Portsmouth Diocesan Synod Presidential Address
Saturday 6th November 2004
‘Finding our Way to the Future’
We do live in interesting times, as they say. And it would be tempting to make a shopping list of all the things that make it interesting, on the spurious assumption that they are all unrelated. But whether one is talking of asylum policy or how high taxes should be, everything is part of a whole. For the Churches - not just our own - many of the controversies that face us are exactly the same, the principal of which is how we manage to stay together when there are such differences among us. The trouble is that we can become so obsessed with the particular controversy of the day that we spend all our nervous energy talking about it and nothing else. We can become so blind that we are unable to see other Churches often only thinly masking the same issues. We can also become so parochial that we fail to notice how, for example, all three main political parties repeatedly attempt to rally their (often radically different) approaches to public policy - especially before a General Election. We can also lose any sense of historical perspective: Archbishop Thomson of York refused to attend the very first Lambeth Conference in 1867 because, along with many other bishops in what was only just beginning to be called the Anglican Communion, he saw no point in it.
These are the observations that I want to bring to current events in our world-wide Church: the Windsor Report of the ‘Eames’ Commission, the Rochester Working Party Report - not forgetting their significance for our own situation here in Portsmouth. By setting them in a wider perspective, I am not for a moment abrogating a sense of responsibility; we are going to have to make some careful decisions, internationally, nationally, and locally. Nor am I suggesting that some kind of facile determinism is at work: events are never inevitable, until, that is, one looks back at them with the luxury of hindsight!
Last month, the report of the Eames Commission was published, called Windsor because of the location of its final meeting. It is important to realise exactly what it is: a Report addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the first instance, by a Commission set up by him, under the chairmanship of Archbishop Robin Eames of Armagh, on the way in which the Anglican Communion reaches decisions and how it can handle internal differences which are seen by some to be of a Church-dividing kind. In a sense, the question is nothing new. What makes it particularly high-profile can be summed up in two factors. First, there is globalization – which means a world-wide organization, existing among many others. Then there is high-tech communication – the press of a button can send information or misinformation round the globe – or a diocese - at a speed unthinkable even 20 years ago, and certainly very much faster than, say, in the more leisurely pace of the fourth century; people in those days could take time to digest things more easily: now it’s a case of instant fact, requiring instant understanding, leading into (perhaps too frequent) instant comment. Put all that alongside a provocative, liberal, Yankee episcopal election by representatives of the people of God in New Hampshire, and a more conservative, missionary Nigerian Anglicanism, in a part of a continent already sharing an ambiguous history with the USA, and where militant Islam is rife - and you hardly have a recipe for sane, patient dialogue. The Windsor Report explores how we can remain together; its recommendations will take time to ponder, and it rightly stresses that neglected theme, ‘bonds of affection’. My main observation concerns lack of historical perspective in the way we look at events: the Anglican Communion is a recent invention. Of course, we are fully part of the same Church that has existed from the beginning, but the specifically Anglican identity, even though its roots go back a long way, is relatively new. Like all historic bodies, including other Churches, it is still evolving, and we may well be moving from a de facto to a de iure more federal model of ‘Communion’, in which local freedoms are permitted, at least in some measure. We have to thrash out ways of doing just that in a different kind of world.
Then comes 'Women in the Episcopate’, the result of a Working Party under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Rochester, which was published only this week, but whose main list of possible recommendations contains few surprises. This is a different kind of document: it is an internal Church of England Report, for the House of Bishops, and the General Synod, and due to be debated there next February, and thereafter by the dioceses. Many people will understandably rush to read the recommendations – different ways of drawing bishops who are women into the life of the Church of England. But there is a full, scholarly and readable account of the theology and practice of episcopacy down the ages which should not be overlooked. From this we can gather that there never was one pattern or understanding of bishopping that existed from the time of Christ, and which remained 100% intact until the first woman bishop was consecrated in the USA in 1988. Nor are ‘flying bishops’ an invention of the 1994 Act of Synod: within living memory, the Bishops of Carlisle and Newcastle used to look after Evangelical congregations in Glasgow and Edinburgh who shunned the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Italian Roman Catholic communities of Brooklyn used to import one of their own for confirmations, in order to avoid having the services of a predominantly Irish local hierarchy. What is at issue now is how to operate, if we should, such a system with a much more pronounced potential built-in theological and ecclesiological side-swipe. For myself, I expect that General Synod will vote in principle for women bishops at some stage in the next few years; then find a way of experiencing their ministry, perhaps using Scandinavian rather than North-American models; and then work at how and when they should be introduced into the Church of England we’re going to have to listen hard to each other. It will be important, too, to gauge just how many parishes would find such a move a Church-dividing issue, over and above the 2.7% parishes of the Church of England who have extended Episcopal ministry of one kind or another at the moment. But I doubt whether a legally constituted Third Province will become a reality – for many reasons, including the fact that Parliament is unlikely to grant the Church enough time for the legislation.
In my Enthronement sermon nearly nine years ago, I prayed for wisdom, and I do so daily. One kind of wisdom is at a premium at the moment – what is sometimes called a theological cooling-system. This is not about taking the passion and the blood out of serious argument. It is about replacing heat and anger with an honest detachment. Perhaps, after all, the issues I’ve touched on, and the observations that I have made on them this morning, are not simply aspects of Anglican Church life that happen to face us now. They may well be part of a whole series of world-wide questions, about money, power, and diversity; and the way we are being pulled in different directions, which quickly strains friendships and causes divisions where once there was some measure of willing sympathy, even where there was sharp disagreement. Shortly after moving to this diocese, I read a biography of one of the great fourth century theologians of the Greek Church, St. John Chrysostom – nicknamed ‘Chrysostom’ which means ‘golden-mouthed’, because of his reputation as a preacher. To him is attributed the form of eucharist most frequently celebrated to this day in much of the Eastern Orthodox Church; and it is to him, too, that is attributed that much-loved prayer, ‘Almighty God… who hast promised that whenever two or three are gathered together in thy name, thou will grant their requests…’ Those words came not from an ivory tower but from a fragile and at times rather brittle Church, in which some bishops, many clergy, and not a few laity behaved in a manner that can only be described as like American gangsters, with sometimes deliberate misunderstandings of what people were trying to say and a reckless enthusiasm to set up a new church here, there, and somewhere else, in order to make some kind of point. With such a perspective, I try to watch the present; and I keep praying for wisdom, and for a theological cooling-system, both for the Anglican Communion, for the Church of England, and for the KAIROS process in the Portsmouth diocese. Distractions have a habit of being diversionary and of generating displacement behaviour. We need to keep our eye on the heart of the gospel and learn again just how central it is to all that we are and all that we should be doing. As that remarkable figure, Bishop Jerry Winterrowd, of Colorado, USA, remarked at the last Lambeth Conference, living out the gospel today can at times seem like “playing squash against a haystack” but “you cannot build a church on issues; you must build a church on the gospel”.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
