The first couple of weeks of July are a very particular time to be in Belfast. Coming from Glasgow is a reasonable preparation for this. You know instinctively that the bonfire being built out of pallets next to your hotel is a symbol of celebration for some local people but not at all for others. You know that the sound of fife and beating drum is one that some will tap their feet to and which will bring a sense of fear and apprehension to others. And you know that the flags and the bunting have not been put up to welcome Anglicans from all around the world.
But not everyone did know.
One of the most striking things about the recent meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council was that many of those present did not immediately know what any of these local cultural signifiers meant at all.
Over the course of the week, things became a bit clearer, not least through the Council being able to hear the extraordinary testimony of Richard Moore in Derry. After walking the walls and seeing the layout of the place, the Council listened with rapt attention to Richard’s story of having been blinded by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier when he was 10 years old and of subsequently forgiving the soldier and then searching him out both to express that forgiveness and ultimately befriend him.
Reconciliation does not come cheap in Northern Ireland and this and other stories of the Troubles formed the backdrop to an extraordinary week of conversation about the Anglican Communion.
Before saying anything about the divisions of the Anglican Communion, it is perhaps worth saying that I came away from the meeting of the 19th Anglican Consultative Council with a deep sense of awe and wonder in relation to the Anglican Communion. I know friends who think of it as being a relic of the past, a distraction from current mission and little more than the Commonwealth (another creaking institution that is difficult to define) at prayer. However, I return from Belfast rejoicing in what God is doing throughout the Anglican Communion and nothing had really prepared me for the onslaught of great stories and deep, deep connections that I witnessed through being a delegate at the ACC.
The Anglican Communion turns out to be both bigger and smaller than you think. Simultaneously.
I travelled four hours in relative comfort to be in Belfast. Some had travelled through war zones. I have relative peace and plenty in living out my life as a Scottish Episcopalian. Some come from communities that are hungry. I come from a place where the faith has been present for centuries. The diocese I come from was founded considerably before there was any thought of a bishop or archbishop at Canterbury. Others came from churches that have only joined the Anglican Communion during my lifetime. Some of us come from places where churches are in decline. Others come from places racing to plant enough churches to cope with the growth in faith that they are seeing. “The age of multiplication is not over, Kelvin” I was told by someone whose job included planning the planting of 2000 churches over the next 3 years.
Such conversations blow your mind. They expand your imagination and go beyond any experience of the church you could imagine. Take a view of the church to an ACC meeting and you have to be prepared for it to be expanded beyond your wildest dreams.
But then go to an ACC meeting and you find yourself sitting at tables of people drawn from across the Anglican World and immediately the conversations start and you realise that you are already deeply connected. I found myself looking across one of those tables at a Malaysian Bishop who happened also to be someone that I knew from his time training and serving in Scotland as a younger man. I found myself in conversation with someone from South America about a priest that I worked with for three years who had served previously in Buenos Aires. Was it possible that we had both known the same priest mentor in our younger days? At the ACC it was not only possible, it was inevitable.
The bonds of affection that people talk about in the Anglican Communion are real – I’ve always known that. But an ACC meeting is a meeting of people who come together and discover just how deep those bonds are and I was moved in my soul again and again to discover myriad connections to places all over the world that I had either forgotten about or not quite realised existed. In all those places the church is alive and people are praying daily. Sometimes they pray for me.
Last week I found myself praying with Irish friends for Ireland, praying with the Bishop of Amazonia for the Amazon, praying with people from island nations on the far side of the world about the climate crisis and praying with the Archbishop of Jerusalem for peace. Those prayers have faces now. Faces that I won’t easily forget.
The prayers and the conversations permeate the business at an ACC. They are meant to and they do – but we were there to do serious business and to have conversations which will help to shape Anglicanism for the next few years.
The primary business was a consideration of a set of something called the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals. These had been put together by something called IASCUFO – the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order. This is a very learned group of academics and thinkers who had tried to put together a way forward for the Communion.
One of the most striking things about the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals was how much they acknowledged divisions in the communion and how little they addressed the cause of those divisions. More than one person spoke to me, days into Council, to express surprise that they had just discovered that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were related at all to the divisions about human sexuality that have surfaced in recent years in the Communion. This was not clear from the text. Rather like those who came to Belfast and heard talks about the Troubles without realising initially that the Troubles had anything to do with religion, there were people at this council who took quite a while to understand that these proposals, which would have changed the Anglican Communion significantly had anything to do with the main presenting issue in our difficulties.
It was also not really very clear to the Council that these Proposals would help very much at all. It was clear fairly early on that these proposals were not something that the Council was in any mood to adopt or to pass. One sticking point was a proposal to change the definition of the Anglican Communion from one which acknowledges communion with the See of Canterbury as being a defining factor into us becoming a communion of churches which “have a historic link to the See of Canterbury”. Such a change was relatively easy for some. For those of us who come from churches which don’t have a historic connection with the See of Canterbury in the sense of being founded by missionaries from England, that change rather stuck in the throat. In the end, the Council wasn’t terribly minded to move in that direction. Nor was it minded to move towards a rotating presidency of the Anglican Consultative Council. Council members seemed to prefer a more informal way of the Archbishop of Canterbury sharing in leadership in the Communion to a formal change in structure.
Overall the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals received a welcome which could only be described as lukewarm. Those who had prepared them were warmly thanked for their work and they will inform further discussion. However, it is fairly obvious that these proposals are not going to fix the divisions in the Communion and ACC-19 wasn’t minded to do much with them other than commend them for discussion. Notably, I think, it chose to commend them for discussion in member churches but did not pass a resolution asking those churches to report back to the next ACC.
It was striking how generous the conversations about these proposals were. This ACC was a Council which acknowledged real divisions but which was not characterised by bitter conflict.
As I process the experience of going to ACC-19 as one of the delegates from Scotland, there are a number of themes which race around in my mind.
One of them is that I think that there is quite urgent work for the Communion to do in trying to understand why different churches have made different choices about the propriety of blessing or marrying same-sex couples. I don’t think that at the moment there is much scope for the Communion coming to one view about this matter. There is going to be no great declaration that this matter has been resolved by the development of a doctrinal statement about this that everyone is going to gleefully sign up to. However, there is much work to be done in trying to understand ourselves and trying to understand why we come to different conclusions whilst holding the same bible in our hands. This is a rich theological vein to mine.
Related to this is a discussion about what it means to address postcolonial issues. There was some suggestion that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were there to address a postcolonial church. I don’t believe that they did do this.
By a long way, my strongest recollection in this area came when someone asked for a definition of what postcolonialism meant. Without a moment’s hesitation, a male, white bishop from the Church of England stepped up to a microphone and answered the question in a way which brought the conversation to a close. The truth is, I don’t think that I’ve ever been in a more interesting group of people who might have answered that question with theological rigour, personal experience and deep reflection on trying to live in a broken world. To put it simply and bluntly, I’d like to hear all of those who were in that room answer the question of what postcolonialism is and to be able to listen gently to one another in trying to articulate their answers.
Coming from Scotland, a land which both benefited from and led the expansion of the British Empire and which also has a powerful myth of being colonised by England, there is much to think about on our doorstep. At an ACC, our doorstep is the world. My hope is that this question is not lost at subsequent Council meetings.
A further reflection from me is that the idea of being in degrees of communion (or being in impaired communion) is one that needs a good deal more thinking about. I realised during my week in Belfast that it is a phrase that means very different things to different people. We don’t have the idea of being in impaired communion within the polity of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I learned last week that there are plenty of other churches that don’t have this idea within them either. However it is the very stuff that the Church of England is built from. One way of seeing the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals is to see them as somehow taking the deeply flawed (some would say heretical) theology that one can be in impaired communion within your own church and make it normative in the Anglican Communion. The Church of England may think it is acceptable to have dioceses in which bishops are not in full communion with their clergy or indeed with one another – it is quite another thing to get people who don’t have this idea to think that it is in any way a force for good. I’m glad that ACC-19 had no enthusiasm for this way of thinking. So far as I can see the words “being in impaired communion” within a church are little more than a euphemism for denying the legitimacy of ordained women. Many from around the Communion had not grasped that this is the reality of the Church of England.
As I reflect on these conversations, it is my hope that the Church of England will become more like the other churches of the Anglican Communion. That is a far better thing to hope for than that the Anglican Communion should become like the Church of England.
Perish the thought!
The Anglican Consultative Council is an overwhelming thing to belong to for the week it meets. It is bewildering, frustrating and utterly wonderful and it will take this participant some time to think through what it means to be part of a global church of such exuberant and vibrant life.
There is a huge pressure on all the Instruments of Communion within Anglicanism to hold things together. That pressure exhibits itself as a drive to find consensus even in the most difficult of times. This ACC did manage to agree a substantive resolution by a huge majority. No-one got everything they wanted. No-one actually needed to get everything they would have wanted.
My overriding sense of the end of ACC-19 was that the bonds of affection were deep and had been deeply renewed by the experience. We all loved one another. And there is no new schism to be had this time.
That might be as good as it ever gets.
And I thank God for it – for all of it.
I have a much better sense of what all of it looks like now than I did before I went.
God bless us one and all.
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