The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.

God the Holy Spirit and “being led into all truth”

Written by: Rev. Professor Christopher Seitz
Sunday, June 6th, 2010

A reflection on the Pentecost Letter of the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church

The central teaching of Jesus Christ in John’s Gospel concerning the Holy Spirit is found in chapters 14 and 16 of the Fourth Gospel. The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church is representative of the view that the Holy Spirit (or “the Spirit”) is responsible for endorsing a new understanding of sexual relationships as appropriate for members of the same gender. The warrant for this view more widely held is John 16: God the Holy Spirit is ‘leading the church into a truth’ the church has not known until now, and continues not to know elsewhere, as God has spoken this to The Episcopal Church  (“The Spirit does seem to be saying to many within The Episcopal Church that gay and lesbian persons are God’s good creation, that an aspect of good creation is the possibility of lifelong, faithful partnership, and that such persons may indeed be good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the Church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones”). This could either be a matter of timing – so technically God the Holy Spirit speaks only one truth on this matter, and so those who have not heard the Holy Spirit will hear the Holy Spirit leading them into new truth eventually (“Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” [John 16:12-13])  – or it could be that the Holy Spirit endorses diversity of hearings (“That growing awareness does not deny the reality that many Anglicans and not a few Episcopalians still fervently hold traditional views about human sexuality”) . This latter understanding seeks grounding in the Presiding Bishop’s understanding of the Pentecost event of Acts 2 (“Pentecost is most fundamentally a continuing gift of the Spirit, rather than a limitation or quenching of that Spirit”) as contrasted with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reading of Pentecost  as a “single understanding of gospel realities”(as she puts it) in a letter to which she is responding in defense of her own position.

We note in passing that: 1) John’s account of the Holy Spirit involves several aspects, explained in the narrative movement of his Gospel, and that any reading of John needs to be able to integrate all of these if Christ’s teaching is to be coherent as intended (hence Christ’s concern with truth); 2) the Holy Spirit can only with difficulty be seen as ‘inspiring diversity’ in Acts; the tension in the account is between a gift of foreign languages that are heard as intelligible by Jews from the widest geographical reach in their first or native tongues (so Calvin et al); or the gift is of a single tongue language that all these gathered Jews are inspired to hear as intelligible in their native languages; the history of interpretation is not uniform here. But in neither case is the point that the Holy Spirit inspires diversity, but the opposite: the Gospel is heard and received with power because the Holy Spirit overcomes the diversity that has hindered such a reception (the fact that the recipients are all Jews – with some proselytes – who have come to Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks to hear the marvelous single account of God’s giving of Torah is also missing from her account); and finally 3) an account of John as inspiring a new truth that all will in time come to hear and acknowledge cannot be squared with an account of the Holy Spirit as inspiring or endorsing diversity of hearings.

But what of the idea of the Holy Spirit (the Advocate, the Comforter) inspiring the church to receive something new? This seems to be the major biblical ‘theme’ the proponents of a new teaching on sexuality appeal to.

In chapter 14 of John’s Gospel the Comforter is to be Christ present with the church after the Ascension. The earthly Christ will take his risen and ascended life and be with the Father, but the Holy Spirit will bring that risen and ascended life to the church.  “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Comforter…I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (14:16,18).

What kind of Holy Spirit teaching can be called a ‘guiding into truth’ and ‘a disclosure of things to come’ (John 16:13)? We are given a hint of it in 16:8-11, so far as the world at large is concerned: the Holy Spirit will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgment. That is, the Holy Spirit will carry on the earthly Christ’s work after his ascension. This extension ministry of Christ will have its counterpart in the church itself (16:12). The church referred to in contrast to the world is represented by those for whom Christ is praying. Many more things are to be said, because they cannot now bear them or understand them. This theme appears elsewhere in John’s Gospel and it is a prominent one at the Cross and in the Resurrection appearances themselves (belief happens incrementally, with the beloved disciple, then Mary, then the others, then Thomas, but blessed are they who have not seen but come to belief via the testimony of John’s Gospel).

The circle of disciples around Jesus in his earthly ministry is unable to grasp the significance of all he is saying and intending. The Holy Spirit’s work is to see that comprehension of what Christ taught and intended is grasped. He takes what is of Christ, including that which was not grasped or understood, and makes it known (16:15). He has no speech of his own initiative, but hears what Christ speaks and has spoken (16:13). There is no Holy Spirit speaking that is not Christ speaking, but now in a form that can be borne and received.  John 14:26 puts it in simplest form: “But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, bringing to your remembrance all that I have said.”

What is new is capacitated understanding, which takes the form of enlarged content only because of this. What Jesus has taught but was not grasped in his earthly life is to be grasped, including the things which Christ (and the scriptures of Israel) taught pertaining to the providential life of the church beyond the scope of Jesus’s sign ministry amongst his disciples, carried out in his incarnation life. The beloved disciple is the example of such initial grasping. But the revelation of scripture (the Old Testament) as witness to Christ and the testimony of the beloved disciple in the form of the written Gospel –these will adequately convey the truth about him by the agency of God the Holy Spirit. The continuity with Christ is everywhere at the fore. (The example of the new covenant in Jer 31 is a type of this: the new covenant is the covenant given to the original disciples of Moses, but now comprehended via a new heart and understanding as to its truthful purpose).

Here we are able to see the continuity of John and Acts, in spite of their differences in narrative form and authorship, that is missing in the Presiding Bishop’s account of the Holy Spirit, where she speaks of John’s ‘new truth’ and Acts’ ‘diversity of truth’ as somehow mutually informing. When the Holy Spirit manifests His life, now with the Gentile (much favored of the Jews) Cornelius and those who heard Peter’s evangelical proclamation, Luke says that this is the same Holy Spirit at work within the household of God (Acts 10:45). So when Peter gives account of the baptism of Cornelius and those upon whom the Holy Spirit came, before the circumcised, the Holy Spirit is the central actor and warrant in his undertaking. When the Holy Spirit “fell upon them just as He did upon us” Peter says he remembered the word of the Lord, how he said “John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Here is a perfect example of what John means by the Holy Spirit’s vocation. What could not be borne, or what was not appropriate to the earthly ministry of Christ, given its providential purpose, is now unveiling its significance. It is what Jesus had said and intended. It is what the Holy Spirit takes from him and sets down as true in the providential life of the church. It can be seen in the record, can be referred to specifically, whose purpose is now taking form.

The same pattern is to be observed when a fuller account of Peter’s (and Paul and Barnabas’s) ministry among the providentially prepared gentiles is given in Jerusalem in Acts 15. Critical is continuity with the message of the Prophets (‘with this the words of the Prophets agree, just as it is written’, Acts 15:15) and the Law. There is a ‘law for gentiles’ inside the Torah of Moses, pertaining to the ‘sojourner in the midst of Israel,’ that is, those among the nations that came out of Egypt with the household of God (the injunctions laid upon the gentiles brought near are to be found in Leviticus 18-19). The laws pertaining to them were given so as to guide the apostolic decree as the Holy Spirit revealed what was God’s purpose imbedded and providentially prepared in the first covenant, “For Moses from ancient generations has in every city those who preach him” (Acts 15:21). The Holy Spirit is pleased to declare no greater burden than these (15:28). Continuity and agreement with the teaching of the Lord, on the one hand, and the revelation of God to Israel, on the other. The truth being led into is a truth given in the Lord Christ and in the LORD God, but whose purpose is now revealed. It can be cited in the record (“it is written,” “I remembered the word of the Lord”) and the Holy Spirit’s guidance is required to understand the agreement and continuity now appropriate for its time, but given of old. The same dynamic animates the canonical shape of the Book of Isaiah in its final form, where “the former thing” is appealed to in order to ground the proclamation until such time as its orienting power gives rise to perception of a new thing, in full continuity with it, but whose purpose is for a later generation able to hear because gifted by the Holy Spirit’s speaking through the Prophet.

We are grateful that the Presiding Bishop has sought to ground her appeal to diversity and new truth in a public message available for the Church’s evaluation and testing. It explains what kind of vision for the Episcopal Church she is seeking to defend. On the one hand, she believes the Holy Spirit has spoken in truthful and special (timely) ways to those who share this view in TEC. On the other hand, she believes diversity on this matter is equally a gifting warranted by the pentecostal event, explaining why the majority of the Anglican Communion and the vast preponderance of Christians worldwide (including the saints numbered on another shore) attended and attend to different Holy Spirit guidance and a different confession of God the Holy Spirit, “who spake by the prophets…who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” Her remarks help frame the matter in clear ways, which we can only pray is itself a gift of God the Holy Spirit, whose vocation is to glorify Christ and convict the world in respect of him. St Paul reveals that appeals to the Spirit and the Spirit’s manifestation required testing in the earliest Christian Churches, especially those with large gentile numbers.  Discerning the work and person of God the Holy Spirit was necessary and was an evangelical challenge.

John and Acts provide the record given to the church so that the Holy Spirit’s work might be recognised,  adjudicated, and confessed.  The Holy Spirit’s deliverances are those of the Risen and Ascended Christ, in agreement with the providential will of the Father as expressed in the Law and the Prophets, whose subject matter is Christ, latent and now patent (St Augustine). The Presiding Bishop’s account of the Spirit as bringing a truth without prior testimony or dominical warrant, which at the same time gives rise to diversity as a pentecostal gift, diverges in extreme ways from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles. It is a teaching lacking continuity and agreement with the witness of Christians in our present day, in the worldwide body, and because without biblical warrant, it is also nowhere attested in the history of the church’s teaching.

We conclude this teaching comes from a conviction already held, independently of what is customarily sought in respect of a warrant of God the Holy Spirit (see the Catechism of the BCP), because of cultural assumptions about the intentions of sexual activity in our age and because TEC has already acted on these. Recourse is therefore sought in a general way to scriptural themes, like ‘inclusion’ or the dynamic of God’s life with Israel and the apostles, independently of the specifics of the scriptural witness (the first pentecostal event was Jewish; Cornelius was not a generic convert; the rules for gentiles in Acts are from Leviticus; ‘all truth’ and ‘new truths’ are inconsistent concepts). This is not what has been held up in times past as scriptural testing, and one may doubt how central such testing really is, especially when the Spirit is being invoked as the bearer of new truth. Almost in the nature of the case such new revelations of the Spirit must be without precedent.  That is what makes them new in a way independent of questions of truth, so critical to Christ’s teaching in John’s Gospel.

This mindset is deeply tied up with the progressivistic orientation of Western consumerism, where the old is constantly to be discarded, as new, better, improved versions are marketed for our attention and our consumption. Against such a climate John’s words receive even sharper convicting force, precisely as the lines blurring the church and the world, so crucial to his account of the work of The Comforter (“this is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold him or know him” 14:17) are erased in the name of ‘new revelation.’ We begin to see an understanding of newness that is indebted to an account of time the scriptural witness is keen to distinguish from God’s electing and adopting purposes in Christ Jesus. Truthful agreement and continuity inside the work of the One God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit – this is what is testified to in the two testaments of one Christian Scripture. On the account we are being presented with in the Presiding Bishop’s Letter, this activity of God in time has been adjusted so that the Holy Spirit is taken to be a warrant for convictions already held and acted on, and has become an independent agent of ‘revelation.’ The ‘Holy Spirit’ is precisely that spirit which speaks in ways that cannot be continuous with ‘prophet and apostle’ because newness requires unprecedented testimony. This is not what the church has confessed when it speaks of God the Holy Spirit, “who spake by the prophets, and “who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.”

Bishops of the church are charged by solemn vow before God the Holy Trinity with guarding the witness of prophet and apostle and properly setting forth their teaching. The Presiding Bishop rightly understands this solemn charge as she seeks to defend her views by recourse to Christian Scripture, in respect of Acts’ account of Pentecost and also based upon John’s Gospel. In this she has clarified what she understands to be the biblical warrant for her view of the Holy Spirit as an agent of new truth. This view is however not consistent with what the witness of prophet and apostle states and the church would be in error should it follow her novel reading. We must test the Spirit, Paul says. The Holy Spirit cannot be an agent of truth not expressly warranted by Christ or a Christian apprehension of the sense of prophetic teaching in the Old Testament. This is what we see as crucial to an account of the work of the Holy Spirit in Acts and John. It is to her credit that the Presiding Bishop has sought publicly to defend her novel view and so explain how the Holy Spirit can be showing the way within TEC on matters of sexual relationships and yet speaking in precisely the opposite way to the majority of Christians in time and space. The argument must be made as the warrants for such a novel view must be found if the church’s teaching is to be overthrown.

This has not been accomplished in the Pentecost Letter though we are helped in seeing what the effort must undertake if it wishes to displace the classical confession of God the Holy Spirit as grounded in Holy Scripture. This is indeed a question before the church regarding  the work of the Holy Spirit properly understood, and she is right to focus her discussion on this crucial theological confession. This puts the argument for a change in teaching where it belongs, on a proper account of theological truth as given through the Holy Spirit’s work, as heard through the witness of Prophet and Apostle. Who is the Holy Spirit and how is He known, worshipped, and obeyed? We have rehearsed the classical position here and pointed to its biblical warrants. It will take a clear overthrowing of that confession if the church is to proceed as the Presiding Bishops urges. If not, the teaching would be opposed to the Holy Spirit’s work of unifying the church according to Christ’s prayer and the Father’s purpose in sending Him. The Holy Spirit cannot speak against Himself, and always speaks of the love of the Father for the Son. To Him be glory and honor, who with the Father and the Son is One God, world without end. AMEN.

June 06 2010 | Articles

Ten Years and a New Anglican Congregationalism

Written by: Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

It is ten years since Anglicanism’s current travails were formally inaugurated with the formation of an alternative “Communion” church in North America, the Anglican Mission in America. Not the cause, it was nonetheless the first major sign that “communion” was no longer a given in Anglicanism, but something to be variously asserted, antagonistically claimed, and built up or torn down as the case may be. And after ten years, I think it necessary to say that most of the work thus far has been one of tearing down. Tearing down, but also of exposing new things and clearer lines of calling, so that what had been emerging as a communion might now be seen as demanding deeper commitment for its flourishing than anybody had imagined. The work that many of us have been doing out of a commitment to the traditional Christian faith as Anglicans (and others) had received it has been worth the effort, and continues to be demanded. But what we are seeing, especially as Christian communion is being assaulted not only from within the Church, but more importantly by a rapidly dissolving Christian culture in the West, is that there are deeper roots to put down and nourish than we had perhaps first thought.

The tearing down, in any case, is what is most obvious, perhaps, to outsiders or onlookers from within. One by one, for instance, the so-called “Instruments of Unity” for Anglicans around the world have been eroded in their perceived integrity, and certainly in their effectiveness.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, over the past decade (from Lord Carey through Rowan Williams), has issued pleas, statements, constructive ideas, hopes. But when, last month, a schedule conflict, not to mention in any case the ash of an Icelandic volcano, kept him from the South to South Encounter of non-Western churches in Singapore, the transient and quivering video image of his unfocused greeting was symbolically all that was left of his presence to an increasingly estranged majority of world Anglicans. For whatever reasons – the constraint imposed on Lambeth’s voice by America’s money monopoly on Communion bureaucracy, loyalties divided between Britain and Communion, mixed convictions within his own mind, an under-appreciation of the demanded influence of his own witness? — ten years of people all going their own way has rendered the moral authority of his voice almost inaudible.

read more...

May 25 2010 | Articles

ADDENDUM: Bishop Ian Douglas And The ACC Standing Committee

Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Monday, May 17th, 2010

In our last post we noted that Bishop Ian Douglas was ineligible under the rules of the Anglican Consultative Council to continue serving on the ACC and its standing committee upon his consecration to the episcopacy in April. In a blog post yesterday, Father Mark Harris, a member of TEC’s Executive Council, discloses that Bishop Douglas in fact resigned from the ACC in February and announced this to the Executive Council at its February meeting. According to Fr. Harris, (then Fr.) Douglas recognized that he would not be permitted to continue to hold his clerical seat on the ACC upon his consecration. The fact of Douglas’s resignation had not been disclosed previously and greatly simplifies the analysis of what the ACC rules require in this situation. The implications of Bishop Douglas’s consecration and his resignation are now plain.

First, from the date of his resignation in February, Bishop Douglas ceased to be a member of the ACC standing committee. Article 2(f) of the ACC bylaws provides:

Elected members of the Standing Committee shall hold office from the end of the Council meeting at which they are appointed until the end of the last ordinary Council meeting which they would be entitled to attend but subject to earlier termination in the event that such elected member shall for any reason cease to be a member of the Council. (Emphasis added.)

read more...

May 17 2010 | Articles

Asking The Wrong Question: New Zealand and The Covenant

Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Reports this week from the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia indicate that it passed a resolution approving in principle the first three sections of the Anglican Covenant, but requesting legal advice on the “appropriateness” of Paragraph 4.2.8. The relevant clause of the resolution as passed reads as follows:

Requests the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion to obtain an opinion from the Legal Advisor to the Anglican Consultative Council and from the Chancellors and Legal Advisors Committee of this church regarding the appropriateness of the provisions of Clause 4.2.8 of the proposed Covenant in relation to decisions regarding membership of the Anglican Consultative Council….

Although this request for legal advice applies only to Paragraph 4.2.8, it is clear from the vote and the debate that the dissatisfaction in New Zealand extends to Section 4 as a whole. The resolution was authored by Dr. Tony Fitchett, who was the chairman of the resolutions committee at ACC-14 in Jamaica that drafted the resolutions on the Covenant debated at that ACC meeting. Since ACC-14, Dr. Fitchett has served on the standing committee of the Anglican Consultative Council, the body that approved the final text of the Covenant last December. Whatever Dr. Fitchett’s views of the Covenant were in December, he is now very much opposed to Section 4:

read more...

May 13 2010 | Articles

Communion With Autonomy And Accountability

Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Sunday, April 4th, 2010

We at ACI have often written in recent years about the autonomy of dioceses within the constitutional polity of The Episcopal Church. Indeed, as we have noted elsewhere, TEC’s polity mirrors that of the Anglican Communion as a whole. That is, the churches of the Communion are autonomous in the sense that they are self-governing, but by tradition, now articulated in the Anglican Covenant, they are bound one to another by mutual subjection in the Lord. In The Episcopal Church our dioceses, by constitution, are autonomous. What we all too often have not practiced either in our internal or external relations is mutual subjection.

This is not a new problem. In his volume on TEC’s governance in “The Church’s Teaching” series, Canon Dawley, who recognized that the “independence” of the diocese and its bishop “in respect of the rest of the Church is almost complete,” went on to caution:

While there may be many good reasons for not changing the constitutional arrangements which have resulted in this diocesan independence, it must be recognized that at times it has seriously handicapped the effort of the Episcopal Church on the national level. Parochialism, or the absorption of the people of a parish with their own affairs to the exclusion of their responsibilities to the whole Church, is a common temptation every Christian community must face; there may also be an equally self-absorbing ‘diocesanism.” (p.116.)

read more...

April 04 2010 | Articles

Statement On South Carolina

Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

In his recent address to his diocese, Bishop Mark Lawrence of South Carolina identified a challenge confronting both his diocese and the wider Episcopal Church:

an entirely new challenge has surfaced: A constitutional question about the ability of a diocese to govern its common life in a way that is obedient to the teaching of the Bible, the received heritage of The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and in accordance with The Constitution & Canons of The Episcopal Church….

It is a challenge to how for over two hundred years The Episcopal Church has carried out its mission and ministry. It is one of the ironies of this time that we in a diocese like South Carolina, which has been one of the most vigorous critics of the “national” church, should be the ones that are called to defend the polity of TEC—to defend the way Episcopalians have for so long carried out their mission. But history is full of such paradoxes. In standing up and protecting our autonomy or independence as a diocese in TEC, in protecting the diocesan bishop’s authority to shepherd the parishes and missions of his diocese, and in defending the bishop and, in his absence, the Standing Committee as the Ecclesiastical Authority, we are in fact defending how TEC has carried out its ministry and mission for these many years. Every Diocesan Bishop, every Standing Committee, indeed every Episcopalian ought to know that if this is allowed to stand, that if The Presiding Bishop and her chancellor are allowed to hire an attorney in a diocese of this Church, to look over the shoulder of any bishop or worse dictate to that Bishop or Standing Committee how they are to deal with the parishes and missions under their care, imposing upon them mandates or directives as to how they disburse or purchase property then we have entered into a new era of unprecedented hierarchy, and greater autocratic leadership from the Presiding Bishop’s office and his or her chancellor.

read more...

April 03 2010 | Articles

The Making and Re-Making of Episcopal Canon Law

Written by: Robert W. Prichard
Monday, February 15th, 2010

In order to current arguments about the structure of The Episcopal Church and its relationship to the other members of the Anglican Communion, it may be may be useful to reflect on earlier periods in which the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church have changed significantly. It could be argued that the three most important such periods in the history of The Episcopal Church in which such change took place were: the American Revolution, the early 20th century, and the 1960s. The first of these three periods was perhaps the most radical, an attempt to revise English canon law in light of American democratic ideals. The second of these periods of reform was perhaps the most sweeping; Episcopalians of the early 20th century attempted to replace a set of individual provisions with a comprehensive code of canon law. The third period of revision—during the 1960s—is an important realignment made in recognition of the increasing complexity of the Anglican Communion.

Constitution and Canons for a new Democracy

Later in this volume other authors will write about the precise details of the Constitution and Canons that were adopted by the Episcopal Church in the period from 1785 to 1789. At this point I do not want to enter into that very important conversation. What I would like to do is to step back and simply consider the importance of the fact that a set of constitutions and canons were adopted at all.

read more...

February 15 2010 | Articles

Losing Their Nerve: What The Courts Would Discover If They Examined TEC Polity Afresh

Written by: Mr. Mark McCall
Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Several years ago I was in a meeting at a large London law firm. We were working on a very complex matter, and this was one of a series of meetings that went on for several years. This particular one was quite large with 30 or so lawyers from several London and New York law firms, as well as representatives of Her Majesty’s Government. During the morning, one of the junior partners of the host firm was asked to address a difficult legal question. He spoke for a considerable time, over an hour, without notes, and then lunch arrived and we went off to a different conference room to eat. But as we were filing back into the meeting room after lunch we could see what this lawyer had done over the break because piled up on his chair and the table in front of his seat was an enormous stack of law books with little handwritten notes and yellow post-its stuck in here and there. As we walked in and saw the pile of books, one of his senior partners turned to this lawyer and said “what happened, David? Did you lose your nerve?”

Today I want to talk about what the courts would see if they lost their nerve and went back to the books and took a fresh look at the law and the facts concerning TEC polity. But I want to state one thing very clearly at the outset: there is no guarantee the courts will ever do this. They may simply assume that TEC has a central hierarchy like the other churches, the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, and the Church of England, and never seriously engage the issues I am going to address. But what if they do engage? What if they undertake a serious examination of this issue? What would they see?

read more...

February 07 2010 | Articles

Communion, Order, And Dissent Or “The Revenge of Puss And Boots”

Written by: Rev. Dr. Philip Turner
Sunday, February 7th, 2010

I owe it to my readers to provide an explanation of a puzzling title. What does a discussion of “communion, order, and dissent” have to do with the well-known and well-loved children’s story of Puss and Boots? Remember, in the story, the hero can only reach his goal if he listens to a despised cat that he must take as his companion on the way. It would seem that the point of the story is that attention must be given to what we might otherwise despise if we are to succeed in our more “high flown” endeavors.

My point is that hierarchy, the subject of this conference, is an aspect of church order, and both have become something like the cat in Puss and Boots. We cannot reach our more noble goals without these unwelcome sources of help. Nevertheless, for some years we have neglected these despised companions, and as a result our church and our communion are in a terrible mess. Indeed, our seminaries do little or nothing to introduce future clergy to the importance of church polity. I remember when I was in seminary the arguments about church order that so engaged the Reformers were mentioned, but only in passing. Polity, we were told, is a subject we ought to “bone up on” because there would be polity questions on our General Ordination Exams. The message was clear. Hierarchy and order are not very important subjects. Yet, here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century faced with fiercely debated polity issues. The debate centers on the communion wide challenge of an Anglican Covenant and on a domestic legal battle over the meaning of the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church (TEC). The former challenge might produce a divided communion and/or result in TEC becoming a second track form of Anglicanism. The latter might produce a change in our constitution effected by a secular court rather than constitutionally mandated procedures.

read more...

February 07 2010 | Articles

The Communion Partner Vision – A View From The Trenches

Written by: The Rev. Charles D. Alley, Ph.D.
Saturday, February 6th, 2010

The question I repeatedly get from those who are interested in the Communion Partner Plan is, “What is it that the Plan will enable us to do?” This is a question of purpose, of vision and of strategy. Since our emphasis in Communion Partners has not been on developing alternative Episcopal structures and we have intentionally avoided defining ourselves over-and-against others, some have interpreted our approach as a passive waiting game. This misperception has only been exacerbated by our chosen strategy which is to be a witness to traditional Anglicanism and biblical Christianity within the Episcopal Church. Again, the idea of witness appears far too passive for many 21th century American Christians. We are a people of action and it is difficult for us to see the value in presenting an alternative way of being the Episcopal Church in the midst of the current church.

I think, when we approach the articulation of the vision of the Communion Partner Plan we really need to start with our understanding of the identity of the Church. One of the best and certainly most succinct descriptions of the Church I have read is that of the Gospel in Our Culture Network, which was developed under the influence of the Church of Scotland missionary, Lesslie Newbigin. From their missional perspective, the church is the community whose purpose is to announce and demonstrate the purpose and direction of God in the world through Jesus Christ. Thus the doing is built in. We witness by announcing and demonstrating the Gospel. Such actions cannot leave the world, or the church, unchanged. It is here that we might begin to see that the radical transformation we are seeking has more to do with spiritual renewal than institutional re-formation.

read more...

February 06 2010 | Articles