Tipping Point in Jamaica

by Charles Raven
http://www.anglicanspread.org/?page_id=49
May 9th, 2009

Last week I questioned Professor Stephen Noll's proposal that the GAFCON Primates should 'move to the front of the queue' to sign up to the latest Ridley Draft being presented to the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in Jamaica, not only because in my view the Covenant still lacked teeth, but also because there were strong grounds for thinking that it could turn out to be a vehicle for co-opting the orthodox.

My anxiety about co-option now looks like being of only academic interest since the Ridley draft foundered through the objections of the American Episcopal Church, but the way that this happened illustrated much more vividly than I had expected the underlying concern I set out last week - ' that the real problem the Anglican Communion faces is not so much the apostasy of the revisionist North American provinces, but the failure of the Instruments of Communion in the face of this challenge' .

So while I have to concede that Professor Noll may have had a stronger point than I realised about the disciplinary potential of the draft, set out in Section 4 - because of the opposition it attracted - my sense that the existing Instruments of Unity are not safe for the orthodox was amply demonstrated. During the voting on the key resolutions, it became clear that when push comes to shove, Rowan Williams will support the revisionist interest. Until his strategic intervention, overruling the chair and reintroducing wording which the delegates had rejected, it seemed that the draft would be accepted. But now the wording of Section 4 will be reviewed by a 'a small working group' appointed by Dr Williams and Anglican Communion Secretary General Kenneth Kearon, delaying the Covenant process even further and with every expectation that what emerges will be a serious dilution of what was already a minimal form of discipline.

Despite his enthusiasm for the Covenant process, Stephen Noll is now quite clear that it has run its course. In his review 'The Anglican Communion Covenant: Where Do We Go from Here?', he writes 'So my immediate conclusion is that the Anglican Communion Covenant is dead. More precisely, it has been etherized while one of the Instruments performs vital surgery on its vital parts....Our Lord said: "For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men" (Matthew 19:12). The Covenant is to be numbered among the latter.'

Throughout the Jamaica meeting it was clear that the revisionist leaning Lambeth leadership was determined to control the outcome. For instance, Philip Ashey, a Ugandan representative resident in the United States was not allowed to take his seat despite being validly selected under existing ACC rules and precedent, causing Archbishop Henry Orombi to write in protest to the Archbishop of Canterbury, describing the decision to reject Ashey as 'nothing short of an imperialistic and colonial decision that violates the integrity of the Church of Uganda.'

The impression of arbitrariness was reinforced when Dr Williams used his position as Archbishop of Canterbury to frustrate an attempt to insert the 'fourth moratorium' on the increasing vengeful pursuit of legal action against orthodox congregations in North America, despite this having been unanimously agreed by the Primates Meeting at Dar es Salaam in 2007.

So it is not surprising that another GAFCON theologian, Mark Thompson, writing as President of the Anglican Church League of Sydney is similarly forthright when he states "We have once again been shown how firmly apostasy and deception is embedded in the international structures of Anglicanism. There is no hope for the future there."

The sense that this meeting has become a tipping point for the future of the Anglican Communion is not simply to do with the failure of the Covenant, it is also to do with the way in which it has failed; there is a widespread sense that trust, already at a premium, has been further undermined. For instance, Bishop Ikechi Nwosu of Nigeria comments 'We may as well have gone to the Archbishop of Canterbury and asked him what do you want. We have gathered here - at great cost - but why not go to Lambeth and ask him? The chair was taking the direction from the observations of the ABC.'

So the 'devastating conclusion' of the Jerusalem Statement 'that we are a global Communion with a colonial structure' has been shown to be accurate yet again. The only positive proposal to come out of the ACC meeting was to extend the discredited 'indaba' process used at Lambeth 2008 throughout the Communion, made possible by a US$1.5 million grant from the liberal leaning Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, but in the absence of an effective covenant to provide a common confessional framework, indaba becomes a tool of manipulation. As Vinay Samuel shows in his powerful critique of the abuse of indaba, in Lambeth hands it becomes 'the badge of oppression.'

Jamaica is not only the end of the Covenant process, but is also likely to mark a decisive shift of confidence away from the Lambeth based Instruments of Unity. Some three years ago, Stephen Noll wrote an insightful essay 'Look Not to Cantuar' and after Jamaica, it is to be hoped that the Global South as a whole will come to recognise that an Anglican Communion which looks for leadership from this Archbishop of Canterbury and the existing Instruments of Unity will descend into deepening chaos.

These 'Instruments' are aptly named because are they are seeking to manipulate a unity which does not exist. There are two irreconcilable religions being hosted within the Anglican Communion and as they contemplate the opportunism and power play on display in Jamaica, it may be that Fulcrum and other evangelicals in England itself who have tied themselves so closely to Rowan Williams and the Covenant process will see this reality more clearly and come to a more positive assessment of GAFCON and the UK & Ireland Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans as it is launched in London this summer.

END