Schism
May 2nd, 2007STUART WOLFENDALE. SCHISM FOR ST JOHN’S REVIEW
In the fourth verse of his hymn “The Church’s One Foundation”, the clergyman Samuel Stone, whose life span was almost entirely contained in Queen Victoria’s reign, writes with a period confidence,
Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, “How long?â€
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!
In the fifty fourth year of the second Elizabeth’s reign, a confused but not doubt still faithful Stone might have been considering a redraft. He would have been watching the Anglican Communion moving into sundering schism by accelerating creep. Heresies unmentionable in his day involving sodomite priests and lady bishops would be the meat of noisy, indigestible debates. Those men looking on with a scornful wonder would be millions of black men in  old African colonies,  Anglicans who outnumbered everybody else and had come to stand for orthodoxy. People like Nigerians were actually lecturing Europeans on textual fidelity and sexual morality. In answer to his watching saints’ ‘How long?’, he might have had to tell them ‘Quite a long time yet’ and that when the morn did dawn ,it would be to a cacophony of disconnected tunes and the song birds would be pecking each others eyes out. The beginning of this season of schism might be descibed as the Robinson Rift when the The Episcopal Church in the US, now anacronymed as TEC, elected and then consecrated ‘practicing’ homosexual Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire despite a request from the Archbishop of Cantebury and the Anglican Consultative Council that they might hold their horses on that one. The English Church had already done so by recently asking a very talented homosexual priest to fall on his own sword and withdraw himself from consideration for a bishopric- and he wasn’t even ‘practicing’. The Americans were deaf to this precedent. They have gone on to line up another gay bishop, who lives and ‘practices’ with another priest, and just to make clear that they were not done on other issues, to elect Katherine Jefferts Schori as their head. Very bothered and increasingly cornered , Rowan Williams , Archbishop of Cantebury, set up a panel to investigate the situation. Its conclusion, the Windsor Report ,recommended the Americans explain themselves, apologise and give certain assurances that they would be patient over gay ordinations and consecrations ‘whilsts the Church’s discernement is as it is.’ TEC did not exactly delight on any count. The evangelical churches of Africa and Asia and the traditional catholic groupings are chorusing in novel harmony for the Americans’ expulsion.In an address of great delicacy and desperation, Williams has asked the provinces of the Communion to consider signing or not signing a covenant by which they would desist from gay ordinations and gay union blessings. The result would be a quite unashamed two tier membership; full membership for those who could desist and ‘associate’ status - something like the Methodists have- for those who could not. It is difficult to see what is in it for a liberal province to sit on hard seats up in the gallery with the Noncomformists watching proceedings which they have been kicked out of. The time of attesting is scheduled for the Lambeth Conference of 2008. In the meantime, the Americans are no longer members of the Anglican Consultative Council and, in utter disregard for the slow, soft steps of ecclessiastical parliamentarians, the Communion is cracking, via the Internet, faster than a Greenland ice floe.Homosexuality appears on the face of it to be the canker in the Communion much to the distress of some gay Anglicans and the bemusement of gays overall. The validation of ordination is a deep and fierce theme in what is very much a clerical battle. Wider than that though, there seem to be wings of the Church which want to face the moral riddles of the 21st century in such contrary ways, they will be glad to be rid of each other. It is not just the merits of the debate on queer clerics that should be concerning Anglicans. It is the physical consequences of schism for churchgoers, queer, straight or don’t-know that are, predictably, quite unaccounted for. Thei approaching headlights are quite mesmerising. The Archbishop has seen them in his address. “There is no way in which the Anglican Communion can remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment. Neither the liberal nor the conservative can simply appeal to a historic identity that does not correspond to where we are now” (my italics).There are different forms of secession which are taking shape, some as neat as a cracking iceberg, others as messy as melting snow. One whole province can decline to sign a covenant or simply announce its departure. The Episcopal Church in the US ( TEC) , the Canadian , The New Zealand and the Scottish Episcopalians are likely to do this.   Coming down in scale a little, individual diocese will decide to go in a direction different from their province. This is already happening in TEC which makes life for this catalystic province far from simple. Half a dozen of its more conservative diocese like Fort Worth and San Jaochim have in all but name gone from it, ignoring Presiding Bishop Jeeforts Sori. Because Anglicanism is a church of bishops and apostolic succession, a seceding diocese needs some sort of ‘ alternative primatial oversight’ -logically from an archbishop of another province. Even this has an acronym. Let me introduce the ‘ APO’.
Nobody knows quite how an APO would work. The largely conservative evangelical diocese of Sydney is so at odds with the otherwise liberal Australian Church that it has asked for an APO by the primate of Nigeria the Most Reverend Peter Akinola. He is head of the seventeen and a half million Nigerian church which has become associated with leadership of the Afro-Asian numerical majority which is franking the Anglican currency with a more conservative face. It is difficult to imagine Archbishop Akinola finding much time for pastoral progresses through New South Wales no matter how much he might fancy the break. One can only imagine that a stranded diocese would eventually make a province out of itself- but a province of what and where?Let us go right down the scale to consider the fate of the stranded parish. Schism - or divorce as some prefer it- is never neat. Some diocese will have serious internal differences. A bishop may well have to be the final arbiter in a dispute over what to sign and where to go. There will be some parishes which will be unable to go on and be left behind to fend for themselves. In a novel developement, indicative of the episcopal chaos that will come out of this values war, a retiring Virginia clergyman has suddenly been made a missionary Bishop in the Nigerian church to look after Nigerians in Virginia and presumably the non Nigerians who cannot stomach the moderately liberal ethic of the diocesan bishop Peter Lee. At a recent meeting of orthodox Anglo-Catholic American bishops, there was a resolution put into prayer that they might extend their espiscopal oversight , pastoral care and mission across current diocesan boundaries. There are , it seems, traditional catholic parishes bobbing about in open boats choppy liberal seas which need rescue.At the very bottom of our splittist scale is  the solitary parishioner, the poor soul in the pew preached at and pick pocketed for good works, fairly passive, well disposed and not minded to divorce anybody. He or she is at least fuzzy over the differences between Anglicanism’s historic traditions as summarised by Rowan Wlliams; the reformed commitment to the priority of the Bible, the catholic loyalty to the sacraments and the ministry and the habit of intellectual flexibility that does not “seek to close down unexpected questions too quicklyâ€. How will these people feel the effects of schism? They will find that a church they used to attend a few miles away when on visits is no longer one of the chain. Procedures have altered. The forms have changed a bit. More to the point, it is not as familiar, not as comfortable. The welcome is more worked at, like you were visiting the Catholics or the Presbyterians. Then they will notice that the clergymen are changing.. Some visiting preachers don’t come any more. There isn’t the variety there used to be because (though they may not be told this) clergy who have worked once in one diocese, or just once in a whole province, will not get a job or even an invitation in another. There are two sad souls in the pews I can think of who will experience schism with painful slowness; Greg the gay and Winnie the widow. Greg will have been going to a mildly conservative, evangelic church because they have been friendly and it is down the road. He has been happy to keep his sexuality confidential and his single status at thirty has never been questioned. Slowly though, the tone has been changing. Homosexuality has been more openly and often mentioned as a template for sin. He is feeling more personally condemned and even, he thinks, looked at now. Increasingly puritanical attitudes to sex are accompanied by a more traditional attitude to a woman’s place in society and hostility to divorce. So, its not just his gay friends he is embarassed over his church for, its his women friends too. So, he stops going. Winnie has been going to All Saints all her life. She lived very close for most of it until she moved further away to a small flat after her husband died. He is buried by the church wall and she still makes the effort most Sundays. But lately the Eucharist has been different somehow every time and she can’t follow it and the church is always having festivals for complicated movements she’s never heard of and there are lots of gay men and women featuring there. She’s nothing against them but it all seems to be about them or groups who have got complaints and the intercession prayers are like political speeches. So she doesn’t make the effort so often now and nobody seems to notice.As well as fracturing in a grand fashion, at grass roots schism will make a lot of enthusiasts feel justified and leave many a Greg and Winnie stranded.ENDS.
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