Communion With Autonomy And Accountability

"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.)

And as events of recent years have demonstrated, there can be no doubt as to the devastating effects of 'provincialism' in our worldwide Communion.

Both TEC and the Communion as a whole are now wrestling with the consequences of this “self-absorbed” exercise of autonomy: bishops who permit communion of the unbaptized and same sex marriages in direct violation of the Book of Common Prayer and the canons; dioceses that withdraw from TEC altogether; TEC’s repudiation of the Communion’s moratoria; and the breaking of communion and resulting cross-border interventions by other provinces. How are these destructive consequences to be reconciled with autonomy? Is autonomy itself the problem? Must autonomy be rejected in favor of authoritarian structures? To the last of these questions, we continue to say 'no' and our reasons for doing so may shed light on the other questions as well.

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