Models of Communion: Performing Our Anglican Identity

http://anglicancommunioninstitute.com/content/view/111/1/

[Anglican Communion Institute] 21 Aug 2007--The essay that follows was begun a month ago and has a context about which I must be clear. I wrote from a particular location and for a particular purpose, both of which shape the way I hope my words will be understood. The location was the Canterbury Cathedral, where I spent three weeks this summer as Canterbury Scholar. These were the days leading up to and during the ACN meeting. At the time I was a postulant for holy orders outside the official structures of TEC, hopeful to be ordained as deacon following my graduation from the Duke Divinity School in December. These two factors are crucial to the interpretation of this essay. First, the gift of time as a Canterbury Scholar - having worshipped in the cloisters St. Augustine built 1,400 years ago, having prayed in 22 languages by candlelight with my fellow Anglicans in the shrine of Thomas Becket, having sung the song of the Ugandan martyrs with my African brothers during the Cathedral's Eucharist service, and, at Oxford, having stood on the spot where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley were martyred - has reinforced my sense that our Communion is a gift from God that we rightly treasure. Second, this essay was borne out of a struggle to understand rightly the character and purpose of our Communion's Instruments of Unity, in the midst of a deep and wrenching controversy among conservatives as how best to find freedom from TEC's ‘heresy and oppression.' It is therefore rightly received as a reflection of my own agonies through which I made the decision that I could not follow a course that willingly accepted global schism as the price for such apparent freedom - agonies which have resulted in a difficult decision to seek holy orders within a current diocese of the Episcopal Church. In that sense, what I share is my own wrestling, in the hope others, similarly struggling to navigate, may benefit. &Two points arise from this context. First, I wrote not for the blogosphere (or ACI), but for myself and for those like me who seek a renewal of the evangelical center but feel torn in their efforts to act in a theologically rigorous way while "pursuing vigorously a right order in the body, including in terms of teaching and discipline." And I wrote while at the International Study Center at Canterbury in the shadow of the cathedral. That explains the admittedly academic genre found here and also my purpose. Second, as I read my essay today, my own criticism is that I perhaps have not given sufficient voice to this last duty, and I fear that others may infer that I see our duty of table fellowship (a key theme of my essay) in opposition to our duty to pursue vigorously right order and discipline. So let me be clear: if I understate this latter duty, it is solely because it seems to me a ‘given,' a duty so clearly handed down to us by those forebears in whose footsteps I walked this summer at Canterbury, that I cannot imagine Spirit-led bishops like Bishops Duncan, Iker, Beckwith, Jenkins, Smith, Stanton, and Wimberly (and many others) abandoning it. I fully expect and count on them to stand firm. My concern in this essay is with the course advocated by those who, in my view, are still too quick to relieve the tension inherent in our duties of table fellowship and discipline. Accordingly, what follows is something I wrote as one who believes our Communion is a gift from God that we reject only at the risk that, in our quest for "truth," (borrowing from Stanley Hauerwas) we underwrite forms of violence that put our salvation in jeopardy. My prayer is that others, wrestling as I still am to make sense of all this, will benefit from my own efforts to work through this theologically.