events of recent years have demonstrated, there can be no doubt as to the devastating effects of "provincialism" in our worldwide Communion. Both TEC and the Communion as a whole are now wrestling with the consequences of this "self-absorbed" exercise of autonomy: bishops who permit communion of the unbaptized and same sex marriages in direct violation of the Book of Common Prayer and the canons; dioceses that withdraw from TEC altogether; TEC's repudiation of the Communion's moratoria; and the breaking of communion and resulting cross-border interventions by other provinces. How are these destructive consequences to be reconciled with autonomy? Is autonomy itself the problem? Must autonomy be rejected in favor of authoritarian structures? To the last of these questions, we continue to say "no" and our reasons for doing so may shed light on the other questions as well. First, autonomy is not an end in itself. For Christians, autonomy is always to be exercised for a higher purpose. In a communion of churches that autonomy should be exercised, in the words of the Anglican Covenant, with "accountability." Indeed, without accountability there is no communion, and a church that is unaccountable has by definition ordered its life outside the communion of churches. This is a fundamental understanding of communion.  It was articulated in 2003 by the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission: each part of the Church is called to submit an account of its stewardship of the Gospel to other Christians"¦.Furthermore, because of human sin, ignorance and frailty, it is to be anticipated that omissions, mistakes or distortions may occur in any account given of the faith. As a result it becomes vital that the account each part of the Church gives to other Christians of its stewardship of the Gospel contains the possibility of openness to correction. Communion in the Church requires this mutual accountability. And in 2009 by the Windsor Continuation Group: To be a communion, as opposed to a federation or association, is fundamentally to acknowledge that the fellowship of Churches is not a human construct; it is the gracious gift of God. Churches are enabled to live in communion because they recognise one another as truly an expression of the One Church of Jesus Christ"¦. If the recognition of one another as Churches is to be sustained, it implies a level of mutual accountability in the handling of the life of each Church. Second, this distinction between autonomy and the exercise of that autonomy in communion with accountability reflects another distinction: that between the narrow concept of polity and the broader one of ecclesiology. Church polity is the "law" governing the church; such legal structures range from those emphasizing autonomy to those that are more authoritarian. But to assume that a polity respecting autonomy necessarily entails a self-absorbed ecclesiology is to give up on Anglicanism! It is to confuse the "human construct" of polity with an ecclesiology that accepts God's "gracious gift" of communion. It is the goal of the Anglican experiment to manifest a universal or catholic ecclesiology through the voluntary mutual subjection of lawful autonomy to the wider communion. To think that ecclesiology must be exhaustively incorporated into polity"”that polity begets a full ecclesiology"”is to decide that communion is not possible without authoritarian structures. We are unwilling to concede this point. Third, TEC's traditional polity of diocesan autonomy providentially coheres perfectly with classic catholic ecclesiology: the people of God are united in one local church by their communion with their Bishop, and through the communion of all the Bishops in a college of Bishops the people of God around the world are joined in one communion.  This ecclesiology underlies the well-known Resolution 49 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference, quoted in part in the preamble to TEC's Constitution, which notes that the Anglican Communion consists of "those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury" that 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." As in the Roman Catholic Church, there may be intermediate bodies or conferences, but the key ecclesiological relationship is between the diocesan bishop and the universal college of bishops. And, that essential relationship can be given juridical force (polity), as in the Roman Catholic Church, or that relationship can be entered voluntarily as is the hope of Anglicanism. However, the relationship itself is a given if the Church is to be truly the Church of Christ.  Hence, the earlier 1920 Lambeth Conference said, in its bold appeal for Christian unity, that "God wills fellowship," through his own act in and through Jesus and his Spirit, and that this fellowship must be "manifest so far as this world is concerned, in an outward, visible, and united society, holding one faith, having its own recognized officers, using God-given means of grace, and inspiring all its members to the world-wide service of the Kingdom of God. This is what we mean by the Catholic Church."  There is no such thing as a "diocese" or "province" or local "church" that is also "Catholic" outside such a visible, episcopally "ordered" "society".  At its best, Anglicanism cannot be catholic alone; at its worst, we can be woefully sub-ecclesial in our complacent bits and pieces. And this leads to our final point.  It is the preservation of this catholicity, the relationship of bishop to the college of bishops, and these finally understood to include some kind of universal college, that is most important. In the past, TEC has exercised its autonomy with accountability in communion with the other Anglican churches. Anyone familiar with the formation of TEC will know that this accountability, although voluntary, was expressed in very concrete ways, including in the formulation of our Book of Common Prayer and the consecration of our first bishops. And within TEC, its autonomous dioceses were able to exercise their autonomy with accountability both to the other dioceses of TEC and to the Anglican college of bishops. But TEC has now repudiated any accountability to the larger communion. This presents TEC's dioceses with an awful choice. How will they exercise their autonomy? To whom will they be accountable? To no one but themselves? To an isolated and declining body that itself rejects accountability to the church catholic? Or, through the Anglican Covenant, to the wider Communion? Autonomy without accountability leads to denominationalism and isolation. Accountability without autonomy leads to authoritarian structures. Communion with both autonomy and accountability is the Anglican hope manifested in the Covenant. For us the choice is obvious, but we recognize that it is not without cost.