Three Days in December: What they do and don’t signify.

THE THREE DAYS:

It appears that on Wednesday, December 3rd, some portion (or perhaps all) of the member groups in the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) will sign on to the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration and give assurance to the GAFCON Primates that they will not let ego or territorial concerns get in the way of forming a coherent and cohesive new ecclesial entity in North America. They will then petition the GAFCON Primates for recognition. According to BabyBlue that recognition will come the next day, December 4th, when the GAFCON Primates are meeting in London. In turn the GAFCON Primates are meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury on December 5th.

The three days begin in Chicago and end at Lambeth Palace. The thing is, when the GAFCON Primates get to the Archbishop’s digs, what’s the agenda? Was that meeting set up in order to make the case for the GAFCON Province, or was it for some other matter, such as defending GAFCON’s own case for its being a legitimate organization within the Anglican Communion? It may be that the meeting with the Archbishop will be about GAFCON, not about the CCP. So Day Three might be unconnected with days One and Two. If so, raising the specifics of a new Anglican entity emerging in North America might be met with objection that that was not on the agenda and that the Archbishop has no intention of commenting on such a proposal or of offering any sort of encouragement.

It will be a day for the Archbishop to use his very best diplomatic skills and his most delicately worded reminder that GAFCON Primates have no special status in his court.

THE MONTHS TO COME

With the encouragement of recognition by the GAFCON Primates and whatever they can muster from the meeting with the Archbishop in hand the leaders of this new entity and the GAFCON Primates will make the case to the Anglican Communion Primates and later to the Anglican Consultative Council that this new entity be made a Province of the Anglican Communion.

The last rounds in the move to a new third province in North America would involve a successful “constitutional convention” of the CCP folk next summer, and a final presentation of the signed, sealed and delivered constitution to the ACC.

According to The Living Church, an analysis of the possibilities suggests that it might not be possible for formal recognition by the ACC to happen prior to its meeting in 2012.

The next six to nine months negotiating would be successful if the GAFCON Primates could provoke earlier action on the new province. The only way to do that is for the GAFCON Primates to use the threat of unilateral action, justified by the slow process of developing adequate pastoral and primatial oversight of the so called “orthodox Anglicans” in North America. The press may be subtle, it may be blatant, but without it there is no reason for the rest of the Primates or the ACC to move rapidly.

Hopefully everyone will understand that from the outset the American Anglican Council and the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, aka the Anglican Communion Network have planned for this day and work tirelessly for the presence of a new improved self styled “orthodox” body that could replace The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada as the “agent” or “franchise” of real Anglicanism in North America. That is, everyone will understand that the takeover plot has been around for several years. While that mean the actions of the CCP and the GAFCON bishops is not surprising, it is, for all its “normality” still an attempt at a hostile takeover.

Hostility is a good motivator, but as a sustainable and rational basis for creative new understandings of a faith community it fails miserably.

The Primates, the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates and ACC, and then the ACC itself will have to work hard at it to avoid dealing with the reality that the CCP consists mostly of unrecognized ecclesial entities in the US and Canada with bishops whose jurisdictions, canonical status or even their orders themselves are in serious doubt. A number of these bishops are not recognized by Canterbury. Several are deposed by their own jurisdictions. Some exist only as temporary organizations attached to another province of the Anglican Communion than where they are organized.

Surely the Primates as a whole, and the ACC as a whole, have considerable reservations concerning the wholesale recognition of the bishops of the several groups in CCP. But then again, who knows.
The temptation is to say that the Three Days in December are of vital importance to the future of the Anglican Communion. The temptation is to say that within six to nine months the remaining power cards are to be played and the Anglican Communion as we know it will be finished, diminished, or triumphant. Anglicans of various stripes are looking at the next nine months as a critical time.

IS THIS A CRITICAL TIME IN THE COMMUNION?

There are two problems with thinking things in Anglican Land are at a crisis moment:

First most of the fight is irrelevant at best and obscene at worse. Outside a small circle of friends and enemies who give a damn about all this, the world’s issues are of much greater importance, and the churches’ issues much less importance, for this to make any difference in their lives. Even the plan as played out in the forgoing appears as an absurdity and an irrelevance.

For many people, including my family and most of the people I love, the machinations of the Anglican Communion or its churches, as regards the current possibilities of a split in the Communion, are mildly interesting but of no ultimate importance. They are right.

The circle of Episcopal, Lutheran and Methodist clergy that I meet with on Wednesdays see these machinations as important in a peripheral way, but they and I find it must more important to deal with the specific and immediate effects of pre-enlightenment theological and social attitudes by some churches and many church people in a county undergoing rapid change. The Episcopalians in this group are proud of our taking even the tentatively more bold stance that we have in recent years, proud of being part of a church that includes Bishop Robinson, glad to be as open and inviting as possible. But mostly, they would say about the doings this week, “So what?” Very little will change in what we do or how we proclaim the Gospel because of the plots and plans of those who have left.

Second, The Episcopal Church, finally, has begun to have a clear and persistent response to those who are determined to leave:

• a. Sadness that it has come to this.
• b. Clarity that the processes by which decision are made in The Episcopal Church will remain as they are – namely by actions of the General Convention and the Executive Council guided by common prayer, the baptismal covenant, the table fellowship that derives from the Eucharist, and the missionary vocation derived from our inclusion in the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.
• c. Determination that we will continue the witness of The Episcopal Church in all parts of the United States of America and those nations in which we have formed dioceses as a result of our missionary efforts, where none had (in terms of the Anglican Communion) been before, or the oversight of which had been transferred to us.
• d. We will continue to affirm our desire to be part of the fellowship that constitutes the Anglican Communion, and very little desire to belong to a world wide ecclesial structure – a church – that would negate much of what we understand Anglicanism to stand for, and would resemble more and more a patriarchy.
• e. We will consider that individuals who leave The Episcopal Church – be they bishops, clergy or laity – do so without changing our obligation to ecclesial presence and missionary outreach in the areas where they had previously exercised ministry as members of the Episcopal Church.
• f. We will insist that that ecclesial presence and missionary outreach, as well as the canons of this Church gives The Episcopal Church, as represented in that place, primary rights concerning property and assets held in trust by vestries, rectors, or other ecclesial officials.
• g. We will pray that we not be overcome by arrogance nor be guided by hostility to those who have left, but keep the paths cleared for common faith and work.
• With these understandings in mind, the actions to be taken on December 3rd and following are not a deterrent to, or detraction from, the path that The Episcopal Church has chosen. The actions of these days, on this level, are irrelevant.

NOT A CRITICAL TIME, BUT A WATCHFUL ONE

Here on Preludium we will continue to monitor all these goings on, but the sense here is that the deal is done.

There will be a new ecclesiastical entity in North America. Some bishops, clergy and people, who have left The Episcopal Church, are bound and determined to establish another ecclesial entity in North America. They will collude with whoever they can and make the claim to be the “real” Anglican presence in North America. They will with others, notably from the Global South, attempt to take over the Anglican Communion and change it from its current form, structure and leadership and shape it to their own sense of what is called for by the Gospel. They may or may not succeed.

But when they have finished doing whatever it is that they purport to do, there will still be The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, and churches throughout the world that remain willing to work together as the Anglican Communion we know and to which we belong. We may find ourselves working with Anglicans elsewhere in the world who relate to the relief and development organizations of the new province as well as with TEC and ACoC. We will view that as yet another of the ecumenical possibilities of our work.

The thing is, when the dust settles, there will be TEC and ACoC. There will continue to be some regional or national churches (provinces) in communion with the See of Canterbury, and we will hope to be among them. There may be some of those that we are not in communion with. That will be the Archbishop of Canterbury’s problem, not ours.

Perhaps the crisis of the next six to nine months, or of the next four years, is a fiction that is a product of ecclesiastical greed.

If the CCP / GAFCON community can capture the flag, if CCP can become the “Anglican Franchise” in North America, if the Jerusalem Declaration becomes the litmus test for orthodoxy, what they will have is a regional church in North America and relations with other Anglican churches that will look less and less like the Anglican Communion. We will be glad to be rid of the hostile takeover crowd. They will have done their work only to find they didn’t get anything real.

And, should they not succeed, they can join the fifty or so other “Anglican” entities in North America that will produce a growing network of bishops whose family tree is filled with ‘the deposed bishop of this’ and the ‘irregular bishop of that’ and the ‘intruder bishop of the other.’ They will have a fine time arguing among themselves as to who among them got it right. They will perhaps take with them the fears of all the years – about the unclean among us (women, young people, gay and lesbian people, people different than themselves, etc) – and live a fearful dream of purity.

We in TEC and ACoC will go on being the regional churches that history and our own vocations as churches require of us.

We will have other churches around the world with which we are closely related in fellowship, mutual care, prayer and call. We will be the Anglican Communion, or barring that a fellowship, not of confessing Anglicans, but of Anglicans in communion.

The day will come when the irrelevancy of the present hostilities will become apparent. Until then, as we practice in Advent, we wait.