So now it’s official. The worldwide Anglican communion is in a state of schism. I was hoping that a bit of traditional Anglican “fudge and mudge” could avoid this, at least for what remains of my lifetime, but there’s no arguing with some people! The Gafcon schismatics claim that they are in the majority in the worldwide Anglican Communion. It sounds convincing but I have no idea if it is actually true. And in any case, I fail to see how it is relevant to what is basically a moral and theological dispute. Since when have right and wrong depended on a majority vote?
My intellectual training was mainly in science and one of the first things I learned was that if something is true, it’s true, whether anyone believes it or not. For centuries, educated people thought that the sun went around the earth, but that didn’t mean that it actually did so. Now that I come to think of it, Jesus was not greatly enamoured of majorities either. He said that you can recognise the road to hell because it is the one with all the people on it (Mt 6, vv.13-14). Oops!
The Gafcon churches, we are told, have no intention of leaving the Anglican communion or starting a new one. Rather they are expelling the Church of England from their Anglican communion because, in their view, we are impenitent heretics and approvers of sin. But let’s consider what that “expulsion” actually means.
The word “Anglican” is really a Latinisation of “English”. Until a couple of centuries ago, the Anglican Church was just another name for the Church of England, which is one of the few Christian denominations that defines itself as the church of a particular nation and not as the upholders of a particular theological position. In fact, Anglo-Catholics, Protestant Evangelicals, Liberal Protestants and radical modernisers have all found a refuge within the Church of England. We pride ourselves on being a broad church. Furthermore the identification of the Church of England with the people of England is deeply embedded in its self-image and reflected in its parochial organisation. If you live anywhere in England, you live in some parish or other, and therefore have a parish church and a parish priest, whether you choose to make use of them or not.
The Anglican churches overseas all originated as branches of the Church of England, created by English missionaries, and their bishops and archbishops were originally appointed by the Church of England. The whole thing was very much a by-product of the British Empire, one of the many good things (now sadly forgotten) which the Empire provided for its people. But as more and more colonies became autonomous dominions within the Empire, their churches naturally did likewise. So the Church of England and its daughter churches morphed into this thing called the Anglican Communion. It was a kind of ecclesiastical reflection of the mostly benign process that turned the Empire into the Commonwealth.
Because the Anglican churches overseas started out as overseas branches of the Church of England, the Anglican Communion was and is defined as the grouping of churches that maintain communion with the See of Canterbury and its Archbishop. The Archbishop of Canterbury has no papal powers. He is only primus inter pares. But his role as lynch-pin (independent of his personal theological opinions) is symbolically important. The Gafcon churches clearly believe that they can break the link with England and still remain Anglican. Well, of course, they can continue to call themselves “Anglicans”. People nowadays are allowed to call themselves anything they like. There are men with penises and beards who call themselves women and it is considered polite to use female pronouns when referring to them. But they are not actually women, whatever they call themselves, because a woman is defined as an adult human female.
Alternatively, you can redefine “woman” and you can redefine “Anglican” to mean something different from what those words have meant up till now. After all, languages do change over time. The word “computer” used to mean a young woman who was paid a pittance for carrying out computations for use in navigation tables. But if you do allow the redefinition of words, you have to be consistent about who is allowed to do it. You cannot say, “The Gafcon churches will remain Anglican because we have redefined the word ‘Anglican’ so that it no longer requires communion with the Church of England via the See of Canterbury”, while still loudly maintaining that trans women are not allowed to redefine the word “woman” to include themselves. Sauce for the goose must always be sauce for the gander.
A further source of confusion is that there are congregations within the Church of England which are very much in sympathy with the Gafcon program. Some of these were actually founded by Gafcon missionaries. They will probably secede from the Church of England and become part of a Gafcon shadow church which will of course claim to be the true Church of England. There will be disputes about the ownership of church property, similar to what we have seen with ACNA in the US, and it will all become terribly uncharitable and unedifying. The whole country will mock us.
Now I regard myself as an Evangelical, theologically speaking, and a pretty conservative one at that, although I have never really identified with the emotional excesses that other Evangelicals appear to favour. In fact I curl up inside with embarrassment whenever someone gives a public “testimony” of how he came to Jesus. That feels to me almost like a person taking his clothes off in public and I’m dubious about it as a strategy for evangelism. It certainly never impressed me in the days when I was an agnostic. But neither do I like the modern“woke” Christianity with which Justin Welby often seems to identify. I think that with so much poverty, loneliness and mental illness in this country, the church should have better things to spend its money on than combing church buildings for memorial plaques to people whose grandfathers may have been involved in slave trading. What about financing more parish priests, rather than aggregating parishes into ever bigger benefices, so that all those people who do not own cars can still get to communion every Sunday in their own parish?
Maybe then I should feel a degree of sympathy with the Gafcon position. Well, sorry, but I don’t. I don’t like their stridency or their self-righteousness (which mirrors alarmingly that of the “woke” left) and I don’t believe that anyone has the right to take the Body of Christ hostage and tear it apart when they don’t get what they want. You see, I’m not a traditionalist Anglican; I’m traditional C of E, which is a very different thing. I like the friendliness and tolerance that exists in ordinary parish churches like my own. It means a lot to me to take Holy Communion every Sunday and sing some hymns with intelligent words (and occasionally really good tunes), and then to have a nice cup of coffee with my church friends. I’m sad that we don’t seem to have many young people in our regular congregation (though Messy Church is doing just fine), but I’m impressed by the number of golden weddings that we celebrate. If so many of our marriages last so long, we must be doing something right.
I have always believed that when people call themselves Anglicans rather than just Christians, they are implying that they subscribe to a set of values which have historically distinguished Anglicans from other Christians and which represent Anglicanism’s distinct contribution to Christendom. These include:
I don’t see much sign that these values are respected at all by the Gafcon crowd. In fact they seem to reject just about all of them. If they really represent the future of Anglicanism as a whole, then I am actually rather glad that I will probably not live long enough to see that future.
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