Anglican Communion Institute. 27 July 2015
The New Episcopal Church: What Hath General Convention 2015 Wrought?
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This makes too much sense to matter, but I cannot help saying it– Since the main body of TEC sprawls from Alaska to Central America through a dozen distinct cultural regions, any central body in this church is fated by geography to approve many variances from the norms set in Prayerbook revisions. Without the cultural cohesion of Wales, we cannot have the relative unity of the Church of Wales, and the voting at General Convention reflects that. So does American puzzlement at documents like the Windsor Report that seem addressed to a far less diverse church than TEC.
The inquiring villager from Fulcrum will note that the horrible things done by this recent GC have permitted things to happen with due process that probably would have happened without due process anyway. So, unless they are rigourists, those from more conservative dioceses have as usual voted for things that those in more cosmopolitan dioceses wanted in the serene confidence that their own bishops will not allow them back home. If TEC actually did have some higher authority, that would only move this granting of dispensations to do what cannot be stopped into a smaller forum with even more power to infuriate the Anglican Communion Institute.
This pattern is indeed crazymaking to all of us with a participative ecclesiology. It drove the Diocese of South Carolina right out of TEC. But the only American churches with the sort of fastidious central control that ACI wants TEC to have are doing it with powerful archbishops accountable to more powerful patriarchs overseas. This is not likely to happen soon.
A simpler change might be to devolve most powers of the GC to America’s ten powerless provinces. For Episcopalians, this would mean that those voting on changes would actually have to live with them, and that they would be debating them in earnest with neighbours who shared their culture. For the ACNA, it would mean saying less about colorful personalities in New York, and conferring more with the TEC bishops and clergy of their own province. For Anglicans elsewhere, it would mean that Anglicans in America were governing themselves more as other Anglicans do, albeit with a few liberal provinces always shocking conservatives everywhere else. Finally, GCs would be even more fun than they are now, if they had nothing else to vote on but, once or twice a century, a new Book of Common Prayer. They could continue to evolve into a sort of Anglican world’s fair.
America, Churchill said, can be counted upon to do the right thing after exhausting every other possibility. Other possibilities are more exciting to several TEC’s constituencies, including even the tradition of posting a jeremiad after every General Convention. But this is the right thing.