CANADA: Church leaders brace for battle over the soul of Anglicanism

by Stuart Laidlaw
Faith and Ethics Reporter
THE STAR
http://www.thestar.com/article/226009
6/16/2007

The blogs have started and the 24-hour prayer vigil is accepting emails as the Anglican world turns its eyes to Winnipeg.

Canada's Anglicans gather this week in Manitoba to pick a new leader and decide whether to allow same-sex marriage blessings. But that narrow debate only touches what is truly at stake. For all those involved, on either side of the issue, what is really at issue is the definition of Anglicanism itself - and the possibility of schism.

"The nature of Anglicanism is that it has been from the beginning a movement that tries to be comprehensive," says retired U.S. Bishop Arthur Walmsley, who has studied and lectured on church history.

But the trait that for more than 400 years has been its strength - an ability to reflect varied theological perspectives and practices - may yet prove its fatal flaw as the gap between conservative and liberal grows too wide to bridge.

"Even if there was a way to solve the same-sex issue satisfactorily to all parties tomorrow, we would still have a major problem on our hands," says Newfoundland Bishop Don Harvey, spiritual head of the conservative Canadian group Anglican Essentials. "It's so much deeper than that."

Already, the church in the U.S. faces expulsion from the Worldwide Anglican Communion if it refuses to recant by Sept. 30 its support of gay marriage and homosexual clergy - a fate that could await Canada if it votes to allow an accommodation of gay marriage within the church. With so much at stake, the Anglican world will be watching what happens in Winnipeg.

"The Canadian Anglican Church is a leadership church in a way others are not," says retired New Jersey bishop and author John Shelby Spong.

Delegates to the synod will vote on a series of resolutions, largely held over since their last meeting three years ago, allowing local churches to decide for themselves whether to bless same-sex marriages.

Harvey's group has set up a blog, www.anglicanessentials.ca/wordpress/, to strengthen the resolve of those opposed to allowing same-sex blessings. Debate of the issue is not tolerated on the forum, according to posted rules.

At http://prayerroom.7.forumer.com, supporters can send requests to volunteers who have promised to pray 24 hours a day through the synod that voting on the issue goes their way.

For others, however, the debate over gay rights is already changing what it means to be an Anglican.

Work has begun on a central covenant to set doctrine for all Anglican churches worldwide, for instance, a notion that's anathema to many in a church founded in a dispute over the central authority of the Pope.

"We have never had a central curia," says Chris Ambidge, a spokesperson for the gay Anglican group Integrity Canada.

The covenant finds support among conservative Anglicans, however, who see it as a way to maintain and enforce strict interpretations of the Bible.

"The teaching has to be the same throughout, or you're not part of the same thing," Harvey says.

Liberals counter that the strength of Anglicanism since the passing of the Act of Supremacy in 1534 has been its ability to choose more than one path to follow.

For them, their church is not defined by the doctrines to which it adheres, but by openness to differences of opinion and theology, and an ability to accommodate all views under the Anglican umbrella.

"It's always been a church in debate," says Andrew Hutchison, primate of the church in Canada.

The early church, formed when King Henry VIII broke from Rome, had to be flexible to survive amid acrimony over the split and widely varied methods of worship across Britain, Hutchison says.

"From Day One, it was an accommodation" he says, a trait the church carried with it as it expanded with British colonialism.

But as attendance at home dwindled, it expanded abroad.

Today, more than half of all Anglicans live in Africa, where conservative bishops take a dim view of the liberal churches in Britain, the United States and Canada.

For conservative Anglicans, those bishops, led by Nigeria's Peter Akinola, are guardians of the traditional Anglican Church.

That point was driven home for Harvey two years ago at a meeting of bishops in Ireland. One of the African representatives told Harvey that the church came to his country largely through the efforts of missionaries from North America.

"Then he said to me, 'Now, my brother, we need to go back to North America and remind you what you taught us.'"

In Winnipeg, Harvey and his group will be pushing the church to not only vote against the local option on same-sex blessings, but reject a recent bishops' statement allowing priests to say the Eucharist with a newly married gay couple.

Hutchison says the statement, issued in April, would stand as church policy if formal blessings are rejected in Winnipeg. For supporters of blessings, it doesn't go far enough. But for Harvey, it goes too far, and could lead to his group splitting with the church.

If that happens, he would be following a path already travelled by conservative Anglicans in the United States, who have split with their church. For Harvey, the church has already become too liberal. "This is the church I was born into," Harvey says.

"This is the church I love. I hope it will be the church I die in."

Having led his church through three of its most difficult years, Hutchison enters his last week in office still hoping for a solution. But despite all the debate and having visited every diocese in the country, he remains at a loss to say what might heal the troubled church.

In the end, all he has is his faith that the Anglican conversation he cherishes won't end in Winnipeg.

"No matter what happens at the General Synod or in the Anglican Communion, the centre will hold," he says. "I really believe the centre will hold."

END