I am really encouraged during these times to see churches more and more working together in charity and social action, and in worship and celebration. Churches of different denominations and ministries.

I dont think the body of Christ has been so united or so active in service in the community for several decades.

And although there arent the numbers of young people overall, there are in some churches, and they are radical and energetic. And the Anglican church is no exception. 

Just this weekend when young people from several churches including my Anglican one were in the community, serving in social action, helping the homeless and healing on the streets, I came out of the Sunday morning service and in the next road passed the Jesus Army on the streets.

Praise God.

I actually have to agree with Dave when he was saying that the "The church of England and the Anglican Communion remind me of a display at an internet flower delivery festival where many sorts of grape of different size and colour have been arranged with artistic effect, The danger with this is that it separates us from the source of Life. It is more important that Christians recognize their common lie with other believers in the next street and denominationalism is a barrier this."

People have to realize that they lose their connection to the source of Life and to their actual belief. One of the problems is that they do not realize it when people tell them constantly they have to experience and become aware of the change they go through constantly seperating further from the source.

I actually have to agree with Dave when he was saying that the "The church of England and the Anglican Communion remind me of a display at an internet flower delivery festival where many sorts of grape of different size and colour have been arranged with artistic effect, The danger with this is that it separates us from the source of Life. It is more important that Christians recognize their common lie with other believers in the next street and denominationalism is a barrier this."

People have to realize that they lose their connection to the source of Life and to their actual belief. One of the problems is that they do not realize it when people tell them constantly they have to experience and become aware of the change they go through constantly seperating further from the source.

This is one of those rather irritating images of Graham's that sounds good  but doesn't actually help at all I don't think. He sets up a flase binary at the end of his talk and just drops it on us as if it demonstrated some important truth - but I don't think it does anything of the sort.

Why? Because my and your communion with Christians around the world depends on Christ not on the ecclesial structures we inhabit. We are definitely not Roman catholics in that way - and I doubt very much that there is anyone on the Fulcrum end of things who wants to argue for a kind of mini Anglo-Papalism. After all, if you seriously do believe that then you can go and join the Ordinariate.

What our communion consists of is our participation in the life of the Holy Trinity through Christ. And that's it. And what no grape ever managed to do, was sort out, discipline, interfere in or otherwise put straight (I use the word advisedly) the life of any other grape. All every grape ever does is live on the vine, and get on with being the best grape you can. Gosh, that sounds very baptist (as if that is a bad thing). And every marble must go on living its life within the same bag - sharing our bit of the bag with those other marbles we are nestled against depends upon the will of the bag owner - where we discover the light, the brilliance of our colours and can appreciate our similarity and diversity as we are put together with others. And the bag owner moves us around according to his sovereign will. See how communiony you can make any image sound if you try!

So the binary, the dichotomy is false. Diverse - even apparently contradictory - interpretations of what the Christian life is will go on being lived out by individual parishes within the same diocese, individual dioceses within the same province, and by individual provinces within the same Anglican communion. But we all read the same Bible, we all use variants of a liturgical tradition to order our worship. We all (pace Sydney) have ordered our churches in a similar way (though clearly we struggle with girl cooties and the pesky gays in some parts). At diocesan and provincial level I see no effort being made to exercise communal pressure to make people follow a common line or to stop variants of the Christian life. Parishes know something about the way their neighbours live out their faith - lots of times they disapprove heartily of all kinds of things. But they don't invoke some piece of paper at diocesan synod to get others to behave like them. Nor do more adventurous parishes have to get the approval of their diocesan synod for everything they are going to try out. Nothing would ever change or develop if they did. Nor, while we are at it, do they ask the bishop - everyone knows the rule that bishops don't want to know - well not much, and not anything that is going to make them feel uncomfortable.

You can't make or keep people in communion by signing bits of paper. People stay in communion because they want to - or not if they want to walk. If the Yes to the Covenant people prevail it will be by a very small majority - that is clear. I think it would be the height of irresponsibility to sign up a Church divided. By contract the women bishops measure passed in all but two dioceses, and the Archbishops are twisting themselves in knots trying to accommodate those who don't like that development.

Grapes, marbles, Marmite sandwiches - I could use the lot as an image of the Communion or of independancy if I wanted. They tell us nothing. But the nature of our real Communion in Christ tells us all. Nothing can take that away from any of us - no matter how much we do things differently from our neighbours - and limiting, controlling, disciplining, hindering or inhibiting my Christian neighbour, whose life I hardly understand, and whose shoes I have not walked hardly a mile in seems to me a very unChristian thing to do. Pray for people, argue with them, fall out if you like. But actually our Communion, whether we choose to recognise it or not, it a gift of the vinedresser. certainly not something that can be confirmed or withdrawn by a bunch of grapes.

The interesting thing about marbles is that you know them when you see them, as marbles, and they are played with flexible rules but similar shared all the same. Marbles have incredible varieties and yet common characteristics. So marbles is not a bad idea for a communion.

Grapes are just all the same, but leave them too long before eating and some can go funny. Marbles get a bit rough from playing but are much more resiliant and longer lasting.

The point about a bunch of grapes is that some of them get squashed.

The point about a bunch of grapes is that it shares a common life. By extension, from John 15, this is the life of Christ. The church of England and the Anglican Communion remind me of a display at a flower festival where many sorts of grape of different size and colour have been arranged with artistic effect, The danger with this is that it separates us from the source of Life. It is more important that Christians recognize their common lie with other believers in the next street and denominationalism is a barrier this. 

Looking at ti in a slightly different way, the brances which have been forced together are in danger of becoming entangled and strangling each other.

Dave 

a book of individual essays rather than any one definitive view

And so it also seemed to those over here who approved it (i.e. Christian Believing, 1976)

Those who were disappointed by the book seem to me to have wanted, not one definitive view, but rather a committee report that, like the earlier Doctrine in the Church of England, was a sort of indaba with dry sherry among Church of England theologians who were never expected to agree on everything or figure it all out, but who could and did find their common ground, explain their differences, assess the pastoral importance of those, and at least hint at what had changed since the generation before. Doctrine in the Church of England was a plausible expression of the comprehensiveness of the church as we usually think of it, and its appendix on the ethics of holding beliefs at variance with the Church's received doctrine was a responsible and generous step beyond Victorian scrupulosity.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Each book would have benefited from some description that put the believer's experience of the Church's doctrine in the context of its tumultuous times. Because the earlier report was concerned with the official teaching of the Church of England, it breathes not a word about the extraordinary ferment of Chistian social thought in that generation, not least in the works of the commission's chairman, William Temple. Nor about the climate of thought in England that brought both Bloomsbury and Eliot's Wasteland, both women's sufffrage and the rise of Labour. Today, I never think of Doctrine in the Church of England, commissioned in 1922, without thinking of a similar report of the London Yearly Meeting that explained how the myriad personal experiences of the Great War had made it difficult for many Quakers to think of God in their received ways.

Although the Second Vatican Council found or retrieved the metaphor of "the Pilgrim Church" that sojourns in time, it seems to me that Anglicans, rather than Roman Catholics, are the Christians who have best accepted the historicity of their own ecclesial life. And that is what one most wants in such reports-- not a summa, or a proposal of doctrine, but a field guide to Anglicanis transcendentalis (commonly known as the yearn) and the way it sings in its natural habitat.

As I understand it, Christian Believing as a book of the Doctrine Commission was roundly criticised for being a book of individual essays rather than any one definitive view, and was consistent with liberal theology coming out at that time elsewhere. Thus later on came a greater emphasis on the Church. The Doctrine Commission tended to follow rather than lead in terms of output, but it hasn't been able to match the increasingly diverse output of theology in universities and that of doctrine and dogma. It seems to have become a superfluous occasional body.

Surely we are making some assumptions in the liberal analysis that the "church" (let's say denomination) is similar to any other kind of association, like the National Trust or the RHS. These have worthy aims for the general benefit and establish specific programmes for their members. So far, so C of E (at least as Adrian would have it). They expect nothing in common of their members other than a weakly articulated belief that built and natural beauty is a self-evident good. A church is more, much more. It's beliefs are much more precisely articulated, interpreted, researched and its organisational behaviours and procedures aim to be designed with integrity, i.e. to be consistent with those beliefs. It does this for many reasons, but mainly two. Firstly because their understanding of the church is historically founded and builds on the experience of two thousand years of the practise of life and faith; their doctrine demands unity because it worked. Secondly, like any other organisation, they will fail to achieve their goals unless they have shared values (refer to any school of government or business school, or read about successful organisations in the business pages).

Sadly the Anglican Communion appears to be in a much closer condition to that of the British political parties. They claim to have beliefs and express them in policies which they then use in a beauty parade to win votes. They change these cynically and their leaders' behaviour often fails abjectly to live up to their own standards. They are amazed and worried when their easy and powerful lives are threatened by steadily increasing public cynicism, easily measured by non-particiation in the political process; party membership is replaced by corporate corruption, public duty is expresed in falling attendances at polls.The one characteristic they all lack is integrity (actual, but more importantly perceived). We are going the same way.

On Maunday Thursday, and later in ordinations across the land our clergy will make promises and swear oaths which every person witnessing it knows they do not mean and have no intention of keeping. And this is Christ's body  on earth!

We desperately need a Clause 4 moment where we will eliminate our lack of integrity, our mismatch of Word with deeds and sermons, and revise our constitution to promote integrity and enable the mission which Jesus demands. What we replace our Clause 4's with is open to prayer and debate, but until our members' lives reflect the constitutional promises we make we will lack all public credibility and our churches will die. Eating too much fudge BTW will kill just as effectively.

It occurs to me, as I read the thoughtful posts of Pluralist, Clifford, and others, that I do not know what any of the villagers of Fulcrum think of The Church of England's two best-known modern efforts to be clear about belief--

(a) Doctrine in the Church of England: The report of the Commission on Christian doctrine appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922.

(b) Christian Believing: The nature of the Christian faith and its expression in Holy Scripture and Creeds: A report.

Or even, after all that has been said about power, money, and sex on these threads--

(c) Being Human: A Christian understanding of personhood illustrated with reference to power, money, sex and time.

Why do these never come up in our conversations about how Anglicans can, do, should, or shouldn't think about doctrine? Pluralist and Clifford, among others, have both alluded to the tension between the "tradition and the individual talent," but I hesitate to reply before understanding an English view of this.  

Personally, I have admired (a) for years, regretted that (b) encouraged some over here to be even more resolutely self-absorbed, and had never even heard of (c) until I just googled the other two. 

And what of the Thirty-Nine Articles? They must surely be the only document in Christendom that is nearly always mentioned as The Confession That Nobody Actually Has To Believe. They have, at least, the virtues of the Reformation, and I do not see that they pose any difficulty that does not reflect their time and provenance. Nor is it obvious to me that Anglicans need more freedom from their articles than, say, Lutherans need from the Book of Concord. After a fight, the main body of Presbyterians here decided to retain the Westminster Standards, but in a collection that included other Reformed confessions and a fresh one of their own composition. All churches of the Reformation have those who don't quite see things with 16th C eyes, but others seem to complain less about the tastes of their ancestors. The Episcopal Church published a new Catechism and a collection of Historical Documents in The Book of Common Prayer (1979)

In all of this it is clearest, I think, to distinguish a church's duty to articulate its belief as a part of its work, and an individual's appropriation of that belief in the course of a lifelong development.

I think you raise an important point, Bowman, about Anglican Churches meaning what they say and saying what they mean. The fact is that within each Anglican Church there is a high level of negotiation about what people mean despite a high level of fixedness about what people say. But the fact is that for many an Anglican, the beliefs they hold are not simply equatable to what they say collectively. That's why, in the end, I went. There is so much understood flexibility, but after a point the collective expression misrepresents what you do actually believe. And this is my criticism of a number of liberals. I think those who believe in a kind of alternative history of an incarnation and resurrection, even if they doubt details like the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, ought to stay where they are, in the Church of England, and exploit its flexibility in so far as it still exists. But those who just see Jesus as an exemplar, say, with a mild theism, are pushing at the limits. Any further and there comes a point of personal misrepresentation.

But this is little to do with adding international layers, that a bunch of bishops in conference can suddenly produce 'the mind of the Communion' when that belongs to the whole of a Church population, or somehow interpret scripture when that comes with acres of theological texts and biblical criticism. That's authoritarianism and religious bureaucracy. But if the consensus of a Church (that is, an actual Church) is roughly as I've suggested, then there are points of personal tension with the collective expression.

It may be that in its sophistication, a Church becomes more obviously liberal and tolerant. Then I'd argue that it ought to be more obvious in how it treats its core documents: for example, the Church of England does not any longer demand word for word assent of the Thirty-nine Articles. If it did this for the creeds and the Trinity, say, accepting them as symbolic and non-literal expressions, then there would be greater space for liberal individualism. But it has not gone so far, and many a modernist/ radical is left at or over its boundary.