Imperial Christianity -Oct 6, 2003
When Rowan Williams changed his mind about the Jeffrey John appointment he unintentionally sent out a message to the Church that lobbying and pressure would ultimately prevail in contested matters of theology.

Since then Church politics has gone ballistic.

The American wing of the Anglican Church, ECUSA, has elected a gay man Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. In a few weeks African and Asian Archbishops will meet privately to consider how they might expel ECUSA from the communion. As the cracks widen, the Archbishop has summoned the leaders of worldwide Anglicanism - all of them men - to Lambeth Palace for an emergency summit.

A hundred years ago the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson challenged a generation of public schoolboys to offer themselves as “missionaries in the Imperial work of the Church of England.”

His friend Bishop Montgomery, sent out to be Bishop of Tasmania, claimed “the clergy are officers in an imperial army”.

This Christian army of missionaries slipstreamed the British Empire to spread the theology of the Church of England throughout the world. And they were extraordinarily successful.

There are now 70 million Anglicans worldwide, most of them in Africa. Though the perception in Britain is of a religious faith in slow and terminal decline, Anglicanism mushroomed in the twentieth century. And it’s centre of gravity moved south.

But in spreading itself around the globe, the Church of England also exported it’s own homegrown divisions.

Evangelical and High Church missionaries carved up the Empire, creating Anglican Dioceses with hugely different theological temperaments. So for example, South Africa became the territory of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the more generally liberal and High Church mission agency, whilst the distinctly evangelical Church Mission Society took responsibility for Nigeria.

It is thus that Southern Africa’s Anglican leadership, currently Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane and before him the sainted Desmond Tutu, are emphatically pro-gay. Whereas the Nigerian Archbishop, Peter Akinola, is so dangerously homophobic that the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement have applied to the Home Secretary to have him denied entry to Britain. If Louis Farrakhan is barred why not Peter Akinola?

Whilst at home evangelicals and anglo-catholics continue to be strapped together in virtue of both being strapped to the state, no such establishment exists to bind other parts of the communion together.

Hence the inherent instability of global Anglicanism. And if global Anglicanism cannot find a way to stay together, it becomes clear that the Church of England sustains its own coherence simply by being the established Church, leeching its unity off the state.

Indeed, if the coming Lambeth summit cannot find a way of avoiding schism in the non-established Church, the Church of England will increasingly look like the marriage of a long estranged couple who stay together because neither party is willing to leave the house.

The Church of England was founded on a pragmatic settlement between evangelicals and Catholics. Effectively, it invented the politics of the third way – refusing the conclusion that there is a contradiction in being both Catholic and reformed.

For some this has meant Anglicanism takes the middle path between the evangelical and catholic tendencies: playing things safe, seeking balance and distrusting extremes. This is the Anglicanism of weak handshakes and still weaker convictions. It may not seem entirely pernicious – though it’s the theology that led to the gutless decision of Manchester Cathedral to welsh on a previous agreement with gay Christians allowing them to use the Cathedral for worship. In the spirit of balance the Cathedral also wished gay Christians well in their forthcoming conference and asserted that inclusively had a ‘proper claim on church and society’. Do me a favour.

A more considered understanding of Anglicanism sees its differences as being related dialectically.
This approach regards seemingly contradictory positions as potentially sublimated into a higher vision of the truth. In this version of Anglicanism, open and vigorous disputation (a.k.a. having a bloody good row) is what powers the search for truth. This is not a sham marriage, though it will always be a turbulent one.

But neither approach has found a way of fully resolving the mutual distrust often created by inherent differences.

Students at the three Anglican Theological Colleges in Oxford (roughly speaking: one liberal, one catholic, one evangelical) used to describe their termly common Eucharist as ‘inter-faith worship’. It was a joke you didn’t repeat in front of the College Principal.

The gay issue has lit a fuse that threatens the very existence of the Church of England. For this is an issue that seems uniquely resistant to third way politics. The Archbishop is said to favor setting up a commission on sexuality - classic third way stuff this. But though it may buy more time, ultimately it will please no one.

Three years ago Rowan Williams came to the rescue of the Communion when the Primates got together in Portugal to face similar questions, albeit in less acrimonious circumstances. As the possibility of schism loomed ever nearer, the newly elected Archbishop of Wales posed the question: ‘will you let disagreements over sexual ethics lead you to the point where you no longer recognize each other as Christians’?

The danger this time is that the answer will be ‘yes’.