One of the casualties of the current Anglican Communion struggle is our responsible grappling with the challenge of Christian communion as a church. It might seem that, with the Anglican Communion's own survival at stake, there would be a robust examination taking place of what it means to live "in Christian communion" and why it is important. Yet, despite strong encouragement from numerous sources like the Windsor Report, the topic has almost disappeared from serious engagement. Indeed, from a practical standpoint, parties in the Communion are pressing their commitments in a way analogous to political groups and their external allies within a civil war: discussion and "agreement" has value only if one can gain a place of advantage from which later to destroy the opposition. While the notion – and reality – of Christian communion is one constituted by common standards and commitments and not simply compromise, the manner in which these standards and commitments embody themselves differs greatly from the (often antagonistically) competitive character of present ecclesial confrontations. It is just this difference that few seem willing to engage.
In what follows I want to reflect on the difficulty we have had in facing up to the challenge of Christian communion, the consequences of this avoidance, and finally a possible way of understanding communion and Anglicanism in terms of a particular vocation or mission, in analogy within the Nations to the mission given long ago to St. Benedict. Certainly, we are avoiding the challenge of communion not simply at our peril as Anglicans, but at our already obvious loss. But we are also perhaps simply and straightforwardly being unfaithful to a specific purpose we have been given by God as a provisional church. That purpose is to act as a "school for communion" for the sake of the larger Church's healing. Communion is not simply a useful or at least expedient concept to deploy in the face of Anglicanism's centrifugal dynamics. It may well be central to Anglicanism as an ongoing instrument of God's evangelical purpose. Why are we running from it?
The localist and confessionalist subversions of communion
There are at least two working conceptions of the church vying with one another in our midst as Anglicans that have consumed the energies of almost all of our councils. Neither of these two views has shown any real interest in figuring out Christ's call and prayer to unity among his disciples. Furthermore, neither can coexist with each other. Their continued promotion will represent not only a turning away from communion but will most certainly destroy the practical realities of the Anglican Communion itself.
One view, which I shall call the "localist" view, is one that the TEC's general leadership seems to be vigorously pressing at the moment. It claims that every local church fulfills the Gospel calling wherever it is and according to whoever it is, and is faithful only as it does this. The Gospel is fully or at least rightly realized insofar it is incarnated in this or that place. This is the church: an autonomous act of faithfulness – of which there may be many, none of which impinge upon the integrity of the other. The localist view represents a certain kind of self-sufficiency with respect to the church – the sufficiency of local faith.
Another view, which I shall call the "confessionalist" view, is held by many conservatives (though not all), in both Western and non-Western churches. It defines the church according to a definite framework of belief and practical assertion, and claims that where the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments duly administered, there is the church, and nowhere else. There is, in fact, only one church – not many instances of it; but this oneness is given at any moment only in the congruity of true preaching and sacrament. The true church is an event, sometimes extended in space but not necessarily, that takes in the breadth or narrowness of ecclesial reach at any given time. This view represents another kind of self-sufficiency – the sufficiency of identity.
The two views are very similar in outcome, for all the conflict they experience with one another. For both, the "self" of the church subsists in a particular setting and reality. The church's self is a given – locally or according to a set of beliefs -- that one holds and lives within. The only way to answer the question "what is the church?", according to these two views, is to point to oneself, if in slightly different ways. Neither view holds to the notion of "giving up one's life for the other", for that would mean that the self of the individual Christian or of the church is actually defined by the other, if even the other's need or fall or desperation. Neither view can assert that "the church lies outside myself" or "away from myself", or that the church's future is to be found "far from myself". the church is present, here, now, with me.
More important, these two views – leaving to the side whether one or the other is true or not – simply cannot coexist together. Here, it is their differences that become voracious. For the confessionalist view defines the other – the other church or the other professed Christian -- according to itself and its own framework of belief; while the localist view defines itself according to itself and none other. And thus, these two ecclesial selves can concede nothing to the other. The confessionalist has no room for the localist; and the localist has no space for the confessionalist. If these two views of the church remain in place within Anglicanism, the Communion will die. One or the other must go. And because they will not – and that is the source of our conflict, with or without the proliferation of "alternative" Anglicanisms -- they must therefore change, if the Communion is to survive. Indeed, if the Communion is to survive, a different working perspective must be adopted vigorously, seriously, and devotedly.
For some, of course, it is not clear that the Anglican Communion should survive, at least in its present configuration and with its present identity. And certainly, neither localist nor confessionalist visions of the church can in fact incorporate the Anglican Communion as it now exists. But it is not obvious that either view can deal coherently with the claim of Paul that "with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" we are "called" to live in a way that witnesses to the "one body, and one Spirit, ...one hope... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God an Father of us all" (Eph. 4:2ff.)"; or that that "whoever eats the bread of drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord" and "anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats an drinks judgment upon himself" (1 Cor. 11:27, 29); or, more pressingly, with the stated desire of the Lord Jesus Christ himself that, "they all may be one", so that "the world may believe"(Jn. 17:21) – this, in the shadow of the question he also asks, as to whether, when he returns, he will "find faith on earth" (Lk. 18:8) or rather "love grown cold" (Mt. 24:12)? Indeed, "why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and not do what I tell you?" (Lk. 6:46). Why?
In any case, to answer the question of whether or not it matters if the Anglican Communion survives one must at least have a clear idea of what "communion" itself might be, and why it is or is not important. And this question has been abandoned, wholly and shockingly, as if it were a leprous house. Some have quite deliberately let it drop, claiming (in line with the two views just outlined) that "communion" is some kind of code-word for hierarchical oppression – "prelates"! -- or that it expresses but the desperate worries of a threatened institutionalist agenda emanating from a frightened Canterbury.
Communion-thinking has a history
Such claims are, on reflection, quite misplaced, since the concern with "communion" as the basis for our church's life is hardly new and do not derive from such secret and nefarious forces. Not only does the concern with communion reflect, rather obviously, the growing sense of ecclesial vocation within Anglicanism since the mid-19thcalled the "Anglican Communion", with all of its self-analysis with regard to koinonia (cf. already at the 1920 Lambeth Conference). But "the Church as Communion" has been at the center of ecclesiological and ecumenical discussion for almost 40 years, both within a context like the World Council of Churches and, most importantly, that of the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue and agreed statements. And in this respect, "communion" derives from a deep yearning for the Church's healing and transfiguration. The Windsor Report's interest in "communion" as the lens through which to view the nature of the Christian Church was not therefore something smuggled in to ornament a disciplinary conundrum, nor was it an egg-headed idea dreamed up by the Virginia Report committee, written in a seminary corner. It was rather the expected and even demanded theological framework that TEC and other Anglicans had been using – and commending! – for several decades already in the course of their own apprehension of their calling. century – hence the emergence of something actually
But autonomy always seems to trump communion: why?
Still, it is possible that "communion" has never really had much traction in actual decision-making because it has appeared to many as a hard-to-understand abstraction at best, and as a distracting and unworkable ideal at worst. When the Windsor Report tries to talk about communion, it often struggles with the practical -- because well defined and "legally asserted" -- realities of local self-determination among Anglican churches. How fit this juridical "independence", frequently described in Anglican self-definition, with the notions of mutual constraint? What kind of constraint? For what reason? How determined? Under whose initiative? In trying to describe the nature of Anglican "autonomy", then, the Report resorts (understandably) to non-Scriptural terms such as "freedom-in-relation" and "interdependence", terms that are less than clear in concrete life and that, frankly, must inevitably find their clarification on the side of what is "known", that is, always in terms of legally defined autonomy itself. Thus, the Report notes that a diocese may understand "interdependence" with respect to its relation to a province, or a parish with respect to its relation to a diocese, but that is precisely because both these relations are defined by canon law. On the other hand, provincial churches seem not to grasp their "interdependence" in relation to the wider Communion (par. 81). And surely that is because provinces are not legally defined in terms of communion at all, but rather in terms of some kind of explicit "autonomy".
But if "freedom-in-relation" is a non-Scriptural term used to describe the Church, even more so and more negatively is the continued use of the term "autonomy" to describe the church in any fashion. And thus, for all of its legal status, the term "autonomy" itself is probably one of the greatest stumbling blocks to a practical engagement with the far more theologically-rooted (and more Scriptural) notion of communion, especially as this term is bound to the quite Scriptural claim that the Church is a "body", even Christ's own.
But, with the best of intentions, even where an alternative way of thinking is groped after, autonomy seems to rear its head and return with a vengeance to seize back control of the ecclesial discussion. Take for example the appeal to Orthodoxy made by many Anglicans. Searching for a living parallel to its argument that ecclesial autonomy makes sense only in terms of a faithfully constraining relationship, the Windsor Report points to "autocephaly" (self-governance by individual churches in communion with one another) within the Eastern Orthodox churches (par. 75). But does such an appeal serve its purpose? For a look at the concrete realities of "autocephaly" quickly shows how ill-fitted such an analogy is, and how even here autonomy takes over the ecclesiological reins.
The Windsor Report, for one thing, does not note how the practice of autocephaly is unresolved at present, even practically, as Moscow and Constantinople, for example, remain at odds over who has the right to "grant" or recognize a self-governing church. Even the Anglican Consultative Council, in theory, has this authority for new provinces within the Communion. But, more like the Anglicanism of the present, the Report does not grapple with the still acrimonious overlapping Orthodox jurisdictions in America, furthermore, and the way that self-governance is disputed in a number of cases such as this within Orthodoxy. AMiA and CANA and Europe and other areas within Anglicanism represent the same challenge. Windsor does not point out how in these disputes, "autonomy" continues to trump constraint, in a way that indicates its all-too-human weaknesses as a principle for ecclesial self-identity.
But even conceptually, autocephaly is a difficult notion to untangle within the context of Scriptural language about the Church. Orthodox theologians like John Erickson or Lewis Patsovos, for instance, will speak of "unity" or communion in terms of a single "body" under the one "headship" of Christ, a body that functions through a common confession and discipline according to the ancient councils of the Church. This single headship somehow holds together the diverse "local" bodies of churches whose self-determination, within Eastern Orthodoxy, has historically matched national or ethnic borders. But is this really how Anglicanism wants to present its desired communion? For "autocephaly"-" self-heading" -- is something of a strange name for this set of ideal relations, precisely because it cannot, in itself, explain and it even confuses – especially given all the disputes in practice – how body, head, and members truly exist as one in Christ. Rather, the notion of ecclesial autocephay it posits many "sub-heads". What are we to make of this, if there is in fact "one body" and "one Lord"? A "member" of a single body, after all, is never "autonomous" in any sense, and is not even able to speak for itself: the eye cannot say what the eye is on it's own, for it cannot think or speak on its own. The very discussion of the church in terms of "body parts" rules out "autonomy" as a working term, at least in any context in which "communion" is to be central. Some other term is needed to deal with the relationship of provincial churches and the "larger" church, and Anglicans should be working on this tirelessly instead of continually proving to one another that "autonomy" is their real ideal.
What about terms such as "local" and "universal"? These have been suggested and but to work in a number of contexts. But even here, their use as categories to provide the building blocks for a working notion of communion has proved challenging. The "local", just because it is the concrete place of most people's Christian life, usually ends by overwhelming any practical consequence for "universal" Christianity, and the discrete ecclesial entities associated with defined territories are quickly invested with much of the theological fullness of "the Church" on their own. One commonly hears things like, "when the local church gathers for the Eucharist, there is the 'whole' Church present", claims that have real legitimacy from one vantage, but that often reinforce practical justifications for local autonomy. The localist vision of the Church, after all, is often buttressed by just such claims to the universal significance of parochial self-regard. And autonomy sweeps back into the well-swept house, along with its friends.
The continued assertion of communion through the episcopacy's Scriptural ministry
For all that, however, the reality of Christian communion has maintained a pull on these tendencies to the degree that communion itself is allowed to maintain a vital profile in self-reflection. The 1999 Agreed Report on the Local/Universal Church by the Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the United States of America, for instance, veers all over the place on some of these matters. Yet it nonetheless offers some surprising claims regarding communion especially given the fact that its authors include American Episcopalians. For one thing, the smallest unit of the "local", according to the Report, is the "diocese". This means that bishops are the "local" expression of whole (in the familiar sense of embodying the "whole church" while presiding at the Eucharist).
But the explicitly episcopal character of this representation has profound practical implications, most pointedly underlined when episcopal links are "visibly" severed and "mutual recognition" of episcopal communion is jeopardized or lost. If, as the Agreed Report argues, the local is not a "subdivision" of the universal church, nor is the Universal Church an "aggregate" of the local churches, the visible and mutually recognized functioning of the episcopacy must act as the ordering means of their relationship. That is, the bishops bear the responsibility for the congruence of the local to the universal church:
"In sum, we agree that the Church's authentic catholicity requires visible manifestation of the unity of faith in a communion in which the local and the universal church are interdependent and co-constitutive. The unity of the communion is effected by the Eucharist and preserved by its bishops, whose unity with each other is manifested in conciliar practice and primatial service."
"Conciliar practice" and "primatial service" are, of course, very concrete ministries, and their function can be measured and held accountable, precisely in the acts and manner of gathering, decision-making, and trust-keeping as they are publicly embodied by individual bishops and their leadership. The Windsor Report, in this regard, has forcefully taken up on this vision, and strengthened and nuanced it considerably in a particularly Anglican way by rooting the episcopal character of communion in the commending, teaching, and guarding of Scripture's authority within the Church. It is a claim, furthermore, that significantly fills out the character of episecopal synodality and conciliar accountability in a way that is not only relevant to present Anglican struggles, but just because of that has been deeply obscured by various parties in these struggles.
For the localist vision of the church refuses to grant such accountability for itself through a universal episcopacy of Scriptural commendation (and in TEC's case, forthrightly denies the episcopacy itself such a role), while the confessionalist vision, episcopal or otherwise, cannot concede such accountability to synodical judgment. Again, whether one is right or not, neither vision can apparently adjust itself to the character of communion life as it is here expressed.
The character of communion
And this character, as I have emphasized, has not been defined in a novel way. The 1990 Agreed Statement on the Church as Communion by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission still stands as the clearest exposition of what the Church's life as communion represents (or should), and informs all the reflections engaged by the Windsor Report and before. It is worth citing a central section of the Statement, because it articulates a vision of the church that is simply different than those embodied by Anglicanism's warring parties, although it comprehends key elements of each:
In the light of all that we have said about communion it is now possible to describe what constitutes ecclesial communion. It is rooted in the confession of the one apostolic faith, revealed in the Scriptures, and set forth in the Creeds. It is founded upon one baptism. The one celebration of the eucharist is its pre-eminent expression and focus. It necessarily finds expression in shared commitment to the mission entrusted by Christ to his Church. It is a life of shared concern for one another in mutual forbearance, submission, gentleness and love; in the placing of the interests of others above the interests of self; in making room for each other in the body of Christ; in solidarity with the poor and the powerless; and in the sharing of gifts both material and spiritual (cf. Acts 2:44). Also constitutive of life in communion is acceptance of the same basic moral values, the sharing of the same vision of humanity created in the image of God and recreated in Christ and the common confession of the one hope in the final consummation of the Kingdom of God.
For the nurture and growth of this communion, Christ the Lord has provided a ministry of oversight, the fullness of which is entrusted to the episcopate, which has the responsibility of maintaining and expressing the unity of the churches. By shepherding, teaching and the celebration of the sacraments, especially the eucharist, this ministry holds believers together in the communion of the local church and in the wider communion of all the churches. This ministry of oversight has both collegial and primatial dimensions. It is grounded in the life of the community and is open to the community's participation in the discovery of God's will. It is exercised so that unity and communion are expressed, preserved and fostered at every level: locally, regionally and universally [...]
Throughout history different means have been used to express, preserve and foster this communion between bishops: the participation of bishops of neighboring sees in episcopal ordinations; prayer for bishops of other dioceses in the liturgy; exchanges of episcopal letters. Local churches recognized the necessity of maintaining communion with the principal sees, particularly with the See of Rome. The practice of holding synods or councils, local, provincial, ecumenical, arose from the need to maintain unity in the one apostolic faith.
All these inter-related elements and facets belong to the visible communion of the universal Church. Although their possession cannot guarantee the constant fidelity of Christians, neither can the Church dispense with them. They need to be present in order for one local church to recognize another canonically. This does not mean that a community in which they are present expresses them fully in its life. (The Church as Communion, 45-46).
This is clearly a broad definition that covers much ground. But we should note some key elements that are agreed as being "constitutive" of the church's communion, and that go beyond simply a common creed or confession: for instance, there are "shared" moral values (an entire Agreed Statement was issued on this topic alone in 1993), common commitments to a single mission for the church, consultation of the faithful, disciplined and committed and engaged counsel by bishops within a common ministry of "oversight", and submission to one another in accepted standards of behavior one towards another. None of this is spelled out in a way that particularly justifies one group or another within the church. Yet these are all elements that were agreed as being actually "constitutive" of communion; they are not just helpful ancillary aspects. However, it is the case that TEC and many other provinces within the Anglican Communion – and most importantly, their episcopal leadership -- have simply failed to look at themselves and their actions by means of this mirror. Indeed, within both TEC and among the Communion instruments themselves, this Agreed Statement was never officially acted upon, perhaps because of its profound challenge to habits of thinking and living.
The historical reality of imperfect and failed communion: mission and martyrdom
This discomfort is now being recognized. And they are being recognized particularly as the hopes generated by discussions and dialogues give way to the realities of disagreement, division, and unilateral assertions within Anglicanism itself. In 2000, Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops had met together in Canada "to address the imperative for Christian reconciliation and healing in a broken and divided world at the beginning of a new millennium, to assess the progress made in Anglican - Roman Catholic relations and to chart a way forward for the future". The hopes at the end of that meeting were high, in part because our bishops believed that communion itself was now properly understood and embraced as a calling and could therefore be pursued with confidence. But in late 2006, the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCUM) issued an Agreed Statement on the fruit of the last 40 years of Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue. And six years of reality check had demonstrated that the hopes of just a few years before were too naive: the disintegration of Anglican common life, embodied in wildly differing views about doctrine, morals, and discipline, had revealed the vast distance between hope and present life.
Still, IARCUM's sobered evaluation of Anglican-Roman Catholic relations was not a judgment against the vocation of communion itself. Rather, it underlined the fact that, as had already been stated in earlier agreements (cf. Church As Communion, 18, 22), the Church's communion is a mission, and not a static essence or characteristic of the Church that she holds by virtue of existing in the first place (cf. Section 2). Communion, understood in the fullness outlined above, is a mission, that is, an historical task that must define the shape of our conversion in that it embodies the form in which and the degree to which we have answered the call of Jesus and been taken up by his transforming Spirit. Communion is not a given in the Christian life of the Church, and its own apprehension in time is an instrument of all of the other aspects of evangelical witness through which the conversion of Church and world takes place. Finally, communion defines our conversion because it defines the shape of our judgment in God's hands: will our love be cold? will the "body be discerned" as we adore God in Christ? will there be faith on earth when Christ returns?
Living through time as the Church in the world, following Jesus in his power and form of power, the Church will continually be thrust into the discomfort of communion's demands, and faithfulness will ask her to die. This, after all, is the very definition of "oneness" that Jesus himself gives in John 17. If there is such a thing as the missio Dei, "God's mission" into which we are called – and this has been a common way of articulating our vocation in recent years – it can only be the mission of the Father who "sends" the Son to die in love for the world's sins, and so bring reconciliation (Jn. 17:21; 1 Jn. 4:10; 2 Cor. 5:14, 19). For "as the Father has sent me, even so I send you" (Jn. 20:21), a mission that includes far more than the doing of good deeds, but demands the conversion of the world through the Cross and Resurrection. This is none other than the missio communionis, the mystery of one "true witness" and martyr who is Jesus Christ (Rev. 1:4; 3:14).
Archbishop Drexel Gomez's paper on "The Church As Holy", presented at the 2005 South-South Encounter puts it this way:
Martyrdom's "for-ness" – for Jesus, for his Word, for his people, and for the world – must lead the Church ever more deeply into a life lived as bound to others. "Greater love has no one that this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13), says Jesus to his disciples, something that Paul then extends to the whole world of sinful creatures: "But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). What is often called the "communion" of the Church – or the "Church as communion" – is really the expression of the Church's holiness as the Body of Christ that is "sent out" in order to be "given away" for the world. It is a gift that is formed and lived first within the Body – a giving away for one another, for one's "friends" (and cf. Rom. 15:1ff; and, of course, Phil. 2:1-11). But it is finally fulfilled in the conformance of the Church's life to the Father's own gift of love for the world ("God so loved the world that he gave his only Son" – John 3:14). The world hears the Gospel most clearly as the Church "loves" "to the end" (cf. John 15:35; 17:21). Jesus is sent "for" the world. And only a Church that is "for" each other and "for the world" too can itself be "sent" on her holy mission to proclaim a word that saves. In this regard, the ordering of the church's life in communion is both essential and finally a gift to be used for the salvation of the world. Communion is mission, because it embodies the holiness of God's own work.
It is only in the context of this missionary sense of communion's vocation that communion's incompleteness can be understood from a Christian point of view. It is because communion is a mission undertaken in the limited course of time, a history that itself provides the means and demands of martyrdom, that communion's imperfection becomes the very instrument of its evangelical perfection: there would be no communion in the Scriptural terms of the Father's "mission" or "sending of the Son", did not sin provide the context in which love asks us to die for one another in God.
Here finally, perhaps more than anywhere, we see why communion is something that is driving Anglicans away: for the "saying" of communion is "too hard, and who can listen to it?" (Jn. 6:60). It is "too hard" because it is the vocation of the "body given away". The vocation is more easily shunted aside; and if obscured, if increasingly felt as undemanding, how can the vocation even be that important? Fear gives way to irresponsible lethargy.
A particular Anglican mission?
But if in fact communion is our missionary vocation, the struggle we are experiencing for grasping its imperative perhaps helps us to see Anglicanism's special calling in a broken Church. TEC localists are right when they argue that the current burdens of communion – as expressed in the demands of the Anglican Communion upon TEC – do not fit with the political realities of the past. Were we not all once "autonomous"? How can the petitions of others outside our local church now bend our wills? But the localists are quite wrong in thinking that this sense of the historically anachronistic nature of communion derives from the fact that the burdens of communion are some invented novelty manipulated by conservative forces from across the seas. The burdens do not "fit" because they represent a vocation whose demands have long been deferred because of their challenge. It is not homophobia – fear of the "same" (sex) -- that is driving this train away from communion; it is theophobia, the fear of God's reality; and hence most truly, it is heterophobia, the fear of what is truly "other", that is the culprit.
And Anglican confessionalists are also right in thinking that the doctrinal and moral demands of communion have been increasingly contradicted by, among others, the localists themselves. But they are wrong in thinking that therefore the burdens of communion have been abrogated by another's difficulty in following. Just the opposite: in this unwillingness, we are being confronted with our vocation ever more profoundly, so that the Lord may not say, "they went out, that it might be plain that they are not of us" (1 Jn. 2:19). The "burden" of communion are to be borne by "one another" (Gal. 5:2). If there is a special calling being issued to Anglicanism, a calling within the larger and difficult vocation of communion for the entire Church of Christ, is it not to suffer communion's judgment among ourselves, so that our healing might mean in fact "life from the dead" (Rom. 11:15) and so stir up the churches and give glory to God?
What Anglicans in general seem to have forgotten is that we are on a mission. Both localists and confessionalists, each in their own way, have perceived the church (their own) as "sufficient" unto itself, as the place or act of faith by which the Church is fully subsistent in their midst. But what the (imperfect) communion of the Church tells us is that our life as Christians now is "not yet already obtained" in its perfection (Phil. 3:12), and that it is only in pressing forward "to make it our own" (3:13) that the Church will find its subsistent reality. And what this pressing forward in the mission of communion tells Anglicans, in our deferral of this mission, is that we are called to the judgment and transformation of ecclesial lives, "bearing on our bodies the marks of Christ" (Gal. 6:17), so that the Church might "carry around the life of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:10). Of all people, we are being called to subject ourselves to communion for the sake of the mission of communion that is given to all Christians. We are called to be molded by the force of communion so that communion can be apprehended and taken up by all. If Anglicanism is a "model", it is a model in the New Testament sense of those ancient architectural models, imagined, worked through, constructed in miniature for copying, and then finally destroyed when the true building is wrought (Heb. 8:5; 9:23). Such a church in mission is always a provisional church, one that seeks something greater, grasping it "from afar" (Heb. 11:13).
There is nothing grim about this, however difficult the calling may appear. As Archbishop Gomez has noted in another recent essay, the broadly and astonishingly expansive life of Anglicanism has acted to draw more and more people, in all their differences and recalcitrance, into the molding power of communion's current. It is a current that has acted as a formative equipping, even as it has demonstrated – just as Jesus prayed – that the Father has truly sent the Son into the world and that this truth holds the power to change us:
[T]he fundamental missionary thrust of Anglican life has not provided a continuing set of invented ways of being the church. Rather, the Anglican way of being an ordered vessel for the Gospel's energy has provided a revelation of sorts, an uncovering of the world, and of the nations, and of the power of the Gospel to work among them. These revelations, that have moved the Anglican Church into that family of churches around the world, have matured the order of the church, not rebuilt it. Until the recent fragmentation of common prayer in several parts of the Communion, it was possible to find more or less the same vehicles of Scriptural adoration and praise present in this or that setting in any number of national churches. And, in theory, that vehicle is still indwelt in common. But within this, the order has required a recognition of those who are present and gathered in this vast crowd. The missionary thrust of Anglicanism has meant that we are still discovering, in places where we had not thought to look or forgotten to revisit, that the Gospel lives, that people hear, that there is power in Christ to make us new and make us one ("On Being Anglican In The 21st Century", Temple Lecture, Blackburn Cathedral, March, 2007)
The particular ministry of Anglicanism within the larger church is thus to be a school for communion, for the koinonia that can only arise from a specific form of evangelism and ecclesial life that, through its outgoing reach, raises up the challenges of the Body of Christ as judgment and opportunity both. That is its constant demand for conversion and change, offered not only to the world, but to the Church as she is renewed by the Spirit of Christ constantly speaking to her and calling her out (Rev. 3:19-22).
To grasp this calling is to see how mistaken is the attempt to view the Anglican church primarily in terms of its political – read "canonical" – character. It is a missionary church that has been given a particular task by God, and its mission must necessarily define the meaning of its canons. This is why, for instance, the recent TEC House of Bishops claim to be the sole interpreters of TEC's Constitution in the area of its relation to the Anglican Communion is so wrong-headed. Not only is it a suspect claim on purely legal grounds, but it is clearly a false claim on ecclesiological grounds, the grounds upon which the church of Jesus Christ is built and lives. For that ground is the church's vocation from God, and nothing less. To use the canonical instruments of polity – according to or in contradiction of their letter – to evade such a vocation is a Jonah-like act of betrayal that can only bring destruction upon all who are touched by it. So we pray for the renewal of the "sign of Jonah", Jesus' sign, in our midst today (Mt. 12:39; 16:4)!
The School for Communion: the Rule of Anglicanism
To be a "school for communion" is itself hardly a novel ministry and mission. The "church as school" is an image that goes back to the Fathers of the Church, and St. Bernard made the phrase famous when speaking of the monastery as a schola caritatis, a school of charity (the title to a fine book by Evelyn Underhill on the Creed). He was drawing on Benedict's own description, in his Rule, of the monks' common life as a "school for the service of the Lord" (dominici schola servitii –Prologue), whose purpose is to "build up charity" through a disciplined life of mutual obedience, accountability, and, of course, prayer. The Benedictine scholar of Pachomius, Armand Veilleux, has quite explicitly reflected on "Benedictine Life as School of Communion" (a talk from 1996), carried out on a number of different levels of relationship, from communion with God, through communion within the local community and larger church, to the world as a whole. More particularly, he also sees this school as a specific kind of "charism" that is entrusted to the community by God for the sake of the larger Church and in a way that is accountable to the larger Church: living in Christian communion is a service that is properly fulfilled only as it is subject to the needs and counsels of the Church as a whole.
There is a good argument to be made that the Anglican reform of the 16th-century functioned as a laicization, a re-embodiment in the form of the people of the church as a whole, of, in a broad sense, the Benedictine vocation. Especially on the level of "common prayer" and the church's ordering, the English reform provided quite concretely to the people as a whole the same charism previously entrusted to an order of monks or nuns, and derivatively, to the priesthood alone. The cultum Dei, or the "service of God" as Cranmer put it (using a phrase central to the medieval description of Israel and the Church's vocation), was, according to the English Reform, to be taken up by the people in a common and practiced manner: they would read or hear the Scriptures articulated "through" in their breadth and prayed together in a disciplined and ordered fashion, and they would do this for their "edification" in godliness. Cranmer's Preface to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer makes this clear, and specifically describes the Reform in terms of this popular reordering of what had become an increasingly marginalized and constricted monastic and clerical vocation (or so the Reformers thought). The Benedictine character of this simple, singular, and whole-scale reappropriation of the dominici schola servitii for the people of the church (and nation) as a body has been noted by many (cf. Peter Anson in his The Call of the Cloister and other books dealing with British and Anglican monasticism; his book on Bishops At Large also – a history of 19th-century self-appointed vicars of unity and orthodoxy -- makes salutary reading for Anglicans today). While never particularly self-conscious, especially as Anglicanism both developed and spread around the world, this Benedictine character is embedded in the purpose of the Book of Common Prayer's essential and formative place in Anglican mission. Unless we grasp it, we cannot understand the nature of Anglicanism's peculiar vocation with respect to communion and we frequently distort it.
It is not, therefore, the serendipity of ecumenical scheduling that led the Archbishop of Canterbury recently to speak of "Benedict and the Future of Europe" while visiting Rome in November, 2006. Although addressing a specifically political and cultural issue touching European society as a whole, he might well have been addressing the Anglican Communion, and his remarks certainly derived from a self-conscious understanding of Anglicanism's peculiar and transposed "Benedictine" charism. Williams outlines three elements of Benedictine life that the political culture of the West needs to reclaim: the structuring of time away from simple production and entertainment, and towards human growth (in and through God); the character of obedience as mutual discernment and support within an ordered life in common; the commitment to full participation by all – the offering and receiving of support -- within the common life. In the Rule itself, these elements are explained in a different order, where the virtues of desire, charity, and humility, whose practiced coincidence within the order of time that Williams points to, are honed into the instruments of holiness through the molding force of obedience itself – obedience to the Rule, to the common life and counsel of the community, and to the abbot. All of which, of course, constitute obedience to the call of the Scriptures into holiness of life.
And it is this molding context of obedience that gives substance to the reality of communion in a way that provides that concrete traction communion seems to be missing in modern discussions. The presence of a Rule, according to which behavior can be yearned after, aimed, and measured; the actual discussions held in common, carried out in the wisdom of listening and attentiveness (as Williams rightly describes it); and the discerning, humble, yet ultimately decisive authority of the abbot that is to preside over, yet with the others subject himself to, these elements – all this represents an actual way of life that has been and remains embodied in the actual relationships of men and women over the centuries within Benedictine communities. These elements underline, in fact, some of the weaknesses of discussing "communion" apart from the more robust substratum of the Church as the "body of Christ", whose tangible contours, in all their imperfections, are exactly what allows communion to descend from the level of the ideal or the abstract to the vocation of the Cross and Resurrection's disciples.
It is because the vocation itself is so real as to be susceptible to stumbling before the failures of human faithlessness, that the local community is accountable to the larger Church: a charism, as Veilleux stresses, is always a "trust" on behalf of the Church, not a possession. And if it is misused, it is for the Church to discipline and redirect that trust's usage. The famous Chapter 64 of the Rule states, with respect to the abbot's election, that "if the [local] community elects someone who encourages their wickedness, and this is made known to the bishop of the diocese or other abbots and good Christians in the area, these should then annul the choice. And they should choose a worthy overseer of God's House". Although Benedictine houses are "independent" in their governance, one from another (and since the Middle Ages have been independent even of diocesan supervision), the Rule here makes it clear that there is no such thing as autonomy of vocation, but rather a responsibility to the Church which has, by definition, the authority and indeed the calling to put right locally what undermines the Gospel and the communion it entails.
This ought to describe the general form of Anglicanism's own mission in a larger ecclesial shape: as a schola communionis, her local bodies evangelize in the peculiar way of forming, through the Scripture's molding force, the nations and their recalcitrant energies for a life lived in the commonality of Christ's body within a broken world. A sense of locality is necessary for this, by definition, since it is a particular people's specificities of life and death, of sin and hope, that are the objects and subjects of Christian communion's imperative. But the mission itself it not a local one, and it is answerable to – in the sense of being called out and called to account by – the larger Church and the breadth and gathering of her many localities, whose embracing communion represents the prayer of our Lord at work (Jn. 5:17)and the power of his death and resurrected life. Every attempt, by contrast, to make the Church subsist self-sufficiently apart from this responsible accountability is a contradiction and abandonment of the charism with which Anglicanism has been entrusted. Like salt that has lost its savor, it is worth no more than to be trampled underfoot (Mt. 5:13).
Anglicanism's final challenge?
This is why, in my opinion, the proposed Covenant is so important – if the Anglican Communion can survive long enough to articulate it and receive it. For with a clearer sense of its peculiar mission, Anglicanism now needs also a "rule" by which to order its formational existence, which stands at the heart of its vocation. In this sense the Covenant needs to be revised in a way that better expresses not only the vocation itself – communion in the Gospel and Body of Christ – but also the formational means by which obedience can mold the virtues of this missionary life. But this very challenge, it seems, has been derailed in its urgency by the mistaken and internecine claims of localism and confessionalism, which would strip the Church of her body and her history both.
There are no doubt other ways to approach the vocation of communion, if it is a vocation at all. Who has taken the time these last months – now mounting into years – to ask? For what is not acceptable is the insistent silencing of the question at this point in time. While localism and confessionalism churn their way through the fields of the church, leaving only stubble for a Communion, the lethargy of ignorance and denial over the question itself is like a flame set to the barren stalks. We seek some other outcome. But perhaps the fire is already set, and another prayer of our Lord is wending its way to fulfillment (Lk. 12:49).
