Many, including those opposing its content, have praised the recent House of Bishops Statement for its "clarity". In what follows, I want to dispute that evaluation. The Statement is unclear in numerous important respects, except one, viz. its animus against the Anglican Communion's Primates' Meeting. The reasons for that animus, however, are hardly spelled out, are often contradictory, and are lodged within a tissue of assertions that are without stated rationale. This is not clarity at all. And in the context of the current agonized and conflicted debate within TEC and the Communion, the Statement amounts to an act of pastoral and theological irresponsibility of the highest order.
Many bishops who supported the Statement have since criticized conservative members of their church for drawing dire conclusions from their work, arguing that such conclusions are precipitous and uncharitable, even while they pat themselves on the back for finally "standing up" to the so-called Communion bullies. The celebration will be short-lived. The Statement itself, rushed out without open consultation on key elements which supposedly inform its perspective, in the face of pledges to hold off from just such rash and emotive response to the Primates, does nothing but encourage despair over our bishops' capacity to exercise their ministries with a modicum of prudence, let alone the humility of Christian wisdom. The dire conclusions are more than justified, short of some unexpected reversal of attitude and performance by the House of Bishops in the near future.
The point in what follows is not to "defend" the Primates "against" the House of Bishops. The Primates are quite capable of defending themselves should they wish, and do not need someone like me as a proxy. This is rather about trying to establish some honesty within the debate among Episcopalians about our church's future, and that honesty has been severely compromised by the House of Bishops' Statement. The Primates are not all saints, by any means; and TEC's House of Bishops is not a den of robbers (nor did all the bishops approve of the Statement their House made public). Moral shades and interpretive uncertainties are present and real, as are sincerely held convictions. But we have reached a stage in our church's life – a stage close to actual collapse for Episcopalians committed to the heritage of their Anglican Communion identity – when it is no longer possible to be silenced by the scruples of nuance, much as one must continue to take such nuance seriously and into account. We have vows to maintain, and the space in which to do so is rapidly disappearing.
I. The Primates' Meeting
Although the purported reason the bishops reject the proposed Pastoral Scheme suggested by the Primates is one of "American polity", as we will see the bishops provide little support for their claim. Indeed, the main reason they give, implied as well as explicit, is the Primates' own unworthiness to be considered as acceptable counselors and participants (e.g. in the Pastoral Council) within matters that concern the Episcopal Church and her position in the Communion. The House of Bishops variously associates the Primates with "unaccountability", high-handed "prelature", anti-Reformation power-grabs, anti-Gospel obsessions, undemocratic complicity with anti-Episopalian Americans, and "distressing" lack of concern with the suffering of the world. Katherine Grieb's presentation on the Covenant to the bishops, which many of them have subsequently pointed to as an inspiring call to action, made the character exhibited by the Primates' at Dar es Salaam the main reason for rejecting the proposed Covenant as a useful way forward, precisely because the Primates themselves could no longer be trusted with the conciliar role suggested for it in the document.
It is worth beginning, then, by considering these loose and unsubstantiated charges and implications, aimed mainly at the Global South Primates.
1. Have the Primates been irresponsible in their concern for human welfare as a central element of the Gospel?
It is difficult to know where to begin in responding to such a broad and unargued charge. Suffice it to say that, long before most bishops in the Episcopal Church knew what hunger, civil war, child-soldiers, AIDS among women and children, illiteracy, abandonment and exclusion of women, oppressive government corruption, violation of basic human rights really were, the church leaders of places like Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Burundi, Rwanda, India, and elsewhere were grappling with these realities face on, without resources or support from the West. They continue to do so, supported mainly with means from within their churches, or by funds from outside the Anglican churches of the West altogether – from Germany, Norway, Catholic charities, government and UN sources, and more. Who exactly should one be "distressed" with in this strange imbalance?
What needs to be said is that, for many of these leaders, the hard work of setting up grinding mills for women, working with AIDS widows and sufferers, re-forming the children of war, literacy etc. are activities that rely on the grass-roots engagement of lay women and men of the church itself, formed in the precepts of the Gospel, bound by the church's common life, and renewed by the Holy Spirit in prayer and praise. Literacy-training often takes place through the teaching of the Bible, relationships within villages or even within urban slums through the building up of prayer groups, AIDS prevention through the teaching of sexual abstinence and marriage fidelity, the very hope for working in the face of overwhelming suffering and cruelty through the living presence of Christ shared through testimony and teaching. There is no separation for these leaders, as there apparently is among many in our House of Bishops, between the teaching of Scriptural faith and the works of Christ's mercy; rather they are one and the same. And the attempt by some Americans to segregate Christian doctrine and morals into a marginal realm of "debated issues", only of secondary importance to the Millennium Development Goals, is simply irrational and unfaithful in the eyes of many of the Primates and their people.
The leadership of many Anglican churches around the world has seen its failures and limitations (some of them sorrowfully spectacular), but given the circumstances, far fewer than one might have expected of frail human nature, even redeemed in Christ. And the American church has been generous in limited ways, but not nearly as much as it would like to congratulate itself as being. The sight of American Episcopal bishops lecturing the majority Global South Primates on the ministry of alleviating suffering is morally incongruous to say the least, short of some concrete, specific, and elaborated argument to the contrary.
2. Are the Primates unrepresentative of the church, because they are all male bishops?
Again, I am not sure what to say in the face of such a sweeping assumption, that flies in the face of the Church's history and current practice, let alone of theological truth. Clearly "representation" does not depend, in Christian terms, on gender or social location, otherwise we would need to reject the representativeness of Jesus for all humanity. (There are, I realize, those who would argue just this; however, I am not sure the House of Bishops is really prepared to go such a blatantly heretical route.) Further, the ability of individual bishops who are either male or female to exercise their authority (however defined) would be severely compromised if Christian representation in authoritative positions required a multi-valent sexual/social person.
The question here, it seems, is whether bishops in particular do in fact have the role that the church – including the Episcopal Church, with its repeated emphasis on the bishop as chief pastor and overseer for the "whole" flock – has assigned them within its midst. The representativeness of Christian individuals, on behalf of the entire Body, is founded in Christ's own life and shared Spirit within the Church, and through it, in the trusted (if accountable) ministry through which individuals are called to leadership, whatever their sex or social placement. It is possible that the current crop of Primates has failed in their calling to Christian representation. But where is the evidence? Have their people been polled? Is their a test that has been applied, according to which they have been found wanting? Does the American House of Bishops have some special insight into this question, and one which does not end by fingering themselves?
Some of our bishops, and others, have argued that the issue at stake here is less one of the representative person of a Primate, and more one of (politically) conciliar representation. Like the American church, they believe, the Communion should have some kind of system wherein the council of bishops is matched and balanced by a council or synod of clergy and laity. As a general suggestion for Communion polity, this is certainly something that might be considered by others. As the House of Bishops is well aware, however, this kind of system is both peculiar in its claims, and even where implemented (as in the United States), limited in its practical meaning (do our bishops really want to make the chauvinistic claim that the General Convention of TEC has proven a more faithful body of Christian decision-making than that of other churches?) Furthermore, there is a history and practice within the Communion, based on an episcopal and catholic ecclesiology (and some would say, Scriptural ecclesiology), that would require a good bit of readjustment, not to say deformation, were the demand for some new authoritative and non-Episcopal Communion synod simply to be asserted without careful discussion, one the House of Bishops has completely failed to engage.
One suggestion that one often hears, including one made by some of our bishops, is that the Primates are attempting to "usurp" the more representative role of the Anglican Consultative Council, that at least (as they see it) has clergy and laity as members. It needs to be pointed out, however, that in making suggestions and requests of the American Church, in the midst of a serious crisis of division that threatens the entire Anglican Communion and that has been initiated by the American church (including many of her bishops), the Primates are merely doing what they have been asked to do by all the other "instruments" of Communion, through the recommendation of numerous bodies that included clergy and laity, women as well as men. Obviously, the Archbishop of Canterbury supports these requests, but the Lambeth Conference (twice) encouraged the Primates' Meeting to take on such a role, later taking up recommendations like that of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (The Virginia Report); the Windsor Report itself pointed in this direction (see its Appendix), and the ACC itself accepted these suggestions.
Again, taking up recommendations by the Windsor Report and earlier commissions, the ACC sought to integrate itself more fully with the work of the Primates' Meeting by altering its membership to more adequately reflect the Primates' leadership role (and this was done, as Windsor said, in order to make the ACC more, not less representative of the peoples in the churches of the Communion!). The ACC's own track-record, furthermore, has been the subject of repeated criticisms precisely on the question of its own representativeness of the Communion, with a long series of complaints aimed at its purported subservience to American interests among other things.
Finally, the Constitution of the ACC focuses that council on cooperative mission more than anything else, and it would be a huge change in its constitutional purpose – subject, furthermore, to the Lambeth Conference's direction - if it were to take on an adjudicatory role within the Communion on matters that pertain to doctrine and discipline.
None of this is confronted in the Bishops' Statement, even as they assert the Primates' lack of credibility to represent the Communion in its moment of near collapse.
3. Have the Primates repudiated their Reformation heritage?
The claim is made by the House of Bishops that the Primates' suggested Pastoral Scheme contradicts one of the English Reformation's foundational purposes, that is, to protect national churches from the intrusions of foreign "prelates" (an archaic term within Anglicanism used by the House of Bishops apparently only for its derogatory connotations). Not only is this claim highly anachronistic historically – the House of Bishops seems to have decided it needs to defend a British king's sovereignty over the church as a model for the 21st century! – but it simply ignores the fundamental Reformation-based vows that the Primates, as Anglican bishops, have taken, which include: "Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to the same?". This vow, which goes back to the early 16th-century versions of the Book of Common Prayer, is no longer used in the American Church, to be sure. But its implications are straight-forward, and it can rightly be seen as at least one "Reformation" motive to the work of the Primates in the present, tying together pastorally elements from within the Articles of Religion and common Reformation commitments regarding Scripture, doctrine, oversight, and witness. I shall say more about the question of "foreign intrusion" below. But the focus by the House of Bishops upon a dubious political element tied to the Church of England's struggle with Rome as defining the "Reformation heritage" by which to evaluate the Primates' requests is historically and theologically bizarre.
4. Are the Primates "unaccountable"?
The House of Bishops claims explicitly and also implies at many reprises, that the Primates are a group of leaders whose actions are unconstrained both theoretically and in practice by the will of the larger Church, and that they answer to no one. Thus, engaging the Primates on the basis of "acceding" to their requests would be an act of submitting to uncontrolled power, a deeply dangerous act and precedent.
Does such a claim and fear have any warrant? The House of Bishops certainly offers none, and it is unclear whether their claim is a rhetorical ploy or just the expression of some unformed anxiety. At any rate, the claim represents a poor understanding of how most primates themselves function within their own churches, in the Global South as much as anywhere, and how they function together in their own meetings and with respect to other elements of common life within the Communion.
In the first place, the Primates are accountable to their own Houses of Bishops, to their own clergy, and to their own people. There are enough instances where Archbishops' plans have been resisted, and their occasional power-grabs openly thwarted. Anybody who has, for an instant, been engaged in the life of Anglican churches around the world knows that the distance between an African Archbishop, for instance, and an American bishop in their respective attempts at "getting their own way" at home is nil. Secondly, Primates are accountable to their colleagues. And as much as some American bishops would like to think that there is a cabal of "Global South" Rasputins running CAPA and the rest of the Communion, the facts on the ground are completely otherwise. It is rather the case that many Anglican councils do not air their differences as publicly as in the U.S.. But struggles, honest discussion, and internal opposition abound. Thirdly, the Primates are accountable to the rest of the Communion in a variety of ways – through the councils of Lambeth, the ACC, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a host of commissions, gatherings, meetings, and public opinion. Many American bishops have now criticized the proposed Anglican Covenant exclusively on the basis of its suggestion that the Primates' Meeting act as a conciliar coordinator for dealing with crises of division and as a final articulator of the Communion's sense on a given matter of such kind . What they simply will not engage is the clear process by which the Primates' Meeting, not only in the draft Covenant, but in fact (and the Covenant's proposals are based on this current practice) is bound to a broad set of accountable counsel and decision.
Even on the issue of "border crossing" there have been debate and acts of mutual restraint among the Primates, motivated by a range of interests from within and outside their own churches, including TEC. I would myself (along with our bishops) prefer greater mutual restraint, but that is not the point. The Communiqué offered a way forward for ending border-crossing, and it was a hard-won agreement. That the recommendations are then received by U.S. bishops as the expression of unaccountable self-promotion by the Primates wholly misses the actual dynamics of their agreement.
It is hard to escape the sense that the only reason the American House of Bishops considers Anglican Primates to be "unaccountable" is because the Primates have refused to see the decisions of the American House of Bishops as acceptable to the Communion's well-being and faithfulness. The Bishops' Statement contains a long litany of purported rebuffs by the Primates to TEC's attempts at explaining itself. Nowhere does it consider the possibility that the rebuffs derive from a consistent and well-founded belief by the Primates, upheld over and over by other councils of the Communion, that TEC has simply failed to meet the standards of teaching and discipline that the Communion holds as a whole. Who exactly is being "unaccountable" here? The seeming desire of the Statement to turn the tables rhetorically just doesn't work.
In sum, the House of Bishops' Statement's hostility towards the Primates as an Anglican council whose requests have a moral authority worthy of presumptive deference is founded on assumptions that appear to be unexamined, inaccurate, and unfair.
II. Denying the reality of the Episcopal Church:
One of the most glaring elements of the House of Bishops' Statement is its idiosyncratic image of TEC. In the history it offers concerning TEC's relationship with the Communion, in its discussion of its own internal life in the present, in its allusions to its Anglican heritage, and finally in its sense of the Gospel to which it is accountable, the Statement presents a series of inaccuracies and half-truths that is astounding coming from a gathering of the church's episcopal leadership.
1. Relationship with the Communion
Nowhere in the Statement do the bishops acknowledge their role in causing the breach that now characterizes TEC's relationship with the Communion. It is a role that has included broken vows, denial, subterfuge, and more. Without going back too far, one can point to the 1991 Convention Resolution (B020) that promised that no change in the teaching and discipline regarding sexuality would be made by TEC apart from the rest of the Communion: "these potentially divisive issues should not be resolved by the Episcopal Church on its own". The Convention then instructed the Presiding Bishop to initiate a "broad" process of "pan-Anglican" and "ecumenical" consultation to avoid unilateral action. This process never took place, and instead, the House of Bishops and Convention itself moved steadily forward with its permission of same-sex blessings and finally the consent and consecration of Gene Robinson, and this was done in the face of repeated warnings by the rest of the Communion that could only indicate that TEC's path was being taken "unilaterally". The Lambeth Conference (upheld by ACC), a series of Primates' Meetings, the Archbishop of Canterbury – all spoke clearly to the American church and her bishops about this. Bp. Griswold himself signed the Primates' Lambeth statement in 2003 that begged the U.S. bishops to stand aside from the consecration of Robinson. Yet in response, many bishops, including Griswold himself, went forward and participated in this action that was clearly viewed by the Communion's leaders as knowingly destructive to the life of the larger body.
Despite the linguistic contortions of this or that House of Bishops and Convention resolutions of "apology", an actual statement of contrition for the specific elements of this long series of broken promises and open rejections has never been made. Instead, the bishops' Statement complains that TEC's good will efforts at being nice to the Primates have all been ignored, time and again, and it implies that she is but the victim of their intransigent and mean-spirited hostility. This response, that bluntly refuses to engage the presenting issues and the behavior of the American church and of her own bishops, represents an astonishing denial of reality.
It is this kind of Humpty-Dumpty invention of idiosyncratic meaning and history that crops up again and again in the Statement. Do the bishops really think that TEC's identity is deeply informed by its "liberation from colonialism", an identity that joins her to the deep aspirations of oppressed people around the globe? Do they really believe that readers will not perceive that their use of the language of "colonialism" is but a craven attempt to appropriate the political categories of victimhood and emancipative virtue to a church and cause that has nothing to do with such realities? The American War was waged by colonizers against their own leaders, not by the poor and the tortured. And the Episcopal Church was founded by people whose lives were built upon the suffering of native peoples, African slaves and their descendents, and a host of minority groups (a pattern that has continued to the present day). The Episcopal Church has had its historical achievements (as has the United States), to be sure, and these include the support of liberal democracy; but anti-colonial liberationism isn't one of them. Simply on the level of Anglo-American politics, our forebears do not fit the anti-colonialist categorization. I cannot imagine, for instance, what our Haitian church members think when hearing such strange claims. Who is "offending" whom?
A failure to see this is tied to the ongoing failure of TEC's leadership to perceive their own standing in the eyes of most non-Western Christians
2. The Internal life of the Episcopal Church
The broken promises of the House of Bishops and the General Convention are noticeable not only to other Communion churches. They are visible to and felt by members within TEC as well. Beginning with those holding traditional views regarding the ordination of women, views that the Convention promised would be protected in political ways, but that it later decided had no place within the structures of the church (despite Communion pleas to the contrary), the assurances by TEC's leadership of a "place at the table" to all members of the church and "respect of conscience" have increasingly rung hollow. The request for some form of alternative "primatial" care within TEC did not emerge out of the blue. The recent embarrassment of the church's consent process in South Carolina's episcopal election marks but the most recent moment in a long developing alienation that is actually applauded by many of the bishops themselves.
It is not worth trying to elaborate here a rebuttal to the consistent claim by TEC's leadership that her internal life is marked by healthy cohesion and encouraged pluralism. It is enough to say here that many would dispute the claim on the basis of experienced reality, and it is the dispute that counts, not the counter-assertion by the bishops. The bishops know well enough of diocesan conventions where open debate is forbidden as "divisive", because they themselves have promoted such conventions. They are well aware of the character of most of their seminaries, places where conservative scholars or leaders are protested against, and conservative appointments rarely made (and not for lack of good candidates). They know about Episcopal-related publishing houses that neither seek nor usually permit diversity of views. This has been a gradual evolution, to be sure, begun already in the 1970's, but the direction has been steady, clear, and stifling. The bishops realize, finally, that some of their own colleagues regularly engage in smear campaigns against "dissident" members and leaders of the church, and in ways that hardly reflect Christian charity. There is little or no mutual accountability within the House of Bishops on any of these matters (among conservatives or liberals both, to be sure), and the claims of the Statement to the contrary mask a long-festering problem.
In the end, there is virtually no trust left that the House of Bishops has any intention to "listen" or "discern God's truth" through open discussion and debate. On the presenting issue of teaching and discipline regarding sexuality, the Presiding Bishop and many individual bishops have stated openly that "there is no going back" on the direction the Convention and many dioceses have already taken with respect to "full inclusion". The now seemingly-official teaching that the innovations on sexual life adopted by TEC are analogies to Paul's defense of the Gentiles' inclusion versus the rigidity and hypocrisy of Peter, makes it clear that the House of Bishops believes that they are on the side of the true Gospel, and all others are on the side of a false understanding of Christ. It is an opposition, they are certain, that the Holy Spirit will inevitably resolve in favor of TEC's positions. A moment's reflection shows that there is no room in this image of the "discussion" for true engagement of "diverse" views, for changes of mind by the House of Bishops and Convention, and for an actual pluralistic search for the truth (even if that were desirable). Is it any wonder that the repeated insistence by the bishops that "the listening process" to homosexuals within the Communion, commended by Lambeth I.10 in 1998, is viewed by many – given the bishops' own complete rejection of the informing assertions of the Lambeth resolution itself – as a smokescreen for getting on with their own entrenched commitments, to the detriment of any opposing or alternative views?
Indeed, the Statement makes a commitment to a notion of the Gospel that is without negotiation. It is not only the case that the House of Bishops holds to a fundamentally different Scriptural "hermeneutic" than many in its own church and than the majority of the Communion. It is that this hermeneutic is intrinsically unteachable.
Any attempt to argue that this is not the case involves a profound incoherence: either the matter of "full inclusion" (including to the episcopacy and same-sex unions and blessings) is a matter "indifferent", and hence is open to compromise for the sake of the Communion; or the matter is one of essential doctrine and discipline, and therefore the bishops should simply confess openly their inability to tolerate and accept alternative views (including within the Communion). Either the matter is one that in fact General Convention can order one way or the other (because indifferent), and so they could recommend to the Executive Council or Convention as a whole that they back off for the sake of "relationships" and the Communion; or it is not such a matter, and the bishops should have no fear in committing themselves even now, and on their own, to maintaining what the Convention in years past has upheld as the "traditional" teaching of the Church. What makes no sense is to claim there is "no going back" because of the essential evangelical issues at stake, yet also to proclaim a willingness to engage in open debate and possible new learning and readjustments of current discipline.
At the same time, the bishops avoid even mentioning the warning signs of church decline within TEC, signs pointed out by any number of students of the church's health, including those working within TEC's own research offices. No one denies that there are also "encouraging signs of life and hope within the church" here and there. But these signs are embedded within dynamics of falling attendance and revenues, departures and litigation. In their efforts to tell the Primates to butt out, the bishops have fallen prey to the petulance of autonomous disintegration. Looking for leadership from the bishops, we discover over and over again their preference for denial that there is anything that requires leading.
3. Denying the full heritage of the church
The Constitution of the Episcopal Church identifies her with those Anglican churches that "uphold and propagate" the "historic faith and order" of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church". As the bishops in their Statement enunciate their "gospel" of inclusion – which certainly seems to preempt any further decisions about the rest of the Primates' requests in September – they make no attempt to integrate it with the "Reformation heritage" they otherwise astonishingly claim to embrace more fully than the rest of the Communion. Given that this is very much at the center of TEC's conflict, it deserves some discussion.
Surely no one would dispute that an essential aspect of this Reformation heritage is the testing of all church teaching and discipline by the "word of God" in the Scriptures. But the bishops continue to ignore that this Reformation principle remains unapplied by them on a conciliar basis, either within TEC or within the Communion, where no council has yet agreed that the House of Bishops or the General Convention is in fact acting "in conformance with the Scripture". At best, all such studies have found a lack of consensus on this subject. And in fact, the Communion has, for its part, applied the principle and found TEC utterly wanting. The one attempt TEC made to show that their actions in 2003 were not "contrary to the Word of God" – the paper presented to the ACC entitled To Set Our Hope On Christ, which only presented one view of the matter – has been deemed unpersuasive. But rather than accept this judgment for what it is worth, the bishops erroneously imply that no one has listened to them. The possibility that they have simply not made their case effectively is something they just cannot accept, and therefore seem to have decided that they have nothing more to say either to their people or the world on the matter, beyond the assertion of a "gospel" that is enunciated, it seems, into an ecclesial vacuum.
This is not only a blinkered approach to the church's heritage. The refusal by the bishops to look at Christian religion in any terms other than the alleviation of human suffering, precisely because it avoids applying to our witness the context of the Communion's sense of the "historic faith and order" of the Church, represents a denial of TEC's own Constitution. The bishops, however, have no right, according to their own vows, to ignore the fullness of the heritage they claim. Indeed, the vows of our bishops bind them to "oneness with the apostles", to a "guarding" of that apostolic faith and the unity and discipline of the church, and to a heritage shared with "patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs" and constrained by the "Church throughout the world".
The picture the bishops present of themselves in all of this is of an increasingly isolated group, unwilling or unable to acknowledge the reality of opposition within their own church and within the larger Communion, refusing to engage the theological and ecclesial issues that they have set loose to the detriment of their own flock and the Communion they purportedly love, and now withdrawing into a posture of self-protecting denunciation. The picture is a sad one.
III. The Bishops' claims against Pastoral Scheme
This ought really to be the meat of the Bishops' Statement's purpose. But, as already indicated, the bishops actually have little to say apart from unsupported assertion driven by apparently political animus. Let us look at some of claims they make. There are five that are stated explicitly, and several others that emerge from the Statement as a whole.
1. Is the Proposed Pastoral Scheme in "violation " of TEC's Constitution and Canons?
No citation is given by the bishops to support this claim, and no public consultation about such a rather major issue, if issue it is, was ever pursued. Given one of the "Mind of the House" resolutions by the bishops, as well as subsequent statements by diocesan chancellors, one of the presenting issues for the bishops appears to be their belief that only the General Convention itself as a whole (i.e. both houses) has the authority to "interpret" the Constitution. And if that is the case, the House of Bishops alone cannot make any decision regarding doctrine or delegation of pastoral authority, nor could a Pastoral Council or a delegated Primatial Vicar, as called for by the Scheme, possibly be in a position to make decisions about matters affecting TEC.
But in fact the Constitution of TEC has nothing to say about any of this. The General Convention has no authority over doctrine in any case, except if it be considered adiaphora, because the Episcopal Church is committed to doing nothing in matters of "essential" doctrine that would conflict either with the Church of England or, more importantly, with the Word of God (cf. the Preface to the Prayer Book, the Prayer Book's consistent teaching, and the Preamble to the Constitution). It is certainly not up to the General Convention alone to decide what is or what isn't in conflict with the Church of England's essential doctrine, discipline and worship, or with the "historic faith and order" of the Church as "propagated" by the Anglican Communion. For this would be for the General Convention to tell the Church of England and the Communion what these two bodies actually believe, independent of their own self-articulation, which is absurd. Generally, some process of ordered arbitration takes place when there is a difference in interpretation, which is precisely what we are witnessing at present in the Communion as a whole.
Within a more limited sphere, it is obviously false to claim for the General Convention as a whole such exclusive interpretive authority, for otherwise it would be impossible for clergy and for bishops to be disciplined for teaching doctrine contrary to the Church's. This is something for which ecclesiastical courts, and in the case of bishops, other bishops, are given authority to make determinations, without corroboration from the General Convention. Such decisions may not have applicability beyond the scope of the cases they investigate (cf. the infamous Righter Decision), but they clearly take place through the authority of bodies constitutionally granted powers over the interpretation of doctrine and discipline.
Thus delegation of authority, in these and other matters, is most certainly possible within the limits of the Constitution and Canons. And since, in fact, the Pastoral Council and the Primatial Vicar, according to the proposed Scheme, are seen as operating explicitly only within the Canons of TEC, and only according to the specific permissions of TEC authorities, and only for so long as that permission is given, it is very difficult to see on what basis the House of Bishops could reject the Scheme as inherently unconstitutional. The character and shape of the Scheme is one of request and permission. The unwillingness of our bishops to look at this carefully and instead insist on reading it in terms of "oppression" and "offense" is bizarre and irrational. Indeed, their rejection of the Scheme appears wholly capricious and arbitrary.
2. Does the proposed Pastoral Scheme "violate" the "Windsor and Covenant process"?
Again, the Statement gives no citations from the Windsor Report to undergird this claim. Indeed, the Windsor Report itself made a series of recommendations, which the Primates reiterated as their own at Dromantine, and the TEC authorities, including the House of Bishops, chose to respond to them as valid (although always with a clear sense that they were doing so out a posture of noblesse oblige). Why, all of a sudden, are requests by the Primates invalid? The final paragraph of the Windsor Report in fact envisions – although with some trepidation – the situation in which the TEC bishops now in fact find themselves: we are in the midst of a process of Communion arbitration, with sorrowful results looming for the future relation of TEC and the Communion. Is this all not exactly what the Windsor Report outlined and exactly as its "process" is unfolding?
As for the "Covenant Process", it is clear that the Pastoral Scheme has been suggested as an "interim" arrangement precisely so that that process might unfold without further fractures in both TEC and the Communion, and with the maintenance of TEC's full participation. This seems to wholly contradict the bishops' accusations. It was revealing that, during the House of Bishops discussion of the proposed Covenant (at which I was present), Katherine Grieb's proposal that TEC take an extended "time out" from the councils of the Communion (a minimum of 5 years) brought one specific question: one bishop rose to ask her, "but what will that do to our participation in the Covenant process?", and Grieb had little to say. That is, the hope to put distance between TEC and the Primates that the House of Bishops' statement clearly seeks, will obviously affect TEC's place in the Covenant process; but that is what the House of Bishops seems itself to be choosing, not the Primates or the Communion. The Primates have in fact proposed a way to keep TEC a part of things. Why therefore are our bishops accusing them of violating the process itself, when it is they themselves who are consciously acting in a way that jeopardizes their ability to remain a part of the process?
3. Does the Pastoral Scheme violate TEC's "founding" principles of post-colonial autonomy?
We have already noted the complete inappropriateness of this claim from a rhetorical and historical point of view. Theologically and politically, the autonomy of the Episcopal Church was, from the beginning, profoundly circumscribed by constraints (from the Church of England and internally) imposed by Prayer Book doctrine, by the configuration of Convention, by the general claims of Holy Scripture, and by the early reiteration by the Convention (1814) that the Episcopal Church is, from an ecclesial (though not civil) perspective, the "same body" as the "Church of England". How exactly the notion of "autonomy" must be understood in terms of TEC's "constituent membership" in a body of churches that upholds and propagates a common "faith and order" that is "historically" traceable is exactly what is at issue in the present conflict in the Communion. The Windsor Report remains to date the most carefully articulated response to this question, and it speaks in terms very different from the House of Bishops'. They in turn ignore their own history, whatever its debatable details, and pass by in silence the Communion's own attempt at providing clarity to this matter.
4. Does the Pastoral Scheme violate the Reformation heritage of Anglicanism?
We have already seen that the bishops' characterization of the "Reformation heritage" regarding episcopal vocation is deformed, as is the notion of "local governance" as a central bequest of the Church of England's break from Rome. The notion of a larger accountability to the greater church's guarding of Scripture is in fact given in Cranmer, Hooker, and of course in the origins of the Episcopal Church.
As for the "generous orthodoxy" of the "Prayer Book tradition" touted by the House of Bishops, their claim seems to ignore completely the rather ungenerous and often violent reality of Prayer Book "conformity" within the Church of England up through a good bit of the 19th century. If America has an essential historical link with this particular tradition, it is a negative one, through the non-Conformist exile that founded the colonies' vigorous social life in the 17th-century – hardly the exemplar the bishops needed to make their case. If the Prayer Book tradition has an "orthodoxy", it is neither generous nor ungenerous, but sui generis, and that is what should be examined, not some myth of a pluralist commonwealth of religious questers that seems to lie behind the bishops' vision.
There is, finally, nothing primatially "exclusive" about the Pastoral Scheme or its acceptance by individual bishops, as they choose to consult, discern, and decide within their particular spheres of counsel with the whole church. The Pastoral Council, as proposed, is open to lay membership. And the decisions of the Pastoral Council are made with accountability and cooperation. And as we noted above, the House of Bishops, in this context, makes no attempt to confront its own failures and those of the General Convention to exercise responsible control over the life of their own church within the Communion, failures that make the Primates' proposal necessary in the first place.
5. Is the Pastoral Scheme "spiritually unsound" in its encouragement of "breaking relationships"?
The issue of "breaking" relationships and trust is indeed at the center of our problems within TEC and the Communion. But the breaking of trust has been a large part of the House of Bishops' own actions vis a vis the Communion for some time, as we have seen above. What the House of Bishops should be addressing is, "what is the value of our word or our church's word within our own body and within the Communion?" What is it worth? Do our "vows" actually count? The litany of being ignored and rebuffed by the Primates that the Statement offers should rightly be reformulated in terms of a list of requests, pleadings, and warnings issued by the Communion that the House of Bishops and their Presiding Bishop have repeatedly spurned.
Yet the House of Bishops wants to claim the Primates are "kicking them out" of the Communion, when in fact it is they, the American bishops, who have deliberately chosen a path they know-if they are thinking clearly-must lead to this outcome. Even their own consultative bodies have told them this. Before the 2003 General Convention, the House of Bishops' Theology Committee recommended that no action be taken on matters that would alter the discipline of the church in the area of human sexuality – such as the consent to Gene Robinson's episcopal election. Such actions would divide the church, since, they argued, there was no clear consensus within the church that could support it. The House of Bishops knowingly and deliberately chose in 2003 to ignore their Committee's recommendations. The "schismatic", as Andrew Marvell wrote, is the one who causes separation, not necessarily the one who separates.
Perhaps what the Statement is claiming is that any form of church discipline that involves distancing someone or some group from positions of decision-making is inherently "injurious" to the church; or that any form of separation that is adopted for the sake of maintaining a provisional and fruitful peace is an assault upon relationships in Christ. On the face of it, however, such a claim would contradict Scripture and tradition, not to mention common practice in most cultures. Discipline within the church is not opposed to unity – even and especially eucharistic unity – but is a part of unity's vital context of accountability. The provisional peace of self-restraint is a long-standing Christian virtue, applied pastorally in many instances.
There is, in fact, something morally unsettling about the Statement's attempt to appropriate the categories of fidelity, even of marital fidelity, in their argument against the Primates. Much like their attempt to co-opt the language of anti-colonialism, it is contradicted by the facts on the ground, some of them embodied personally by bishops themselves.
Some of our bishops have called the Primates' requests "offensive". Yet Paragraph 28 of the Communiqué is clear as to the Primates' Meeting's intentions: holding TEC together and bringing healing. It may well be the Scheme is not the best possible way forward to this end. But the presumption of "injury" and "offense" in the face of the Primates' own stated desires is a mark of the very "illness" of diseased trust that afflicts TEC and the Communion. There is little in the Statement that takes this seriously, that acknowledges any responsibility on the part of the House of Bishops for this illness, and that seeks to find ways to repair it with the same concrete attempts at offering healing that the Primates themselves attempted with much effort and perseverance. To label the Pastoral Scheme as inherently schismatic – driven by the serious spiritual disease of "breaking relationships" – contradicts the Primates' own stated desires, and it comes close to calling them liars. More than anything, this kind of response seems reactionary.
From a broader perspective, it appears as if the bishops do not grasp - or certainly do not accept - the central point of the Windsor Report, namely, that communion rests in mutual subjection within the Body of Christ. Such subjection does not prohibit contrarian actions, but it does prohibit them from being undertaken as immediate, ill considered, and undiscussed forms of action. And when such actions are taken in such a way, the order and trust of the Body is torn apart, and ways of restoring such trust and order are demanded that engage willed changes within the heart and behavior of those involved. By contrast, the bishops are defining communion as historical association and
(perhaps) mutual aid, whose connections are not vulnerable to the deep and complex influences and imperatives of mutual subjection as understood by the larger Communion.. Perhaps this essential difference in perspective accounts for the fact that the bishops' response remains largely on the level of ad hominim comment and tortured remarks about differing forms of polity.
IV. Questions raised by the Bishops' Statement for Episcopal Clergy
Our own Prayer Book teaches us that our first commitment as a baptized Christian is to "continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship" (BCP p. 304) and that this following is of the very nature of the Church (p. 854). This commitment we have all made. At the same time, we are taught that it is the Church who leads us in the right interpretation of the Scriptures, the apostolic witness, through the Holy Spirit (853f.).
Which Church is this? Is it the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops? Is it her Executive Council? Is it her General Convention? Or is it not the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic" church we confess in the Creeds? In any case, we are now being taught two opposing truths. The House of Bishops herself has set up before the faithful Christian in her midst a dilemma that must be resolved.
Those of us who are priests have vowed to be obedient to the faith "received" (p. 526). Received from whom? Surely from the apostolic heritage and witness, of which our bishops are to be guardians (p. 517), the "historic Faith and Order" that our Constitution tells us represents the very evangelical identity of the "Anglican Communion" of which our Episcopal Church is bound as a "constituent member" (borrowing the phrasing and meaning of a previous Lambeth Conference). It is clear that the historic Faith and Order is something shared. And if it is shared, it cannot be the sole possession of the Episcopal Church to define or to demand, as our bishops have resolved the Episcopal Church has the right to do. The bishops of the Episcopal Church are part of the "Church throughout the world" (p. 517), in time as well as space, and it is therefore this universal "trust" (p. 518) that they are called to guard. And it is this trust that we, as clergy, are solemnly bound, by a vow of "loyalty", to uphold.
How shall we then today understand this trust? The wider Anglican Communion, through those councils that we share (p. 531) – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates' Meeting, and each according to the definitions offered by the Lambeth Conferences – have articulated the standard of the "historic Faith and Order" in the matters currently under fractious debate; they have also called on our bishops in the Episcopal Church to adapt themselves to this teaching and discipline, since the Anglican Communion has defined this standard as something essentially in accordance with Scripture (cf. 1998 Lambeth I.10), a matter our own Prayer Book tells us is the necessary criterion by which to evaluate the adequacy any church's decisions (Preface) . Our bishops as a house have now refused the Communion's trust, clearly and resolutely. They have done so without argument and without open consultation. They have done so with animosity.
With whom and under whom do we now fulfill our vows made before God? It is no longer possible to receive equally the claim made by the House of Bishops to be faithful to the apostolic trust, along with the claim by the "Church throughout the world" that this trust demands another set of actions and commitments. What then shall we do?
Our bishops have left us in a grievous and parlous position. It is true, as our bishops have said, that those who wish to "divide" the church are few. The concerns expressed above come from clergy, like myself, who have long labored to maintain the unity of TEC, internally and with the Communion. We do not wish what the bishops themselves, few in number though they be, are pressing upon us.
Let us who care for Christ's embrace of Anglican Christianity in Communion redouble our prayers and our efforts to see that the will of Dar es Salaam unfold in God's good time, and not be thwarted by another unilateral dictation of how the Communion ought to mirror the incoherent image of TEC. God help us. Much is at stake here. It is time to do all we can to assure that the Instruments of Communion be able to do their work unhindered. If TEC's bishops do not wish to be a part of this, that is their decision. Let them have the courage of their convictions; but let us not quietly accept their invented Anglican Christianity that never existed anywhere before.
Many bishops who supported the Statement have since criticized conservative members of their church for drawing dire conclusions from their work, arguing that such conclusions are precipitous and uncharitable, even while they pat themselves on the back for finally "standing up" to the so-called Communion bullies. The celebration will be short-lived. The Statement itself, rushed out without open consultation on key elements which supposedly inform its perspective, in the face of pledges to hold off from just such rash and emotive response to the Primates, does nothing but encourage despair over our bishops' capacity to exercise their ministries with a modicum of prudence, let alone the humility of Christian wisdom. The dire conclusions are more than justified, short of some unexpected reversal of attitude and performance by the House of Bishops in the near future.
The point in what follows is not to "defend" the Primates "against" the House of Bishops. The Primates are quite capable of defending themselves should they wish, and do not need someone like me as a proxy. This is rather about trying to establish some honesty within the debate among Episcopalians about our church's future, and that honesty has been severely compromised by the House of Bishops' Statement. The Primates are not all saints, by any means; and TEC's House of Bishops is not a den of robbers (nor did all the bishops approve of the Statement their House made public). Moral shades and interpretive uncertainties are present and real, as are sincerely held convictions. But we have reached a stage in our church's life – a stage close to actual collapse for Episcopalians committed to the heritage of their Anglican Communion identity – when it is no longer possible to be silenced by the scruples of nuance, much as one must continue to take such nuance seriously and into account. We have vows to maintain, and the space in which to do so is rapidly disappearing.
I. The Primates' Meeting
Although the purported reason the bishops reject the proposed Pastoral Scheme suggested by the Primates is one of "American polity", as we will see the bishops provide little support for their claim. Indeed, the main reason they give, implied as well as explicit, is the Primates' own unworthiness to be considered as acceptable counselors and participants (e.g. in the Pastoral Council) within matters that concern the Episcopal Church and her position in the Communion. The House of Bishops variously associates the Primates with "unaccountability", high-handed "prelature", anti-Reformation power-grabs, anti-Gospel obsessions, undemocratic complicity with anti-Episopalian Americans, and "distressing" lack of concern with the suffering of the world. Katherine Grieb's presentation on the Covenant to the bishops, which many of them have subsequently pointed to as an inspiring call to action, made the character exhibited by the Primates' at Dar es Salaam the main reason for rejecting the proposed Covenant as a useful way forward, precisely because the Primates themselves could no longer be trusted with the conciliar role suggested for it in the document.
It is worth beginning, then, by considering these loose and unsubstantiated charges and implications, aimed mainly at the Global South Primates.
1. Have the Primates been irresponsible in their concern for human welfare as a central element of the Gospel?
It is difficult to know where to begin in responding to such a broad and unargued charge. Suffice it to say that, long before most bishops in the Episcopal Church knew what hunger, civil war, child-soldiers, AIDS among women and children, illiteracy, abandonment and exclusion of women, oppressive government corruption, violation of basic human rights really were, the church leaders of places like Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Burundi, Rwanda, India, and elsewhere were grappling with these realities face on, without resources or support from the West. They continue to do so, supported mainly with means from within their churches, or by funds from outside the Anglican churches of the West altogether – from Germany, Norway, Catholic charities, government and UN sources, and more. Who exactly should one be "distressed" with in this strange imbalance?
What needs to be said is that, for many of these leaders, the hard work of setting up grinding mills for women, working with AIDS widows and sufferers, re-forming the children of war, literacy etc. are activities that rely on the grass-roots engagement of lay women and men of the church itself, formed in the precepts of the Gospel, bound by the church's common life, and renewed by the Holy Spirit in prayer and praise. Literacy-training often takes place through the teaching of the Bible, relationships within villages or even within urban slums through the building up of prayer groups, AIDS prevention through the teaching of sexual abstinence and marriage fidelity, the very hope for working in the face of overwhelming suffering and cruelty through the living presence of Christ shared through testimony and teaching. There is no separation for these leaders, as there apparently is among many in our House of Bishops, between the teaching of Scriptural faith and the works of Christ's mercy; rather they are one and the same. And the attempt by some Americans to segregate Christian doctrine and morals into a marginal realm of "debated issues", only of secondary importance to the Millennium Development Goals, is simply irrational and unfaithful in the eyes of many of the Primates and their people.
The leadership of many Anglican churches around the world has seen its failures and limitations (some of them sorrowfully spectacular), but given the circumstances, far fewer than one might have expected of frail human nature, even redeemed in Christ. And the American church has been generous in limited ways, but not nearly as much as it would like to congratulate itself as being. The sight of American Episcopal bishops lecturing the majority Global South Primates on the ministry of alleviating suffering is morally incongruous to say the least, short of some concrete, specific, and elaborated argument to the contrary.
2. Are the Primates unrepresentative of the church, because they are all male bishops?
Again, I am not sure what to say in the face of such a sweeping assumption, that flies in the face of the Church's history and current practice, let alone of theological truth. Clearly "representation" does not depend, in Christian terms, on gender or social location, otherwise we would need to reject the representativeness of Jesus for all humanity. (There are, I realize, those who would argue just this; however, I am not sure the House of Bishops is really prepared to go such a blatantly heretical route.) Further, the ability of individual bishops who are either male or female to exercise their authority (however defined) would be severely compromised if Christian representation in authoritative positions required a multi-valent sexual/social person.
The question here, it seems, is whether bishops in particular do in fact have the role that the church – including the Episcopal Church, with its repeated emphasis on the bishop as chief pastor and overseer for the "whole" flock – has assigned them within its midst. The representativeness of Christian individuals, on behalf of the entire Body, is founded in Christ's own life and shared Spirit within the Church, and through it, in the trusted (if accountable) ministry through which individuals are called to leadership, whatever their sex or social placement. It is possible that the current crop of Primates has failed in their calling to Christian representation. But where is the evidence? Have their people been polled? Is their a test that has been applied, according to which they have been found wanting? Does the American House of Bishops have some special insight into this question, and one which does not end by fingering themselves?
Some of our bishops, and others, have argued that the issue at stake here is less one of the representative person of a Primate, and more one of (politically) conciliar representation. Like the American church, they believe, the Communion should have some kind of system wherein the council of bishops is matched and balanced by a council or synod of clergy and laity. As a general suggestion for Communion polity, this is certainly something that might be considered by others. As the House of Bishops is well aware, however, this kind of system is both peculiar in its claims, and even where implemented (as in the United States), limited in its practical meaning (do our bishops really want to make the chauvinistic claim that the General Convention of TEC has proven a more faithful body of Christian decision-making than that of other churches?) Furthermore, there is a history and practice within the Communion, based on an episcopal and catholic ecclesiology (and some would say, Scriptural ecclesiology), that would require a good bit of readjustment, not to say deformation, were the demand for some new authoritative and non-Episcopal Communion synod simply to be asserted without careful discussion, one the House of Bishops has completely failed to engage.
One suggestion that one often hears, including one made by some of our bishops, is that the Primates are attempting to "usurp" the more representative role of the Anglican Consultative Council, that at least (as they see it) has clergy and laity as members. It needs to be pointed out, however, that in making suggestions and requests of the American Church, in the midst of a serious crisis of division that threatens the entire Anglican Communion and that has been initiated by the American church (including many of her bishops), the Primates are merely doing what they have been asked to do by all the other "instruments" of Communion, through the recommendation of numerous bodies that included clergy and laity, women as well as men. Obviously, the Archbishop of Canterbury supports these requests, but the Lambeth Conference (twice) encouraged the Primates' Meeting to take on such a role, later taking up recommendations like that of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (The Virginia Report); the Windsor Report itself pointed in this direction (see its Appendix), and the ACC itself accepted these suggestions.
Again, taking up recommendations by the Windsor Report and earlier commissions, the ACC sought to integrate itself more fully with the work of the Primates' Meeting by altering its membership to more adequately reflect the Primates' leadership role (and this was done, as Windsor said, in order to make the ACC more, not less representative of the peoples in the churches of the Communion!). The ACC's own track-record, furthermore, has been the subject of repeated criticisms precisely on the question of its own representativeness of the Communion, with a long series of complaints aimed at its purported subservience to American interests among other things.
Finally, the Constitution of the ACC focuses that council on cooperative mission more than anything else, and it would be a huge change in its constitutional purpose – subject, furthermore, to the Lambeth Conference's direction - if it were to take on an adjudicatory role within the Communion on matters that pertain to doctrine and discipline.
None of this is confronted in the Bishops' Statement, even as they assert the Primates' lack of credibility to represent the Communion in its moment of near collapse.
3. Have the Primates repudiated their Reformation heritage?
The claim is made by the House of Bishops that the Primates' suggested Pastoral Scheme contradicts one of the English Reformation's foundational purposes, that is, to protect national churches from the intrusions of foreign "prelates" (an archaic term within Anglicanism used by the House of Bishops apparently only for its derogatory connotations). Not only is this claim highly anachronistic historically – the House of Bishops seems to have decided it needs to defend a British king's sovereignty over the church as a model for the 21st century! – but it simply ignores the fundamental Reformation-based vows that the Primates, as Anglican bishops, have taken, which include: "Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to the same?". This vow, which goes back to the early 16th-century versions of the Book of Common Prayer, is no longer used in the American Church, to be sure. But its implications are straight-forward, and it can rightly be seen as at least one "Reformation" motive to the work of the Primates in the present, tying together pastorally elements from within the Articles of Religion and common Reformation commitments regarding Scripture, doctrine, oversight, and witness. I shall say more about the question of "foreign intrusion" below. But the focus by the House of Bishops upon a dubious political element tied to the Church of England's struggle with Rome as defining the "Reformation heritage" by which to evaluate the Primates' requests is historically and theologically bizarre.
4. Are the Primates "unaccountable"?
The House of Bishops claims explicitly and also implies at many reprises, that the Primates are a group of leaders whose actions are unconstrained both theoretically and in practice by the will of the larger Church, and that they answer to no one. Thus, engaging the Primates on the basis of "acceding" to their requests would be an act of submitting to uncontrolled power, a deeply dangerous act and precedent.
Does such a claim and fear have any warrant? The House of Bishops certainly offers none, and it is unclear whether their claim is a rhetorical ploy or just the expression of some unformed anxiety. At any rate, the claim represents a poor understanding of how most primates themselves function within their own churches, in the Global South as much as anywhere, and how they function together in their own meetings and with respect to other elements of common life within the Communion.
In the first place, the Primates are accountable to their own Houses of Bishops, to their own clergy, and to their own people. There are enough instances where Archbishops' plans have been resisted, and their occasional power-grabs openly thwarted. Anybody who has, for an instant, been engaged in the life of Anglican churches around the world knows that the distance between an African Archbishop, for instance, and an American bishop in their respective attempts at "getting their own way" at home is nil. Secondly, Primates are accountable to their colleagues. And as much as some American bishops would like to think that there is a cabal of "Global South" Rasputins running CAPA and the rest of the Communion, the facts on the ground are completely otherwise. It is rather the case that many Anglican councils do not air their differences as publicly as in the U.S.. But struggles, honest discussion, and internal opposition abound. Thirdly, the Primates are accountable to the rest of the Communion in a variety of ways – through the councils of Lambeth, the ACC, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a host of commissions, gatherings, meetings, and public opinion. Many American bishops have now criticized the proposed Anglican Covenant exclusively on the basis of its suggestion that the Primates' Meeting act as a conciliar coordinator for dealing with crises of division and as a final articulator of the Communion's sense on a given matter of such kind . What they simply will not engage is the clear process by which the Primates' Meeting, not only in the draft Covenant, but in fact (and the Covenant's proposals are based on this current practice) is bound to a broad set of accountable counsel and decision.
Even on the issue of "border crossing" there have been debate and acts of mutual restraint among the Primates, motivated by a range of interests from within and outside their own churches, including TEC. I would myself (along with our bishops) prefer greater mutual restraint, but that is not the point. The Communiqué offered a way forward for ending border-crossing, and it was a hard-won agreement. That the recommendations are then received by U.S. bishops as the expression of unaccountable self-promotion by the Primates wholly misses the actual dynamics of their agreement.
It is hard to escape the sense that the only reason the American House of Bishops considers Anglican Primates to be "unaccountable" is because the Primates have refused to see the decisions of the American House of Bishops as acceptable to the Communion's well-being and faithfulness. The Bishops' Statement contains a long litany of purported rebuffs by the Primates to TEC's attempts at explaining itself. Nowhere does it consider the possibility that the rebuffs derive from a consistent and well-founded belief by the Primates, upheld over and over by other councils of the Communion, that TEC has simply failed to meet the standards of teaching and discipline that the Communion holds as a whole. Who exactly is being "unaccountable" here? The seeming desire of the Statement to turn the tables rhetorically just doesn't work.
In sum, the House of Bishops' Statement's hostility towards the Primates as an Anglican council whose requests have a moral authority worthy of presumptive deference is founded on assumptions that appear to be unexamined, inaccurate, and unfair.
II. Denying the reality of the Episcopal Church:
One of the most glaring elements of the House of Bishops' Statement is its idiosyncratic image of TEC. In the history it offers concerning TEC's relationship with the Communion, in its discussion of its own internal life in the present, in its allusions to its Anglican heritage, and finally in its sense of the Gospel to which it is accountable, the Statement presents a series of inaccuracies and half-truths that is astounding coming from a gathering of the church's episcopal leadership.
1. Relationship with the Communion
Nowhere in the Statement do the bishops acknowledge their role in causing the breach that now characterizes TEC's relationship with the Communion. It is a role that has included broken vows, denial, subterfuge, and more. Without going back too far, one can point to the 1991 Convention Resolution (B020) that promised that no change in the teaching and discipline regarding sexuality would be made by TEC apart from the rest of the Communion: "these potentially divisive issues should not be resolved by the Episcopal Church on its own". The Convention then instructed the Presiding Bishop to initiate a "broad" process of "pan-Anglican" and "ecumenical" consultation to avoid unilateral action. This process never took place, and instead, the House of Bishops and Convention itself moved steadily forward with its permission of same-sex blessings and finally the consent and consecration of Gene Robinson, and this was done in the face of repeated warnings by the rest of the Communion that could only indicate that TEC's path was being taken "unilaterally". The Lambeth Conference (upheld by ACC), a series of Primates' Meetings, the Archbishop of Canterbury – all spoke clearly to the American church and her bishops about this. Bp. Griswold himself signed the Primates' Lambeth statement in 2003 that begged the U.S. bishops to stand aside from the consecration of Robinson. Yet in response, many bishops, including Griswold himself, went forward and participated in this action that was clearly viewed by the Communion's leaders as knowingly destructive to the life of the larger body.
Despite the linguistic contortions of this or that House of Bishops and Convention resolutions of "apology", an actual statement of contrition for the specific elements of this long series of broken promises and open rejections has never been made. Instead, the bishops' Statement complains that TEC's good will efforts at being nice to the Primates have all been ignored, time and again, and it implies that she is but the victim of their intransigent and mean-spirited hostility. This response, that bluntly refuses to engage the presenting issues and the behavior of the American church and of her own bishops, represents an astonishing denial of reality.
It is this kind of Humpty-Dumpty invention of idiosyncratic meaning and history that crops up again and again in the Statement. Do the bishops really think that TEC's identity is deeply informed by its "liberation from colonialism", an identity that joins her to the deep aspirations of oppressed people around the globe? Do they really believe that readers will not perceive that their use of the language of "colonialism" is but a craven attempt to appropriate the political categories of victimhood and emancipative virtue to a church and cause that has nothing to do with such realities? The American War was waged by colonizers against their own leaders, not by the poor and the tortured. And the Episcopal Church was founded by people whose lives were built upon the suffering of native peoples, African slaves and their descendents, and a host of minority groups (a pattern that has continued to the present day). The Episcopal Church has had its historical achievements (as has the United States), to be sure, and these include the support of liberal democracy; but anti-colonial liberationism isn't one of them. Simply on the level of Anglo-American politics, our forebears do not fit the anti-colonialist categorization. I cannot imagine, for instance, what our Haitian church members think when hearing such strange claims. Who is "offending" whom?
A failure to see this is tied to the ongoing failure of TEC's leadership to perceive their own standing in the eyes of most non-Western Christians
2. The Internal life of the Episcopal Church
The broken promises of the House of Bishops and the General Convention are noticeable not only to other Communion churches. They are visible to and felt by members within TEC as well. Beginning with those holding traditional views regarding the ordination of women, views that the Convention promised would be protected in political ways, but that it later decided had no place within the structures of the church (despite Communion pleas to the contrary), the assurances by TEC's leadership of a "place at the table" to all members of the church and "respect of conscience" have increasingly rung hollow. The request for some form of alternative "primatial" care within TEC did not emerge out of the blue. The recent embarrassment of the church's consent process in South Carolina's episcopal election marks but the most recent moment in a long developing alienation that is actually applauded by many of the bishops themselves.
It is not worth trying to elaborate here a rebuttal to the consistent claim by TEC's leadership that her internal life is marked by healthy cohesion and encouraged pluralism. It is enough to say here that many would dispute the claim on the basis of experienced reality, and it is the dispute that counts, not the counter-assertion by the bishops. The bishops know well enough of diocesan conventions where open debate is forbidden as "divisive", because they themselves have promoted such conventions. They are well aware of the character of most of their seminaries, places where conservative scholars or leaders are protested against, and conservative appointments rarely made (and not for lack of good candidates). They know about Episcopal-related publishing houses that neither seek nor usually permit diversity of views. This has been a gradual evolution, to be sure, begun already in the 1970's, but the direction has been steady, clear, and stifling. The bishops realize, finally, that some of their own colleagues regularly engage in smear campaigns against "dissident" members and leaders of the church, and in ways that hardly reflect Christian charity. There is little or no mutual accountability within the House of Bishops on any of these matters (among conservatives or liberals both, to be sure), and the claims of the Statement to the contrary mask a long-festering problem.
In the end, there is virtually no trust left that the House of Bishops has any intention to "listen" or "discern God's truth" through open discussion and debate. On the presenting issue of teaching and discipline regarding sexuality, the Presiding Bishop and many individual bishops have stated openly that "there is no going back" on the direction the Convention and many dioceses have already taken with respect to "full inclusion". The now seemingly-official teaching that the innovations on sexual life adopted by TEC are analogies to Paul's defense of the Gentiles' inclusion versus the rigidity and hypocrisy of Peter, makes it clear that the House of Bishops believes that they are on the side of the true Gospel, and all others are on the side of a false understanding of Christ. It is an opposition, they are certain, that the Holy Spirit will inevitably resolve in favor of TEC's positions. A moment's reflection shows that there is no room in this image of the "discussion" for true engagement of "diverse" views, for changes of mind by the House of Bishops and Convention, and for an actual pluralistic search for the truth (even if that were desirable). Is it any wonder that the repeated insistence by the bishops that "the listening process" to homosexuals within the Communion, commended by Lambeth I.10 in 1998, is viewed by many – given the bishops' own complete rejection of the informing assertions of the Lambeth resolution itself – as a smokescreen for getting on with their own entrenched commitments, to the detriment of any opposing or alternative views?
Indeed, the Statement makes a commitment to a notion of the Gospel that is without negotiation. It is not only the case that the House of Bishops holds to a fundamentally different Scriptural "hermeneutic" than many in its own church and than the majority of the Communion. It is that this hermeneutic is intrinsically unteachable.
Any attempt to argue that this is not the case involves a profound incoherence: either the matter of "full inclusion" (including to the episcopacy and same-sex unions and blessings) is a matter "indifferent", and hence is open to compromise for the sake of the Communion; or the matter is one of essential doctrine and discipline, and therefore the bishops should simply confess openly their inability to tolerate and accept alternative views (including within the Communion). Either the matter is one that in fact General Convention can order one way or the other (because indifferent), and so they could recommend to the Executive Council or Convention as a whole that they back off for the sake of "relationships" and the Communion; or it is not such a matter, and the bishops should have no fear in committing themselves even now, and on their own, to maintaining what the Convention in years past has upheld as the "traditional" teaching of the Church. What makes no sense is to claim there is "no going back" because of the essential evangelical issues at stake, yet also to proclaim a willingness to engage in open debate and possible new learning and readjustments of current discipline.
At the same time, the bishops avoid even mentioning the warning signs of church decline within TEC, signs pointed out by any number of students of the church's health, including those working within TEC's own research offices. No one denies that there are also "encouraging signs of life and hope within the church" here and there. But these signs are embedded within dynamics of falling attendance and revenues, departures and litigation. In their efforts to tell the Primates to butt out, the bishops have fallen prey to the petulance of autonomous disintegration. Looking for leadership from the bishops, we discover over and over again their preference for denial that there is anything that requires leading.
3. Denying the full heritage of the church
The Constitution of the Episcopal Church identifies her with those Anglican churches that "uphold and propagate" the "historic faith and order" of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church". As the bishops in their Statement enunciate their "gospel" of inclusion – which certainly seems to preempt any further decisions about the rest of the Primates' requests in September – they make no attempt to integrate it with the "Reformation heritage" they otherwise astonishingly claim to embrace more fully than the rest of the Communion. Given that this is very much at the center of TEC's conflict, it deserves some discussion.
Surely no one would dispute that an essential aspect of this Reformation heritage is the testing of all church teaching and discipline by the "word of God" in the Scriptures. But the bishops continue to ignore that this Reformation principle remains unapplied by them on a conciliar basis, either within TEC or within the Communion, where no council has yet agreed that the House of Bishops or the General Convention is in fact acting "in conformance with the Scripture". At best, all such studies have found a lack of consensus on this subject. And in fact, the Communion has, for its part, applied the principle and found TEC utterly wanting. The one attempt TEC made to show that their actions in 2003 were not "contrary to the Word of God" – the paper presented to the ACC entitled To Set Our Hope On Christ, which only presented one view of the matter – has been deemed unpersuasive. But rather than accept this judgment for what it is worth, the bishops erroneously imply that no one has listened to them. The possibility that they have simply not made their case effectively is something they just cannot accept, and therefore seem to have decided that they have nothing more to say either to their people or the world on the matter, beyond the assertion of a "gospel" that is enunciated, it seems, into an ecclesial vacuum.
This is not only a blinkered approach to the church's heritage. The refusal by the bishops to look at Christian religion in any terms other than the alleviation of human suffering, precisely because it avoids applying to our witness the context of the Communion's sense of the "historic faith and order" of the Church, represents a denial of TEC's own Constitution. The bishops, however, have no right, according to their own vows, to ignore the fullness of the heritage they claim. Indeed, the vows of our bishops bind them to "oneness with the apostles", to a "guarding" of that apostolic faith and the unity and discipline of the church, and to a heritage shared with "patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs" and constrained by the "Church throughout the world".
The picture the bishops present of themselves in all of this is of an increasingly isolated group, unwilling or unable to acknowledge the reality of opposition within their own church and within the larger Communion, refusing to engage the theological and ecclesial issues that they have set loose to the detriment of their own flock and the Communion they purportedly love, and now withdrawing into a posture of self-protecting denunciation. The picture is a sad one.
III. The Bishops' claims against Pastoral Scheme
This ought really to be the meat of the Bishops' Statement's purpose. But, as already indicated, the bishops actually have little to say apart from unsupported assertion driven by apparently political animus. Let us look at some of claims they make. There are five that are stated explicitly, and several others that emerge from the Statement as a whole.
1. Is the Proposed Pastoral Scheme in "violation " of TEC's Constitution and Canons?
No citation is given by the bishops to support this claim, and no public consultation about such a rather major issue, if issue it is, was ever pursued. Given one of the "Mind of the House" resolutions by the bishops, as well as subsequent statements by diocesan chancellors, one of the presenting issues for the bishops appears to be their belief that only the General Convention itself as a whole (i.e. both houses) has the authority to "interpret" the Constitution. And if that is the case, the House of Bishops alone cannot make any decision regarding doctrine or delegation of pastoral authority, nor could a Pastoral Council or a delegated Primatial Vicar, as called for by the Scheme, possibly be in a position to make decisions about matters affecting TEC.
But in fact the Constitution of TEC has nothing to say about any of this. The General Convention has no authority over doctrine in any case, except if it be considered adiaphora, because the Episcopal Church is committed to doing nothing in matters of "essential" doctrine that would conflict either with the Church of England or, more importantly, with the Word of God (cf. the Preface to the Prayer Book, the Prayer Book's consistent teaching, and the Preamble to the Constitution). It is certainly not up to the General Convention alone to decide what is or what isn't in conflict with the Church of England's essential doctrine, discipline and worship, or with the "historic faith and order" of the Church as "propagated" by the Anglican Communion. For this would be for the General Convention to tell the Church of England and the Communion what these two bodies actually believe, independent of their own self-articulation, which is absurd. Generally, some process of ordered arbitration takes place when there is a difference in interpretation, which is precisely what we are witnessing at present in the Communion as a whole.
Within a more limited sphere, it is obviously false to claim for the General Convention as a whole such exclusive interpretive authority, for otherwise it would be impossible for clergy and for bishops to be disciplined for teaching doctrine contrary to the Church's. This is something for which ecclesiastical courts, and in the case of bishops, other bishops, are given authority to make determinations, without corroboration from the General Convention. Such decisions may not have applicability beyond the scope of the cases they investigate (cf. the infamous Righter Decision), but they clearly take place through the authority of bodies constitutionally granted powers over the interpretation of doctrine and discipline.
Thus delegation of authority, in these and other matters, is most certainly possible within the limits of the Constitution and Canons. And since, in fact, the Pastoral Council and the Primatial Vicar, according to the proposed Scheme, are seen as operating explicitly only within the Canons of TEC, and only according to the specific permissions of TEC authorities, and only for so long as that permission is given, it is very difficult to see on what basis the House of Bishops could reject the Scheme as inherently unconstitutional. The character and shape of the Scheme is one of request and permission. The unwillingness of our bishops to look at this carefully and instead insist on reading it in terms of "oppression" and "offense" is bizarre and irrational. Indeed, their rejection of the Scheme appears wholly capricious and arbitrary.
2. Does the proposed Pastoral Scheme "violate" the "Windsor and Covenant process"?
Again, the Statement gives no citations from the Windsor Report to undergird this claim. Indeed, the Windsor Report itself made a series of recommendations, which the Primates reiterated as their own at Dromantine, and the TEC authorities, including the House of Bishops, chose to respond to them as valid (although always with a clear sense that they were doing so out a posture of noblesse oblige). Why, all of a sudden, are requests by the Primates invalid? The final paragraph of the Windsor Report in fact envisions – although with some trepidation – the situation in which the TEC bishops now in fact find themselves: we are in the midst of a process of Communion arbitration, with sorrowful results looming for the future relation of TEC and the Communion. Is this all not exactly what the Windsor Report outlined and exactly as its "process" is unfolding?
As for the "Covenant Process", it is clear that the Pastoral Scheme has been suggested as an "interim" arrangement precisely so that that process might unfold without further fractures in both TEC and the Communion, and with the maintenance of TEC's full participation. This seems to wholly contradict the bishops' accusations. It was revealing that, during the House of Bishops discussion of the proposed Covenant (at which I was present), Katherine Grieb's proposal that TEC take an extended "time out" from the councils of the Communion (a minimum of 5 years) brought one specific question: one bishop rose to ask her, "but what will that do to our participation in the Covenant process?", and Grieb had little to say. That is, the hope to put distance between TEC and the Primates that the House of Bishops' statement clearly seeks, will obviously affect TEC's place in the Covenant process; but that is what the House of Bishops seems itself to be choosing, not the Primates or the Communion. The Primates have in fact proposed a way to keep TEC a part of things. Why therefore are our bishops accusing them of violating the process itself, when it is they themselves who are consciously acting in a way that jeopardizes their ability to remain a part of the process?
3. Does the Pastoral Scheme violate TEC's "founding" principles of post-colonial autonomy?
We have already noted the complete inappropriateness of this claim from a rhetorical and historical point of view. Theologically and politically, the autonomy of the Episcopal Church was, from the beginning, profoundly circumscribed by constraints (from the Church of England and internally) imposed by Prayer Book doctrine, by the configuration of Convention, by the general claims of Holy Scripture, and by the early reiteration by the Convention (1814) that the Episcopal Church is, from an ecclesial (though not civil) perspective, the "same body" as the "Church of England". How exactly the notion of "autonomy" must be understood in terms of TEC's "constituent membership" in a body of churches that upholds and propagates a common "faith and order" that is "historically" traceable is exactly what is at issue in the present conflict in the Communion. The Windsor Report remains to date the most carefully articulated response to this question, and it speaks in terms very different from the House of Bishops'. They in turn ignore their own history, whatever its debatable details, and pass by in silence the Communion's own attempt at providing clarity to this matter.
4. Does the Pastoral Scheme violate the Reformation heritage of Anglicanism?
We have already seen that the bishops' characterization of the "Reformation heritage" regarding episcopal vocation is deformed, as is the notion of "local governance" as a central bequest of the Church of England's break from Rome. The notion of a larger accountability to the greater church's guarding of Scripture is in fact given in Cranmer, Hooker, and of course in the origins of the Episcopal Church.
As for the "generous orthodoxy" of the "Prayer Book tradition" touted by the House of Bishops, their claim seems to ignore completely the rather ungenerous and often violent reality of Prayer Book "conformity" within the Church of England up through a good bit of the 19th century. If America has an essential historical link with this particular tradition, it is a negative one, through the non-Conformist exile that founded the colonies' vigorous social life in the 17th-century – hardly the exemplar the bishops needed to make their case. If the Prayer Book tradition has an "orthodoxy", it is neither generous nor ungenerous, but sui generis, and that is what should be examined, not some myth of a pluralist commonwealth of religious questers that seems to lie behind the bishops' vision.
There is, finally, nothing primatially "exclusive" about the Pastoral Scheme or its acceptance by individual bishops, as they choose to consult, discern, and decide within their particular spheres of counsel with the whole church. The Pastoral Council, as proposed, is open to lay membership. And the decisions of the Pastoral Council are made with accountability and cooperation. And as we noted above, the House of Bishops, in this context, makes no attempt to confront its own failures and those of the General Convention to exercise responsible control over the life of their own church within the Communion, failures that make the Primates' proposal necessary in the first place.
5. Is the Pastoral Scheme "spiritually unsound" in its encouragement of "breaking relationships"?
The issue of "breaking" relationships and trust is indeed at the center of our problems within TEC and the Communion. But the breaking of trust has been a large part of the House of Bishops' own actions vis a vis the Communion for some time, as we have seen above. What the House of Bishops should be addressing is, "what is the value of our word or our church's word within our own body and within the Communion?" What is it worth? Do our "vows" actually count? The litany of being ignored and rebuffed by the Primates that the Statement offers should rightly be reformulated in terms of a list of requests, pleadings, and warnings issued by the Communion that the House of Bishops and their Presiding Bishop have repeatedly spurned.
Yet the House of Bishops wants to claim the Primates are "kicking them out" of the Communion, when in fact it is they, the American bishops, who have deliberately chosen a path they know-if they are thinking clearly-must lead to this outcome. Even their own consultative bodies have told them this. Before the 2003 General Convention, the House of Bishops' Theology Committee recommended that no action be taken on matters that would alter the discipline of the church in the area of human sexuality – such as the consent to Gene Robinson's episcopal election. Such actions would divide the church, since, they argued, there was no clear consensus within the church that could support it. The House of Bishops knowingly and deliberately chose in 2003 to ignore their Committee's recommendations. The "schismatic", as Andrew Marvell wrote, is the one who causes separation, not necessarily the one who separates.
Perhaps what the Statement is claiming is that any form of church discipline that involves distancing someone or some group from positions of decision-making is inherently "injurious" to the church; or that any form of separation that is adopted for the sake of maintaining a provisional and fruitful peace is an assault upon relationships in Christ. On the face of it, however, such a claim would contradict Scripture and tradition, not to mention common practice in most cultures. Discipline within the church is not opposed to unity – even and especially eucharistic unity – but is a part of unity's vital context of accountability. The provisional peace of self-restraint is a long-standing Christian virtue, applied pastorally in many instances.
There is, in fact, something morally unsettling about the Statement's attempt to appropriate the categories of fidelity, even of marital fidelity, in their argument against the Primates. Much like their attempt to co-opt the language of anti-colonialism, it is contradicted by the facts on the ground, some of them embodied personally by bishops themselves.
Some of our bishops have called the Primates' requests "offensive". Yet Paragraph 28 of the Communiqué is clear as to the Primates' Meeting's intentions: holding TEC together and bringing healing. It may well be the Scheme is not the best possible way forward to this end. But the presumption of "injury" and "offense" in the face of the Primates' own stated desires is a mark of the very "illness" of diseased trust that afflicts TEC and the Communion. There is little in the Statement that takes this seriously, that acknowledges any responsibility on the part of the House of Bishops for this illness, and that seeks to find ways to repair it with the same concrete attempts at offering healing that the Primates themselves attempted with much effort and perseverance. To label the Pastoral Scheme as inherently schismatic – driven by the serious spiritual disease of "breaking relationships" – contradicts the Primates' own stated desires, and it comes close to calling them liars. More than anything, this kind of response seems reactionary.
From a broader perspective, it appears as if the bishops do not grasp - or certainly do not accept - the central point of the Windsor Report, namely, that communion rests in mutual subjection within the Body of Christ. Such subjection does not prohibit contrarian actions, but it does prohibit them from being undertaken as immediate, ill considered, and undiscussed forms of action. And when such actions are taken in such a way, the order and trust of the Body is torn apart, and ways of restoring such trust and order are demanded that engage willed changes within the heart and behavior of those involved. By contrast, the bishops are defining communion as historical association and
(perhaps) mutual aid, whose connections are not vulnerable to the deep and complex influences and imperatives of mutual subjection as understood by the larger Communion.. Perhaps this essential difference in perspective accounts for the fact that the bishops' response remains largely on the level of ad hominim comment and tortured remarks about differing forms of polity.
IV. Questions raised by the Bishops' Statement for Episcopal Clergy
Our own Prayer Book teaches us that our first commitment as a baptized Christian is to "continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship" (BCP p. 304) and that this following is of the very nature of the Church (p. 854). This commitment we have all made. At the same time, we are taught that it is the Church who leads us in the right interpretation of the Scriptures, the apostolic witness, through the Holy Spirit (853f.).
Which Church is this? Is it the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops? Is it her Executive Council? Is it her General Convention? Or is it not the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic" church we confess in the Creeds? In any case, we are now being taught two opposing truths. The House of Bishops herself has set up before the faithful Christian in her midst a dilemma that must be resolved.
Those of us who are priests have vowed to be obedient to the faith "received" (p. 526). Received from whom? Surely from the apostolic heritage and witness, of which our bishops are to be guardians (p. 517), the "historic Faith and Order" that our Constitution tells us represents the very evangelical identity of the "Anglican Communion" of which our Episcopal Church is bound as a "constituent member" (borrowing the phrasing and meaning of a previous Lambeth Conference). It is clear that the historic Faith and Order is something shared. And if it is shared, it cannot be the sole possession of the Episcopal Church to define or to demand, as our bishops have resolved the Episcopal Church has the right to do. The bishops of the Episcopal Church are part of the "Church throughout the world" (p. 517), in time as well as space, and it is therefore this universal "trust" (p. 518) that they are called to guard. And it is this trust that we, as clergy, are solemnly bound, by a vow of "loyalty", to uphold.
How shall we then today understand this trust? The wider Anglican Communion, through those councils that we share (p. 531) – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates' Meeting, and each according to the definitions offered by the Lambeth Conferences – have articulated the standard of the "historic Faith and Order" in the matters currently under fractious debate; they have also called on our bishops in the Episcopal Church to adapt themselves to this teaching and discipline, since the Anglican Communion has defined this standard as something essentially in accordance with Scripture (cf. 1998 Lambeth I.10), a matter our own Prayer Book tells us is the necessary criterion by which to evaluate the adequacy any church's decisions (Preface) . Our bishops as a house have now refused the Communion's trust, clearly and resolutely. They have done so without argument and without open consultation. They have done so with animosity.
With whom and under whom do we now fulfill our vows made before God? It is no longer possible to receive equally the claim made by the House of Bishops to be faithful to the apostolic trust, along with the claim by the "Church throughout the world" that this trust demands another set of actions and commitments. What then shall we do?
Our bishops have left us in a grievous and parlous position. It is true, as our bishops have said, that those who wish to "divide" the church are few. The concerns expressed above come from clergy, like myself, who have long labored to maintain the unity of TEC, internally and with the Communion. We do not wish what the bishops themselves, few in number though they be, are pressing upon us.
Let us who care for Christ's embrace of Anglican Christianity in Communion redouble our prayers and our efforts to see that the will of Dar es Salaam unfold in God's good time, and not be thwarted by another unilateral dictation of how the Communion ought to mirror the incoherent image of TEC. God help us. Much is at stake here. It is time to do all we can to assure that the Instruments of Communion be able to do their work unhindered. If TEC's bishops do not wish to be a part of this, that is their decision. Let them have the courage of their convictions; but let us not quietly accept their invented Anglican Christianity that never existed anywhere before.
