THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL ANGLICANISM – PART 2

Distinguished Contributors
Anglican Scholars & Clergy
Most Rev. Dr. Mouneer Anis Archbishop (Ret.), Province of Alexandria Egypt	Rev. Dr. George Westhaver Principal, Pusey House Oxford, UK	Rev. Dr. Gerald McDermott Distinguished Professor of Theology Jerusalem Seminary
Dr. Alice Linsley Biblical Anthropologist & Scholar Midway University (Ret.)	Rev. Ben Jefferies Priest & Liturgical Scholar Trinity Anglican Seminary	Rev. Mark Perkins Chaplain & Assistant Headmaster St. Dunstan's Academy, VA

The Future of the Traditional Anglican Parish: A Case Study - Fr. Mark Perkins

Back in 2021, when my friend Thomas Fickley told me about his vision for a farm, trades, and classics boys boarding school in the Anglican tradition, I knew he was onto something… but I have been taken aback by the response to St. Dunstan’s Academy. We’ve had faculty and student inquiries from all over the country and from four continents. We’ve been covered in First Things, Touchstone, WORLD, and Christianity Today. There is a chapter about our founding in a forthcoming book by Ruth Graham of the New York Times. And, from ground zero, with no fundraising experience and not a dollar paid to consultants, we’ve raised over $2.5 million.

In what follows, I give three reasons why St. Dunstan’s has struck such a chord, each of which has direct implications for parishes and for global Anglicanism. In short, St. Dunstan’s is authentically embodied, unapologetically masculine, and we are engaged in genuine grass-roots ecumenism.

First, amidst the increasing disembodiment of contemporary culture, St. Dunstan’s is authentically embodied. Our work integrates head, heart, and hand. Students will raise, slaughter and butcher; they will grow, harvest, and cook their own food in our agriculture and culinary arts programs. Our students are already building their own buildings in our trades program.

While on campus students live under a rule of digital poverty — no screens, phones, headphones, or individual digital devices allowed.

We are building our school along the lines of the traditional parish, in which the whole community will live within earshot of the church bells. This reintegration of school, church, neighborhood, and work restores what was the parochial norm for all of human existence until the day before yesterday.

The parish — that place in which sacramental worship spills over into life in a thick community — the parish remains the Anglican norm. Our theology and work should be parochial in orientation. There are essentially two realities in the Church: there is Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and there is the local instantiation of that Church. The local instantiation is the people gathered round a bishop — the parish within a diocese. The parish-in-diocese is in one sense part of the whole Church, but in another sense it is the fullness of the Church in a place. A parish-in-diocese lacks nothing essential — it just is the Church in a place.

Everything between the diocese and the Church Catholic — whether province or jurisdiction or communion — each of these is in some sense an artifice. That doesn’t make them unreal, much less bad. But the parish-in-diocese is fundamental in a way that a jurisdiction or communion is not.

Our ecumenical work starts with the premise that the fullness of the Church is present in every diocesan parish. Ecumenical work must not proceed from a false sense of inferiority. I fear that, for some, pointing to an “international communion” of some numerically large number of Christians spanning the globe is a form of ecclesial self-justification — a response to insecurity vis-à-vis Rome and the East.

But if the local reality is the diocese, and the ultimate reality is Christ’s Church, then what matters is whether and how the diocese is a local instantiation of the Church — which is determined not by intercommunion agreements but rather through the sacraments, particularly Holy Baptism, Holy Communion, and Holy Orders in Apostolic Succession.

More on that to come, but for now the point is that we do not win converts to an abstract, disembodied faith. We make disciples who join with their brothers and sisters in a particular place at a particular altar to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Our parishes are inherently and always embodied by virtue of their participation in the sacramental life. And yet we are being pulled away at every moment by the temptation to attend to other things. We are constantly pulled toward a way of life that is distracted, disembodied, disintegrated, and empty. The responsibility of our parishes is not to recreate exactly what we are doing at St. Dunstan’s, though they surely can imitate some of what we do, but to give our attention, our time, and our bodies to the work of our own parishes — not to distractions and abstractions.

This means reconsidering our approach to digital spaces and social media. Our online work must always be downstream of and subservient to the embodied parish. Success is measured not in views or likes or subscriptions but rather by the extent to which these digital initiatives push people off their phones and computers and more deeply into embodied, parochial community. Does your online presence encourage you to push deeper into the life of your parish? Does it do the same for others? Or are you just one more algorithmically driven dopamine hit?

Perhaps this sounds irrelevant to the future of global Anglicanism. I assure you it is not. Virtually all of the challenges we are addressing today are deeply connected to the neutered, androgynous, and acedic disembodiment of this present evil age.

Which brings me to my second point. In the face of post-industrial androgyny, St. Dunstan’s is unapologetically masculine. Thanks to some very stark data about male outcomes in education, the workplace, and overall health, mainstream culture has begun to pay attention to the particular challenges facing our young men. But this new attention is all happening within the dominant feminist cultural frame. Boys are now a distinctly disadvantaged demographic, and so most of the conversation is dedicated to addressing inequities so that we can continue along our not-so-merry androgynous way. We need to reject the premises of the conversation, even as we make common cause where we can. We need to honor sex difference, not flatten it.

Single-sex education is one way of doing so. Boys, in particular, need meaningful rites of passage to draw them out of boyhood and into manhood. They need to inherit manhood from mature men, alongside a band of brothers. The good news is that churches, by and large, still offer single-sex spaces — men’s groups and women’s events and the like. Smaller churches are also likely to offer intergenerational spaces where older men, younger men, and boys can get to know one another. But we need to do more to recover the vision of sexuality from Genesis to Revelation.

For one thing, as Fr. Gerry and others have said, we need to give up on the failed experiment of women’s ordination. But not only that.

I used to think that the best way to protect the exclusively male character of ordination was through a kind of sacramental minimalism — make sure the priest is male, but everything else in the Church can be mixed gender. But so long as male-only ordination is the one discordant stroke in an otherwise-androgynous painting, it will always look incoherent and irrational.

We must situate our understanding of ordination within the larger picture of sex difference, from creation to eschaton. To take one example, if we want to end the misguided experiment with women’s ordination, we must also end our experiment with female altar servers. Altar service, like the priesthood itself, is unexceptionally male in Scripture and in the liturgical tradition of the Church. Up until sixty years ago, male altar service was a Vincentian canon norm — practiced by all, everywhere, at all times.

A mixed-gender altar party is liturgically and symbolically incoherent. The Holy Eucharist is nuptial — every Holy Communion is an image of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. In the Eucharist, the Bride of Christ, the Church, approaches the altar to become one with her beloved, Jesus Christ, in the sacrament. The celebrant is an icon of Jesus Christ the Bridegroom, and the servers are the friends of the groom. Mixed-gender altar parties both obscure and distort this imagery, creating the same kind of sexual confusion and disorder that obtains when you attend a wedding where a man is among the bridesmaids or a woman among the groomsmen.

These minor offices are also a traditional means of discerning whether one’s particular vocation of service to the Church is in ordained ministry. Restoring the male character of altar service allows for the recovery of the cursus honorum as a rite of passage by which a boy ascends through the minor offices until he attains the rank of a man. For us, that is the lay reader, who proclaims the Scriptures amidst the assembled Body of Christ and is authorized to lead services in absence of an ordained minister. Lay reading is the job of a man, not a boy.

I understand if the notion of restoring exclusively male altar service makes your blood run cold. Not too many parishioners are all that invested in the debates over women’s ordination… but if you tell people that their daughters cannot be acolytes… you’re going to have a problem on your hands. Pastoral wisdom is necessary. But to the extent that that idea remains unthinkable — to precisely that extent, your parish remains trapped in the dominant feminist frame. What we need — and what St. Dunstan’s offers — is an unapologetic masculinity which takes as its starting point the story of sexuality told in Scripture and lived out in the tradition of the Church.

Lastly, St. Dunstan’s is engaged in genuine grass-roots ecumenism. St. Dunstan’s is a school, not a church. We are an independent, board-governed 501c3 nonprofit. As chaplain, I am hired and can be fired by the headmaster, who is hired and fired by the board. But we are a school framed around the sacramental life of our chapel, and my sacramental ministry flows not from the board but from my bishop, who sits on the board ex officio. We are not ecclesial free agents. Rather, we are embedded in the life of a particular diocese, even as our ministry extends beyond jurisdictional bounds.

Disembodiment, sexual confusion, presentism, acedia — these are acids eating away at Christian fidelity. The battle against these forces cuts across the traditional lines of intra-Anglican squabbling and indeed across denominational borders altogether. We will happily make common cause with any who share our vision for Christian maturity, masculine strength, and an embodied and rooted way of life centered around the sacramental life of the Church. But we do not disguise who we are, nor do we compromise what we are.

Grass-roots ecumenism requires honoring the sacramental unity we ultimately share in Holy Baptism, Holy Communion, and Holy Orders in Apostolic Succession — while also acknowledging and mourning the realities of impaired communion. Again, the two fundamental realities are the Church and its local instantiation, the parish-in-diocese. Because the parish in a diocese lacks nothing fundamental, we seek unity without compromise and without self-justification. We reject the inferiority complex that is the numbers game.

I will end on what is perhaps a provocative note. Our opposition to same-sex marriage and to women’s ordination is not primarily ethical (as in, “women should not be ordained” or “same-sex marriages should not occur”). Rather, it is a matter of ontology. Marriage and priesthood are of divine origin. We cannot alter them. Whether we like it or not, there is no such thing as a same-sex marriage or a female priest. These things are not for us to decide.

The God who knows more and loves better than we have already decided them. The Anglican Province of America, of which I am a priest, is not in communion with the ACNA or GAFCON as a whole. Nor could we be, unless we were to embrace women’s ordination. I mean that literally — we cannot be in full communion. This is not a matter of choice, except insofar as we have chosen to reject the innovation of women’s ordination. So long as we do that, we are incapable of full communion, no matter what sheet of paper we might sign.

There is no such thing as full communion without the sharing of altars and the sharing of priests. It does not exist. Because the mutual recognition of Holy Orders is a sine qua non of full communion, the REC and all other dioceses and jurisdictions that reject women’s ordination… these are in actual fact not in full communion with the ACNA or GAFCON as a whole either, except insofar as they accept women’s ordination.

In other words, it is either the case that intercommunion in the ACNA is a convenient fiction… or that opposition to women’s ordination is a convenient fiction. And, in either case, it is best to dispense with convenient fictions and face up to inconvenient truths.

At St. Dunstan’s, by God’s grace and through the particular work to which he has called us, we seek to dispense with the convenient fictions that dominate our culture. We challenge young men to embrace the inconvenient truths that are necessary for their own maturation as Christian men — for the health of their parishes, for the good of the Church, and for the life of the world.

“Hating Even the Garment” - Ben Jefferies

I. I have taken for my text Jude 23 – ‘to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.’

• This image – the garment stained by the flesh – is what I want to dwell, and unpack its relevance as an image that illuminates the path forward on this question of unity and truth and the future of the Anglican Church.

• The image is of course indexed to the commandments in Leviticus – that garments can be rendered unclean, toxic, by being stained with unclean bodily fluids, mold, and the like.

• The first thing I wish to offer is a theological interpretation of this image: The uncleanness of a bodily member – corresponds to the immoral acts of the church. The garment – corresponds to the documents that govern the church’s life: Formulary documents and constitutional documents.

• Think of it – in the early centuries of the Church, the institutional life of the Church was fully embodied in the will of the individual bishop. Same with kings in the early Middle Ages, right? But on this side of 1215 – the signing of Magna Carta – the life of the Organic Company is embodied not only in the will of the head, but also in constitutional documents. As a man wears clothes, that buffer his presentation to others, that give him a different shape – so King John donned Magna Carta, and bequeathed it as a vestment to his successors.

• It’s the same thing in the Church today. The life of the Church is no longer embodied solely in the person of the individual bishops. The bishops don the Constitution of their dioceses – they are beholden to it – as well the Constitution of their province.

• And, since the Church is a spiritual entity, the Constitution and Canons and Liturgies of a Church are spiritual things. They are maximally important.

• So, when a bishop sins (and by extension, mutatis mutandis, when a priest sins – he mars the body of Christ. He makes a wound and infects it with sin. This sin can be anything: Personal sin: Abuse, Theft, Adultery; or it can be a sin of disobedience affecting another, such as officiating the “wedding” of a gay couple. Whatever the sin – it is the bishop’s sin. The church has always had sinful bishops. Thankfully there have always been Godly and Righteous Bishops as well – we remembered Alphege and Anselm just this week – but wickedness in the church, as such, is not the problem. Those who love righteousness are called to carry the pain of the wound with them, and pray for healing.

• The problem comes when the infection seeps out of the wound, and into the garment – that is, when the immoral action gets embedded into the governing documents of the Church. When dioceses and provinces re-write their Constitutions, or authorize unrighteous liturgies. Then the garment is stained.

• And we are to hate the garment stained by the flesh.

II.

• This brings me to the second point I wish to convey to you this afternoon: The priority of Catholic Morality. The Life of the Church Catholic is instantiated in Catholic Faith and Catholic Morality: What we believe, and what we do. So often the question of Christian unity places the Catholic Faith as the Sun around which the ecumenical discourse should orbit, but I believe this is backwards. The ability to spiritually perceive and believe the Catholic Faith is subsequent to, and conditioned by Catholic Morality. We see this ontological sequence throughout the New Testament – that when the heart is hardened by sin, the mind is subsequently darkened.

• Think of Ephesians 4:18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.

• And THE issue that is tearing apart the Church today – and it’s all one issue – the question of what does the Bible say about Sex, Sexuality and the Sexes – It began with Women’s Ordination, Same-sex marriage was the middle game – THE issue – is a moral issue. The question to be asked isn’t “what’s the theology of this? What ought to be believed about marriage? And so on” – these are belief questions – and they are non sequiturs. On matters of catholic morality, the question is simply, ‘Is God being obeyed? Or disobeyed?’

• With a few odd and fringe exceptions, none of the Anglican Bishops around the world today are denying the Nicene Creed. The Era of Bishops like Pike and Spong and, in the UK, JAT Robinson – that’s ancient history. Dame Mullaly spoke of the Resurrection of Christ in her enthronement sermon in a perfectly satisfactory way. But the assertion of the Faith claims of the Church Catholic are unimpressive, by themselves. The Devils can recite the first two articles of the Nicene Creed without flinching. The real matter is, are we obeying this God we confess to believe in?

• Confusing Faith and Morality has created an ecclesial quagmire. The reason that women cannot be ordained isn’t important. The fact that in God’s Holy Book he spoke through his servant St. Paul and said, “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man” – this is a commandment – are we obeying it? Or disobeying it?

• And let me now link this with my first point – that some Bishop ordained women to the priesthood in 1974 – is a local disobedience. Tragic, Irritating, but a localized sin. When the General Convention of The Episcopal Church re-wrote their Canons in 1976 to enshrine women’s ordination – now the garment is stained. And those who gathered at St. Louis in 1977 and broke off were exactly right in doing so. Same thing in our day. Gene Robinson getting consecrated wasn’t the Rubicon. ACNA jumped a little early at the request of the GAFCON bishops. 2015, when TEC’s General Convention re-wrote their marriage canons, or in the UK – it was December 2023 when the House of Bishops approved the prayer for the blessing of a ”married” gay couple. For authorized liturgies are also governing documents.

• The garments are now stained. We must hate them. Which means put them off – put them away, and pray for them to be cleansed, apart from ourselves.

III.

• All of this has set the stage for my final point, to address the conference question head on, with new eyes.

• How should we Anglicans retain unity in the truth? & What truth is essential?

• In the first place, clarifying the difference between faith and morals evaporates the cavil of “what is first order doctrine?”. We don’t ask “is the female priesthood first order or second order doctrine?” No, it’s not a matter of doctrine, it’s a matter of obedience. With this clear, we see that “first order doctrine” itself is an oxymoron spawned amidst moral disobedience. The Lord Jesus deposited a body of belief to the Apostles – this has been passed down for 2000 years. It must not be added to, or taken away from. It can be clarified by never developed in the way Newman meant the word. The entirety of Catholic Truth - in faith and morals – is essential, and is not to be compromised even an iota for the sake of unity.

• So, let’s get down to some concrete application of all this.

• Judgment begins with the household of God, we must look first at the log in our own eyes, and examine the garments that we are wearing – are they stained by the flesh? If you are a bishop or an executive committee member – the provincial constitution and canons. If you are a presbyter, or standing committee member, your diocesan constitution and canons. Who cares if some Anglican province somewhere is celebrating gay bishops, if your own garment is also stained. This is the first order of priority – to have our own garments purified. Only then will be capacitated to deal rightly toward others.

• Let me start closest to home – to use myself as a demonstration – The diocese I am in – Upper Midwest of the ACNA – has nothing in its constitution or canons that opposes the Catholic Faith or Catholic Morality. It is silence on the question of women in the diaconate, and the legal principle of silence implying consent holds here. The province I am in – ACNA – has a corrupted constitution – because it allows each bishop to decide for their own diocese on the matter of women’s ordination. But, structurally, to say that Catholic Morality – that is, obedience – and anti-Catholic morality, i.e. disobedience – are both tolerable, is to fundamentally authorize error. Our ACNA garment is stained. Now, this happened before I knew of it, before I was a presbyter, before I knew better – otherwise I would have tried to take a stand – as I did with the Augustine Appeal a few years ago. But as it is – it is an error, a compromise, an unrighteousness, that I bear with and pray for.

• For my part, I could never join the REC, even though it is obedient on Holy Orders, because the Declaration of Principles of 1873 clearly rejects the Catholic Faith. A 2017 Pastoral letter that attempts to explain it away is not the same as a repentance and a scrubbing of the garment. It would be bad faith to ever take on willingly a garment that is stained when we are called to hate it. If the Abp of Canterbury offered me a chaplaincy to the King with a million-pound stipend a year, I could not take it, because the garment is stained.

• At a larger global level, and with this I’ll end:

• The Nairobi-Cairo Proposal out of Canterbury can go nowhere, because it asserts women’s ordination as a fait accompli and allows for differing views – obedient AND disobedient views on homosexual practice.

• GAFCON initially showed promise, but the Kigali Statement asserts the Bible to be the Rule of Faith, which is not the Catholic Teaching. It is also styling itself recently as a Confessional Church, which is also un-Catholic. Furthermore – it has welcomed bodies, such as the Reformed Episcopal Church of South Africa, which plainly deny the Catholic Faith.

• Like GAFCON, the Cairo Covenant of the Global South doesn’t breathe a word about Women in Holy Orders. While Silence on this front may be construed as consent, the larger practical question presents itself: Are we going to do all this work of realignment, only to have the biggest issue in our midst completely unresolved? It is like going into a 12 surgery for a complex bone-fracture, only to agree to set the bone mostly in the right way, but not fully. The effort of global realignment seems to me to not be worth effort if we’re not going to align around Catholic Faith and Morals.

But if it did – if the ACNA, say, cleansed the garment, and brought an end to the disobedience of Women’s ordination, a cascade of real unity, beginning with the G3, could commence and the witness would be dazzling.

‘Mere Catholicism, Practical Holiness, and Unity in One House’- The Rev. Dr George Westhaver

INTRODUCTION: THE COURAGE TO BE THANKFUL

In 1904, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang gave a series of lectures called The Opportunity of the Church of England: ‘The strength of the forces which are dissolving the traditions and habits of religion’ mean that very many churchmen find themselves in ‘a shifting rubble of half-formed doubts in which no religious influence can take root and become …clear conviction’. Despite his colourful diagnosis, he said ‘this is our opportunity’: ‘There are energies in the very forces which cause the evil, which can be converted into powers of recovery’. Indeed, his lectures are full of hope:

Let us [therefore] …have the courage to be thankful for these times in which it has pleased God to ask for our ministry. It is useless to sigh for other times; the days in which there were no special trials. ‘The study of history is the best cordial for drooping spirits.’

Long difficult divisions in the Church may tempt us to despair. Cosmo Gordon Lang’s counsel invites us to see these trials as an opportunity. About 50 years earlier, in another time of division, John Keble, the Father of the Oxford movement, also called his fellow churchmen to persevere in hope:

‘Look at the early Church and the long agony of the contest with Arianism after the council of Nicaea. How long was it before she had rest from the troubles which then beset her on a chief point of doctrine? We are now in 1850, and some eager ones think it much too long to wait for 1851 or 1852 for settlement of our present troubles: but she waited for two whole generations until the Council of Constantinople in 381, and under all sorts of interruptions, anomalies, charges of heresy, and breaking of communion.

‘The whole air of England seems to me to ring with voices from the dead and from the living: “Stay here; think not of departing, but here do your work.”’

Can Keble’s call to ‘persevere in hope’ in the search for unity in truth inform our response to the current struggles in the Anglican communion?

A CATHOLIC APPEAL TO THE 39 ARTICLES

The recent Abuja statement points to ‘the Reformation Formularies’ of the Church of England, to ‘the Thirty-nine Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer’ as expressing the doctrinal basis for unity. I would like to consider how E B Pusey’s careful study of the 39 articles as a focus for unity both within the Church of England, and within the Western Church, can help us to consider what this appeal offers.

In their article ‘IS THE ANGLICAN “RESET” TRULY ANGLICAN?’, Fathers Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, Greg Peters offer a more in-depth example of this kind of approach. They look at the tension between declaring the Bible to be ‘its own interpreter’ and the patristic or ecclesial exegesis which both gives us the creeds but also challenges contemporary assumptions about the plain sense of the Bible.

For Pusey, ‘The real danger was that the Articles should be understood to deny what was Primitive as well as [error, “Romish” error]’. Pusey re-stated and adapted John Henry Newman’s controversial argument:

‘…our Articles neither contradict anything Catholic, nor are [our Articles] meant to condemn anything in early Christianity, but only [errors in] the later system in the Church of Rome.’

This was not an obscure theological argument, ‘inside baseball’ for Anglicans: reading the articles and the Anglican formularies with the Fathers and the whole Church gives the Gospel a converting power to meet the rising tide of secularism, religious liberalism, and indifference. Pusey was particularly astute at perceiving the way biblical interpretation hides implicit ideas which can obscure rather than reveal Christ. His arguments about the Articles are arguments about shaping a theological or cultural imagination which makes the Incarnation, the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, the lens through which we read the Bible, the Church, and the world. Will a contemporary Anglican appeal to the Articles be shaped by this kind of ‘sacramental ontology’ and the ‘doctrine of the catholic fathers’, or will our appeal to the Bible be made superficial by the glosses and prejudices of our day, or even of one part of the Church?

So, for example, to condemn as un-biblical the ‘Romish doctrine of Purgatory’, the late medieval errors which Pope Benedict XVI rejected, is only the beginning of a scriptural consideration of the intermediate state and how God brings to completion the good work begun in us.

The condemnation of the “sacrifices of Masses” rejects ‘the purchase of Masses’ for the forgiveness of sins’, yes. But the patristic and biblical doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Church’s pleading of ‘the “pure offering” which the Prophet Malachi foretold’, this doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice is part of the proclamation of the Gospel and the life of the Church.

The 39 Articles are not a confession of faith, not a catechism, so appealing to them is the beginning of a conversation, not the end. The 19th century example suggests that in order for the Articles to serve as a basis for renewing communion, then we will need to consider how to avoid narrowing our presentation of the ‘fine gold’, of the Gospel proclamation.

Unity in Truth

Between 1865 and the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, Pusey wrote three book-length public letters proposing the reunion of the English and Roman Churches on the basis of the 39 Articles and the Council of Trent.

‘Unity is, in part, the direct gift of God’ writes Pusey. ‘In part, it is the fruit of that gift in the mutual love of the members of the Church.’

In his hierarchy of gifts, Pusey emphasises the gifts which God gives:

‘Christ our Lord, God and Man, binds us to Him by the indwelling of His Spirit, by the gift of His Sacraments, administered by those to whom He gave the commission so to do, [and] by the right faith in Himself.’

Pusey notes that unlike many Churches or Communions, the C of E both assumes this unity, and prays for it.

‘At Holy Communion we pray God to “inspire continually the Universal Church [not C of E only] with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord”’ and ‘We pray for “all Bishops,” not our own only’.

‘The Church is one’, but ‘How it is one, the Church nowhere defines’.

Contemplating schisms in the Church, Pusey argues that, ‘There is no ground to assume that suspensions of inter-communion (sad and mournful as they are) and in themselves only, hinder either body from being a portion of the Body of Christ.’ ‘Unlove began its work even in the Apostles’ times.’

If intercommunion does not destroy union with God the Holy Trinity, what does?

‘It is of man to retain the faith which he has received. They have not the same Lord, who do not believe the same truth as to Him’.

For Pusey unbelief with regard to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation is especially corrosive.

According to this view, unity is destroyed only when a body loses essential notes of the Church—apostolic ministry, the true sacraments, the substance of the faith, or the moral law.

On the basis of Pusey’s principles, how do decisions about the doctrine of marriage, or what constitutes a holy life, affect communion? Such decisions have disrupted our communion with one another in love, but do they affect communion with God in Christ?

If decisions are made against the received consensus of Scripture and the wider Church, whether or not this constitutes rebellion or formal schism depends in part on the degree to which the people or synods making those decisions understand themselves to be contradicting the catholic consensus of the Church. Or do we believe, rightly or wrongly, that we are developing the faith and practice of the Church in fidelity to the Gospel? This of course is the focus of the debate, not an answer.

Differentiation Serving Unity

In a letter written in 1845 to a priest at S Clement’s Church here in Philadelphia Pusey writes:

‘There is absolutely no doubt that our succession is valid, that our Bishops are the successors of those through whom God planted the Gospel here; and so our Church is the appointed channel of God’s gifts, and the instrument of salvation to us.’

In this last section, I would like to consider if the arrangements made in the Church of England to maintain the widest possible degree of communion despite serious disagreement over apostolic ministry and the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate can serve as a model for seeking unity in truth in the Anglican communion and between the Anglican churches.

The Five Guiding Principles enshrined in the House of Bishops’ Declaration on the Ministry of Bishops and Priests states that the C of E’s ‘own clear decision on ministry and gender is set within a broader process of discernment within the Anglican Communion and the whole Church of God’. The 5 Guiding Principles also make a commitment, without a limit in time, to enable those ‘who, on grounds of theological conviction, are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests’ to ‘flourish within its life and structures’.

The Society under the patronage of Saint Augustine and Saint Hilda is the ecclesial community which gives flesh and spirit to these principles. The Society offers ministry in the historic and apostolic succession, ‘sacramental assurance’, and provides episcopal oversight for clergy and for parishes that affiliate to The Society.

The Society also ‘promotes and maintains catholic teaching and practice within the Church of England’. In the same way that the Abuja statement points to ‘doctrinal … departures from the teaching of Scripture’ in the Anglican communion, the Society’s foundation assumes that the ordination of women represents a departure from the teaching of the Bible and the consensus of the Church. Does this change weaken or damage the apostolic channel of God’s gifts, the instrument of salvation to us? This is a serious matter not addressed in the GAFCON documents.

The result of the arrangements made to secure the widest possible degree of communion in light of the issues raised by the ordination of women is that the Church of England could be described as an ecumenical fellowship within a unifying canonical structure. It no longer displays the system of full inter-communion which has been the norm for a church. In the most hopeful form, this church within a church promotes the widest possible degree of ecumenical fellowship within the C of E, and by this serves the unity of the whole Church.

As I investigated what one might learn for the Anglican churches from the Church of England model of degrees of communion alongside ecclesial differentiation, I discovered what many of you will know much better, that this model has already been proposed. ‘The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals’ for ‘Renewing the Instruments of the Anglican Communion’ has very explicitly applied the language of the ‘highest possible degree of communion’ from debates about ordination to our profound disagreements about the doctrine of marriage.

The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals recognises what we already know, that ‘Solemn calls to unity may … function as an abuse of power’. It replaces the language of ‘walking together’, or wearing down, with Differentiated communion: ‘We find in the story of Paul and Barnabas a precedent for walking together at a distance’ maintaining some degree of unity despite “sharp disagreement”.

On the basis of the century-long Donatist controversy and Augustine of Hippo’s arguments, the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals proposes that it is an error ‘to break from the Church in search of a haven of purity, rather than contesting for the orthodox faith within the Church, which is always a mixture of wheat and weeds, [bad fish with the good]’. Until harvest time, the struggle for unity in truth will be accompanied with much ‘lamentation and groaning’.

On the basis of Abuja’s commitment, ‘to support faithful Anglicans whether they stay in … mixed provinces or decide to leave’, one commentator has proposed that ‘the best and brightest in GAFCON who are not part of the Global Anglican Council could engage in the Instruments of Communion’, and contribute even now to the Nairobi-Cairo process’. This would strengthen the bonds of communion and interdependence between Anglicans and express the truth that we need one another.

Bearing with One Another in Love

Jurisdictional, institutional, and even confessional instruments of unity can only serve our unity in Christ if they express a genuine charity and holiness of life.

In the words of one of the Society bishops from a sermon at Pusey House, accepting differentiation as a path to unity does not mean giving up on truth:

Bearing with one another in love ‘cannot mean remaining apart in static silence. … If truth is objective, then it is the same for everyone, and we will come to dialogue over disagreement in the belief that the truth will convert’.

The NCPs stress the importance of seeking ‘the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace’ for our witness to the Gospel: ‘A dogged refusal to give up on each other, to remain in relationship despite deep and significant disagreement, can be a remarkable witness to the power of Christ to bring unity in a divided world’.

John Henry Newman’s entrance into the Roman Catholic Church stirred up division and anger in the Church of England. Pusey was urged to both condemn his friend and the Church of Rome. The public letter he wrote is full of lessons for our current struggles:

‘You too’, Pusey writes, ‘have felt that it is what is unholy on both sides which keeps us apart….As each, by God’s grace, grows in holiness, each Church will recognise, more and more, the Presence of God’s Holy Spirit in the other; and what now hinders the union of the Western Church will fall off….But while we go on humbled, and the humbler, surely neither need we be dejected. God’s chastisements are in mercy too.

‘And so now, then, in this critical state of our Church, the most perilous crises through which it has ever passed, must not our first lesson be increase of prayer?’

[Pusey:] ‘It is not to immediate results that we ought to look, “the times are in His hands”; but this one cannot doubt, that the good hand of God, which has been over us in the manifold trials of the last three centuries, checking, withholding, guiding, chastening, leading, and now so wonderfully extending us, is with us still. It is not thus He ever purposes to leave a Church. Gifts of grace are His Own Blessed Presence. He does not vouchsafe His Presence in order to withdraw it.’

Or, in the words with which we began, and in the face of our current trials, ‘let us have the courage to be thankful for these times’, even as we know that, until harvest time, the struggle for unity in truth will be accompanied with much ‘lamentation and groaning’.

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