The Report of the Primate’s Theological Commission of the Anglican Church of Canada on the Blessing of Same-Sex Unions, also known as the St. Michael Report, is a document worthy of study, and an example of the kind of focused work that the Episcopal Church should be doing. It is available for review at . Whether or not the Church of Canada follows through is up to that Church. What ECUSA does is up to us. One hopes we’ll soon decide to take upon ourselves the responsibility that is ours, and if not from the episcopal order, then perhaps better still, this decision will emerge from the order of the laity.
It’s very disappointing to see that, stateside, something quite to the contrary has been unfolding. As recently reported in The Living Church, a scandalous number of our bishops have been busy demonstrating how well they are able to speak from both sides of their mouths. Rather than genuinely supporting a prayerful and reverent response to the call to enter into a sophisticated, credible, respectful, and respectable process of defining the theological groundings for what we do, and thus for who we are, they have been hiding behind a deceptive pretense.
On the one hand, these bishops joined the entirety of the House of Bishops in endorsing the HoB’s Covenant Statement. This can be found on the web at . The contents of the statement show it to be no fluff piece of double-talk, but suggest instead that the bishops did some hard and honest work, and engaged God in serious prayer, as is their due responsibility. They educate the rest of the Anglican Communion, and perhaps some of ECUSA, as to the constitutional extent and limits of what our bishops are allowed to do. And they articulate how they’ve worked within these boundaries to respond respectfully and meaningfully to concerns at work in other parts of the Communion.
The HoB did a hard job, producing a substantial document that could lay the groundwork for this Church finally to get serious about some things that it has seemed determined to avoid. The time is long overdue for this Church to help move the debate beyond the prurient fascination with, and inevitable condemnation of, anal sex. The Church needs to spend time, money, and effort on developing an articulated theology of personhood (anthropology) and a theology of relationship with God and with one another. ECUSA has long enjoyed a reputation for intellectual sophistication. We now have an opportunity to offer to the rest of the Communion, if not the wider body of Christianity, a genuine contribution to the resolving of the controversy that has arisen around homosexuality and faithfulness to God. The Covenant Statement is (was?) a step in that direction.
Instead, though, and shamefully, this secretive group of bishops reportedly sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury, via an observer from the Church of England who was present for the Covenant meeting of the HoB, a message directly contradicting the hopeful note struck by the Covenant, the very document they themselves had just helped create. Regrettably, the ABC validated their communication to him by requesting from them a clarification of their message. Their clarification, sent to the ABC in early April, and published at The Living Church’s online edition, shows how clearly duplicitous this group of bishops has been, and how clearly intent they seem to be on permanently fracturing this Church.
In their letter they ask to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the last week of May to “lay before [him their] concerns regarding the future of our Church.” They go on to commend the efforts behind the Camp Allen Covenant, but then claim that “the very fact that we need such a Covenant reminds us that our divisions are deep. These divisions stand as a threat to our own unity and that of the Anglican Communion.” In other words, even as they claim to praise the effort in which they took part, they cite the very existence of the Covenant as evidence that such efforts are futile! This they offer as justification for sabotaging it before the ink was dry. Publicly, these bishops are happy to be seen by their constituents as working collegially toward reconciliation and progress. Secretly and simultaneously, it seems they are planning (plotting?) to position themselves as perhaps the core of a new American province of the Anglican Communion. It appears they are hoping to encourage the Archbishop of Canterbury to support the nominally Anglican hard-lined primates in their call for the excommunication of ECUSA.
In addition, as they sent their clarifying letter to the Archbishop, these bishops sent a cut-and-paste adaptation of it to Presiding Bishop Griswold, demonstrating for him the immediate renunciation of their commitment to the Covenant they’d just helped fashion a few weeks earlier. They did not, however, trouble themselves to inform the PB that they’d requested an urgent meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury. As the Episcopal News Service reported, the PB was miffed, and who could blame him? Once the existence of their correspondence with ABC became known, their request to Bishop Griswold “for an immediate and compassionate conversation to provide for the welfare of all the members of the Episcopal Church” rang understandably hollow.
There is further evidence of the determination of these bishops to see only doom for ECUSA. Both letters site statistics that these bishops claim prove the imminent demise of our Church. Yet, when one troubles oneself to investigate the source, one discovers that it is “a survey of lay leaders in 15 percent of Episcopal congregations (40 percent of whom responded), along with comments made at gatherings of leaders across the country.” Thus, what the bishops claim as an illuminating statistic is actually a report derived from all of approximately 6% of the Church’s membership! Hardly definitive. Furthermore in comparing the decline in membership with the decline in average Sunday attendance, they use a classic apples and oranges comparison in order to support their foregone conclusion that ECUSA is a lost cause. How discouraging that these purported leaders are determined to believe that the Church is dead.
We can only wonder if and how any of us among their constituencies ever would have learned of these bishops’ secret efforts, had not their letters come into the hands of the press and subsequently been published. But now we know, and one hopes that we all realize that when those who are entrusted to be the leaders of the Church take action in deceptive and factional secrecy, they cease to serve the Church in its catholicity, its entirety. That these men (no women are signatories) have dedicated themselves to a sectarian effort is one thing. Everyone is free to choose his or her own path, to support this or that action. That these bishops have sold their office to that same effort is a scandal. That they treat those who disagree with them as infidels to whom they may lie with impunity, in good fundamentalist fashion, is antithetical to anything Christian. They have behaved as shamefully as any of those whom they’ve criticized on “the other side.” And they should be ashamed. They have cast a permanent shadow of doubt over the HoB Covenant Statement. Who can believe in its integrity or efficacy now that these bishops have shown their participation in it to be fraudulent?
It seems to me all the sadder that that each of these persons likely believes himself to be acting from the purest of motives. Nevertheless, even if this is true, it is that fine old treasure of Anglican moderation that is suffering the assault here. And so it is all of us who believe in the wisdom thereof who are suffering the consequences of these very un-anglican Anglican leaders. One can only pray that the poisonous atmosphere of secrecy and deception that continues to grow and permeate the Anglican global community (I won't use 'Communion' as I think that overestimates things just now) will become so offensive to so many that 'right belief' and ‘correct politics’ will cease to characterize those who have donned the mantel of episcopal responsibility, and perhaps something akin to true virtue will replace these lesser characteristics for awhile.
ECUSA has the chance to enter into precisely the reasoned and prayerful response that the Anglican Primates have requested, namely: to provide a rationale for the actions taken at General Convention 2003, and to base this rationale on the Anglican tripartite ethos of Scripture, Reason, and Tradition. If we, either in the persons of our leadership or otherwise, will commit ourselves to the hard, humble, intellectual, and spiritual work to do this; if our leadership will commit themselves and all of us to the work that still needs to be done in this Church internally; then ECUSA has the opportunity to make a significant contribution to the rest of the Communion, and to the wider family of Christianity as well. We may yet be able to derive a theology that finds, in good Anglican fashion, a way of being faithfully the Church that God has made from us, and which God calls us to be; a way that stays clear of those damnable litmus tests that can only shorten our reach outward to others, and render hypocritical our witness to the Gospel. I suggest that this will either happen deliberately through the chosen and sacrificial efforts of the current titular leadership of the Church, or it will happen by default through the will of the people, and through the will of the Spirit therein. If the latter, then the current leadership, enrapt of their own cleverness in working the system while keeping the majority of the people in the dark, had better duck and cover.
James V. Stockton
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