The Stakes Just Went Up: If the Shoe Fits, Wear It

Last Saturday, I put up a carefully researched post about the impending maneuvers at the Executive Council of ECUSA to ensure that the (newly ordained) Bishop Ian Douglas of Connecticut would be able to claim a continuing seat on the Anglican Consultative Council, and derivatively, on its 14-member Standing Committee, to which he was elected at the Council's 14th meeting ("ACC-14"), held in Jamaica a year ago. (The Archbishop of Canterbury makes, ex officio, the Standing Committee's fifteenth member, but one member has resigned, and another is not attending, for reasons explained in the earlier post.) Set out verbatim in the post were the plain-English provisions of Article 4 of the ACC Constitution, which preclude ECUSA or its Executive Council from taking any such step as proposed.

When the Rev. Ian Douglas was elected to the ACC's Standing Committee at ACC-14, he was serving as ECUSA's clerical representative. But when he was elected as the Bishop of Connecticut, and ordained last April 17, he was no longer a simple priest, and became from that moment disqualified to serve as ECUSA's clergy member on the ACC. He immediately resigned his post on ECUSA's Executive Council, because he had been elected to it as a clergy member. But he has since withheld his resignation from the ACC, to which he had also been elected as a clergy member.

The ACC's Constitution mandates that a member elected as a clergy representative step down when he ceases to be a member of the clergy; it does not allow switching orders in the middle of a term. "[O]n retirement from [the] ecclesiastical office [in which the member was elected]," it says, [b]ishops and other clerical members shall cease to be members [of the ACC]." (Constitution, Sec. 4 (d), with emphasis added. It is specious to argue that election to the episcopacy is not "retirement" from the priesthood, given that the whole point of the ACC is to have a body in which bishops, clergy and laity all share proportionate representation. And there is much more language, as demonstrated in the earlier post, that bears out this common-sense interpretation.)

"This is not rocket science," the post asserted, "but plain English." Nevertheless, because of what had been said in two posts put up by the Rev. Canon Mark Harris at his Preludium website (not linked here due to technical glitches, as explained earlier), the post called attention to the hypocrisy that would result if ECUSA's Executive Council proceeded as Canon Harris suggested it might, at its meeting next month, to "reappoint" Bishop Douglas to the ACC as a replacement for ECUSA's last episcopal representative.

The post itself was clear, both as to the reasons why that act would constitute hypocrisy, and as to the motives for saying so. Contrary to the Rev. Canon Harris' reaction to it, the post labeled no person a "hypocrite" -- after all, the action proposed has yet to be taken. But if it were to be taken, it would give ECUSA what no other province enjoys on the Standing Committee -- two of its bishops serving as members. And it would seek to prevent the Standing Committee from replacing its one clergy member with another -- in violation of the ACC's bylaws (see the membership listings linked above). All just because ECUSA wants it that way, and acts as final judge of its own members' qualifications, while blocking other provinces from selecting their members according to their own criteria.

Now, however, with the promulgation of the Pentecost letter by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the stakes for ECUSA have increased by quite a bit. As many other blogs have already noticed, the Archbishop very pointedly mentioned that he would be taking up with his fellow primates the issue of attendance and agenda at the forthcoming Primates' Meeting, scheduled for January 2011. This is a warning shot across ECUSA's bow. If 815 now attempts to re-vote Bishop Douglas onto the ACC in violation of its rules, it may find that it has marooned itself by running against the tide in the Communion, and is left stranded without any ability of ++Canterbury to throw it a helping line.

What is this "tide in the Communion" to which I refer? ++Canterbury's letter, I submit, has struck just the right Pentecostal tone to call every member of the Communion to re-examine the paths on which they are going -- to ensure that the call to which they are responding is from the Holy Spirit. Now is not the time to strike out on one's own course, or to continue blindly on the same heading as before:

And so the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of ‘communion’ or fellowship (II Cor. 13.13). The Spirit allows us to recognise each other as part of the Body of Christ because we can hear in each other the voice of Jesus praying to the Father. We know, in the Spirit, that we who are baptised into Jesus Christ share one life; so that all the diversity of gifting and service in the Church can be seen as the work of one Spirit (I Cor. 12.4). In the Holy Eucharist, this unity in and through the self-offering of Jesus is reaffirmed and renewed as we pray for the Spirit to transform both the bread and wine and ‘ourselves, our souls and bodies’.

When the Church is living by the Spirit, what the world will see is a community of people who joyfully and gratefully hear the prayer of Jesus being offered in each other’s words and lives, and are able to recognise the one Christ working through human diversity. And if the world sees this, the Church is a true sign of hope in a world of bitter conflict and rivalry.

++Rowan Cantuar here is doing what he does best: pastoring the churches of the Communion, and calling them to account, to think deeply about the course they have set for themselves, and what it means for the Communion at large, as a family in Christ. He has no primatial powers within the Communion itself, and so he is using the force of his pastoral personality to its best purpose.

A vote by the Executive Council next month to send Bishop Douglas to the ACC -- before he even admits that he is no longer a member, by resigning the seat he held until he became a bishop -- would send exactly the wrong signal at exactly the wrong time to the rest of the Communion. (And once he admits he is no longer a member, he will have to concede the next step as well -- that the Constitution requires ECUSA to wait for at least six years before it can reappoint him.) Ignoring the facts on the ground, waving the hands and muttering something about "we can't allow the ACC to lose the benefit of his voice and experience; there has to be a less narrow reading of the provisions that will allow him to stay on" -- will proclaim loud and clear that nothing has really changed. If Dr. Williams and the ACC's Secretary-General were then to "overlook" such a perverse manipulation of the rules, it will change Canterbury's wonderful letter from a spiritual wake-up call into decorative wallpaper.

With regard to observation of the moratoria adopted by the Primates and the ACC itself, the "reappointment" of Bishop Douglas to the ACC would also be a finger in the Communion's collective eye at this point. The reason, as I explained in the previous post, is that Bishop Douglas now heads a diocese in which his predecessor had authorized rites for same-sex blessings, in defiance of the Windsor Report. The post observed that Bishop Douglas had made no move to rescind the authorization for same-sex blessings by the clergy who canonically are under him, and that he was thus every much as effectively "in violation" of the Windsor Report as had been the Rev. Ashey. Sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If not, there is a double standard involved for those on the left: they are allowed to do as they please, while voting to exclude others for doing the same thing they do.

Apparently these observations failed in their Christian objective. They were not intended as calumny, or ad hominem attack, but like the Archbishop's much more elegantly worded pastoral letter, as a call by one Christian to another to stay upon the upright path. Forget and forgive, then, my paltry effort. To heed the Archbishop's call should now weigh uppermost in the mind of everyone in a leadership position at ECUSA.

There is still time to reflect and consider, on the part of everyone concerned. Let us pray that the Pentecostal Spirit will be upon us all.

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Postscript: To those loyal readers who might think I have sold my birthright for a pottage from the Archbishop of Canterbury, I say only that I write as a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church (USA), who has been in despair since the 1970's over its usurpation by social activists and its ensuing decline -- for more than thirty years now. As a member of the legal profession, I especially deplore its more recent descent into the morass of litigation over ill-defined and highly questionable "property rights". From where I observe ECUSA and the Communion, however, I can see no other hope of deliverance from the current troubles -- except that either ECUSA sinks under the weight of its own tenemental concupiscence, or that ++Rowan Cantuar is finally driven by ECUSA's machinations to make a stand independent of its perfidious goals, which if unchecked will grow to encompass the very see of St. Augustine. The current Pentecostal Letter offers a glimmer of hope in that latter direction, so I shall not detract from it in any way. Nor shall I disparage the scorn of the many who have grown tired of waiting for the Archbishop to take definitive action, because I recognize their right to disappointment based on everything that has come to pass thus far. Only time will tell, and until there are absolutely no options left whatsoever, I shall continue to pray that the Holy Spirit brings my church back onto the path of righteousness and truth.