Llewellyn

King

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July 28, 2008

The Agony of the Anglican Church

The third-largest denomination in Christendom after the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox Church, the 70-million-strong Anglican Communion is in chaos. In fact, the Anglicans, also known as Episcopalians and, in Britain, and the Church of England, are being torn apart as they began, with a row over sex.

Actually, two rows over sex.

King Henry VIII ripped the English communion from Rome because the Pope would not grant him a divorce. Now the far-flung Anglican Communion – found wherever the British went, from the United States to Ghana and even Baghdad – is in danger of disintegrating.

There are two riled-up factions: The evangelicals and the conservatives. The former want gays out and the latter want women stopped.

The evangelicals are trying to break away from the Anglican fellowship because they cannot abide the appointment of openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson in New Hampshire. Some American congregations, and many African ones, are violently opposed to gays holding senior or any office in the church.

The breakaway bishops are nominally led by Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, an English bishop of Pakistani descent, and a fiery Nigerian bishop, Peter Jasper Akinola.

Two hundred twenty bishops out of 880 are boycotting the current conclave of the church in England. The meeting takes place every 10 years, and when it is not dealing with big issues, it contents itself with discussions of liturgy and raiment. (Like the Roman Catholic Church, from which it is descended, form is important to Anglicans.) Before the synod started, the rebels undercut it with a meeting in Jerusalem.

Then there are the conservatives, who are as upset as the evangelicals but are a little less vocal. Their beef is about gender. They abhor the idea of women bishops. Having swallowed women priests over the years, they feel they must take a stand or they will be overwhelmed by the rank and file of the church membership, which is either ambivalent on the issue or in favor of women having the same rights ecclesiastically as men.

Many thousands of conservative Anglicans, known in church terms, especially in England, as Anglo-Catholics, have simply joined the Roman Catholic Church, following a well-trodden path that included theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman, writers G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge and former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In England, this is not such a big step because the Church of England has not considered itself so much Protestant as unique. In English parlance, Protestants are often referred to as “Nonconformists.” In their creed, Anglicans still affirm their belief in the “Holy Catholic Church” but pointedly omit the word “Roman.”

Presiding over the unhappy Anglican Synod is, ironically, one of the more respected archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. He is a devout man who favors tolerance in the Communion. But he has no authority. He is not a pope. He is a kind of honorary elder, first among equals. Williams, as leader of the Anglican community, can take comfort that he is a better man than many of his predecessors. They have included drunks, fornicators, almost certainly gays and one who famously doubted the existence of God.

One way or another, the Communion is an odd creature. Over the years, it vied with Methodists as a liberalizing force in British foreign policy. But as an established church, the Church of England had access to power that no other denomination enjoyed. To this day, its bishops are appointed by the Queen – in theory, at least. But this is the base from which the worldwide Episcopal movement has evolved and that is why it is meeting in England to decide its future. The Church of England is the Mother Church.

If the Anglican Communion is not to be sundered, there may be another secular issue that saves it: Money. Like the Roman Catholics, the Anglicans own a lot of property scattered around the world, and dividing it up may be more difficult than blessing gays and women. Sex and money: Henry VIII must be smiling on his creation. Breakaway U.S. churches have found they cannot necessarily claim title to the buildings in which they worship.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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