“First, there is little agreement on how to evaluate the current situation in the Anglican Communion. Second, given the lack of details in the announcements regarding what the Archbishop of Canterbury actually has in mind, many commentators are assuming the worst.”

With some leaders of the Anglican Communion accusing others of not being “Christian,” and others charging their opponents of being “un-Anglican” fundamentalists in response, the stakes were high when Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby issued a press release on 16 September, inviting the 37 Primates of the Communion – along with the Primate of the Anglican Church of North America – to a gathering in January 2016.

The flurry of responses to this announcement illustrates the depth of disagreement and disunity within the Anglican Communion. Two things in particular stand out.

First, there is little agreement on how to evaluate the current situation in the Anglican Communion. Second, given the lack of details in the announcements regarding what the Archbishop of Canterbury actually has in mind, many commentators are assuming the worst.

That there are different interpretations of the present state of the Communion is evident from even a casual scan of initial reactions to the press release.

For the former Primate of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, David Moxon, it would be a mistake to understand the Archbishop’s plan as a “crisis summit”; in his view the Communion has already overcome any such state of emergency. The Primate of Canada, Fred Hiltz, hopes that the gathering will not take on the tone that “nothing’s working and everything needs to be fixed or made new. Because I, for one, don’t believe everything is broken.”

It is clear, however, that many do not share this view. Writing in England’s Church Times, Madeleine Davies describes “a deep concern about the stress for the Anglican Communion.” In the Guardian, Andrew Brown suggests that the Anglican Communion “has been a fantasy for at least 30 years” and that the Archbishop’s press release is evidence that the Communion is dissolving.

Sources at Lambeth Palace have apparently offered statements more in line with this second interpretation. London’s Telegraph quotes one Lambeth “insider” as suggesting, “We’ve actually got to draw a line here; we can’t go on,” and that Welby’s initiative is his “last throw of the dice.” Such sources reportedly admitted that Lambeth thinks there is a 30% chance that the meeting will be a disaster: “If that happens, the whole thing goes completely pear-shaped, it will pull apart large chunks of the Church of England.”

Given such contrasting readings of the Communion’s current state of affairs, it is no surprise that there is little agreement over what the Archbishop hopes to achieve at the gathering. For a few commentators, the press release is a refreshing dose of “realism,” which finally admits how bad the situation has become. For others, the announcement implies a drift towards greater centralisation and managerialism. A few have concluded that the outcome of the gathering will be a “two-tiered” Communion, with inner and outer circles. Some suggest the intended outcome is to reorganise the Communion along the lines of the Lutheran World Federation (for criticism of such a move, see Tom Ferguson’s blog). Others evoke the Orthodox Church as a possible model to adopt, while acknowledging that this may not be the most congenial example to strive for. A few argue that the whole exercise is a pointless waste of time.

Much has been made of the familial metaphor employed by an unnamed source at Lambeth Palace who responded to the question as to whether the announcement essentially signalled a “divorce”: “It’s more like sleeping in separate bedrooms.” It is difficult to know what to make of this image (although Ruth Gledhill’s rendering of it as implying an “open marriage” is unlikely to be one the Archbishop would himself endorse). If not a divorce, are we to imagine some sort of legal separation? Will there be “joint-custody” of the “dependents” of the separating parties (be they financial assets, ecumenical and missionary relationships, and so forth)? Does what Archbishop Welby intend for his gathering of Primates resemble “marriage counselling” or the negotiated settlement of a legal separation that is presumed from the outset? Should we anticipate the possibility of reconciliation, or something rather more akin to a scene from War of the Roses?

At this stage, the intentions of the Archbishop’s gathering are yet to be clarified. However, whether the correct analogy is marriage counselling, divorce negotiations, or simply agreeing to keep up appearances in order to avoid a public scandal, the Archbishop appears to have a clear sense of his own role. For if Justin Welby has indeed concluded that many of the national churches of the Communion “have nothing constructive to say to each other,” he clearly thinks that each continues to be interested in speaking to him. For all that the press release emphasises that the Archbishop’s role is nothing akin to a “Pope,” the tone of the statement and those of Lambeth spokespeople suggest that his office is somehow beyond the fray of the controversies destabilising relationships between other member churches of the Communion. Whatever the outcome, the assumption is that Canterbury will remain at the centre of any resolution.

This is particularly evident in the suggestion that the gathering of primates might result in a situation in which different Anglican provinces will not be in communion with each other, but they will all be in communion with Canterbury (who presumably decides whether or not to recognise them). A similar tone is implied in the suggestion that authority in the Anglican tradition “is ultimately found in Scripture, properly interpreted.” Since the role of Canterbury is not at issue, the implication is that the Archbishop’s office has a key role in adjudicating what a “proper” interpretation of Scripture actually is.

Thus, while it may be that the press release signals that the future of three of the so-called “Instruments of Unity” – Lambeth Conference, formal Primates’ Meetings and the Anglican Constitutive Council – is now in question, the one Instrument of Unity to be both maintained and enhanced is the Archbishop of Canterbury. The fact that the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, Foley Beach, has said that he will only attend the gathering of primates if his fellow GAFCON primates agree to attend, however, suggests that he views the status of the See of Canterbury otherwise.

While the precise intentions of Archbishop Welby remain unclear, significant issues are coming sharply into focus in the wake of his recent announcement. Some of these have to do with existing Anglican polity, while others are more directly theological.

Toward a “Liquid Communion”?

At level of existing polity structures, while the Archbishop suggests that he himself cannot act like a Pope, the notion that the Primates of the different provinces can meet to restructure the Communion implies that each Primate has papal-like authority in his or her respective province. The Presiding Bishop from the United States, for example, has no authority to change the canons of The Episcopal Church. Recall also how Rowan Williams, during his tenure as the See of Canterbury, could not even get the Church of England to accept his proposed Anglican Covenant. The status of any agreement achieved at the scheduled gathering of Primates, therefore, remains shaky at best.

In similar fashion, there appears to be the presumption that the primary fissures within the Communion are to be found between the different provinces, and not within each of them. But focusing solely on getting the different provinces to remain in communion with Canterbury, while allowing them to distance themselves from those with whom they disagree, ignores the internal challenges that many individual provinces are experiencing.

A “divorce” has already occurred in the Episcopal Church of the USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, and such fragmentation may continue to expand in the wake of movements sponsored by Global South Provinces such as AMiA, AMiE and CANA. Such threats are not unknown in the Church of Australia, and divisions within Provinces in Africa continue to pose challenges over the ordination of women and the traditional tensions between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals. This is to say that, if the metaphor of “sleeping in separate bedrooms” is apt, then one should imagine that this is occurring within provinces, and not merely between them.

The communion-with-Canterbury-only model is curious for another reason. In his analysis of contemporary globalised capitalism, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the present age as a period of “liquid modernity.” As the economy is increasingly detached from the nation state and its institutions, he argues, social groupings and cultural identities are decoupled from geographical locations, and take on a de-territorialised nomad-like form. This diagnosis has encouraged Pete Ward to develop the concept of a “liquid church.” Rather than being a community gathered in a particular place – the traditional “congregation” – such a notion of church is conceived “as a series of relationships and communications.”

One way to interpret the commentary offered by sources at Lambeth Place on Justin Welby’s initiative is that the direction of travel is toward a “liquid Communion.” Characterised by fewer traditional institutions and structures, there will be greater flexibility, looser geographical boundaries, ease of movement and constant change.

This is why the Irish Times is apt to warn that a model in which unity is secured only by being linked to Canterbury risks reducing the Communion to an association of sects. What one would potentially be left with is a collection of different networks of like-minded groupings, which might seldom (if ever) have anything to do with each other. If such is the outcome of the proposed gathering of primates, then it will become increasingly difficult to describe the church as something that comes into being “whenever two or three are gathered in my name” (Matthew 18:20). The risk becomes that like-minded individuals will effectively be gathering in the name of their own self-enclosed ideology, rather than to re-discover Christ. Moreover, with the internet, why bother to “gather” at all?

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