CHAPTER 1
The Exigency of Timesand Occasions
Power and Identity in the AnglicanCommunion Today
Ian T. Douglas
Even to the casual observer, the 1998 Lambeth Conference of worldwide Anglicanbishops was not the garden party of yesteryear. Following the conference,Anglicans in the industrialized West have had to wrestle deeply with the realitythat the Anglican Communion is no longer a Christian community primarilyidentified with Anglo-American culture. Up until the summer of 1998, mostAnglicans in the West could pretty well ignore the radical shifts indemographics that have occurred in the Communion over the last four decades andthus avoid hard questions of identity and authority. The cultural, economic, andpolitical power of Western Anglicans shielded them from deeply engaging therealities of an increasingly diverse and plural church.
But Lambeth 1998 signaled a turning point for Anglicanism. In debates overinternational debt and/or sexuality, it became abundantly clear to all that thechurches in the southern hemisphere, or the Two-Thirds World, would not standidly by while their sisters and brothers in the United States, England, andother Western countries continued to set the agenda. Whether aided or not bysome in the West who stood to gain ground in sexuality debates by siding withbishops in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, Lambeth 1998 pointedout that a profound power shift has occurred within Anglicanism. For the firsttime ever, the Anglican Communion has had to face head-on the radicalmulticultural reality of a global Christian community. Old understandings ofAnglican identity based on shared Anglo-American hegemony have broken down.Anthems of Titcomb and Tallis sung by boy choirs in chapels at Cambridge andOxford can no longer hold Anglicans together. Even bishops taking tea with theQueen in the garden of Buckingham Palace during Lambeth is not what it used tobe.
Astute watchers of Lambeth and the emerging Communion knew that such a profoundshift has been in the works for decades. Speaking of the contemporary AnglicanCommunion, the Most Rev. Robert Runcie, past Archbishop of Canterbury, in hisaddress to the 1985 General Convention of the Episcopal Church propheticallyannounced:
We have developed into a worldwide family of churches. Today there are 70million members of what is arguably the second most widely distributed body ofChristians. No longer are we identified by having some kind of English heritage.English today is now the second language of the Communion. There are more blackmembers than white. Our local diversities span the spectrum of the world'sraces, needs, and aspirations. We have only to think of Bishop [Desmond] Tutu'scourageous witness in South Africa to be reminded that we are no longer a churchof the white middle classes allied only to the prosperous western world.
The changes in contemporary Anglicanism, from a white, predominantly English-speakingchurch of the West to a church of the southern hemisphere areconsistent with the changing face of Christianity over the last four decades.Anglican mission scholar David Barrett has documented that in the year 1900, 77percent of the 558 million Christians in the world lived in Europe or NorthAmerica. Today only 37 percent of the close to two billion Christians live insame area. Barrett further predicts that in less than three decades, in the year2025, fully 71 percent of the projected 2.6 billion Christians worldwide willlive in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. If we consider the churchin Africa south of the Sahara, specifically, the numbers are equally astounding.In 1960, after a 150 years of Western missionary activity, the number ofChristians in Africa was approximately 50 million. From 1960 until 1990, theChristian population in Africa increased from 50 million to 250 million! Thatchange represents a five-fold increase in one fifth of the time, a fact notattributable to population growth alone.
What are we to make of this transformation in the global body of Christ? Inparticular, how has our own little corner of the Christian tradition, that partof the body of Christ that traces its origins to the holy catholic church firstrooted in the British Isles and now known as Anglicanism, been transformed intoa truly global Christian community? It is useful to reconsider our history.
For the majority of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centurythe Anglican Communion (as it existed) was dominated by Western churches. Chiefamong them were the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the UnitedStates, and the Anglican churches in Canada and Australia. Each of these fourautonomous Anglican churches supported and controlled their own missions aroundthe world. In the case of the Episcopal Church USA, the three biggest missionfields in the nineteenth century were China, Liberia, and Japan. From the 1850sto the 1960s mission was inextricably linked to Western colonialism andimperialism. This was especially true for the Church of England as theestablished church, for wherever the Crown went so too did the church.
All of this began to change, however, in the 1960s, for with politicalindependence for countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific camethe desire for ecclesial independence for the mission fields. Over time themissions grew into autocephalous Anglican churches in their own right,ostensibly autonomous from their "mother" churches in England and the UnitedStates. With the increase in the number of member churches in the AnglicanCommunion, Anglicans began to search for new ways of coming together, new waysof relating to one another as the body of Christ. The Anglican Congress of 1963,held in Toronto, Canada, was a watershed for the contemporary AnglicanCommunion. This meeting of Anglican lay people, priests, and bishops from everycorner of the globe embraced the influential and far-reaching vision: "MutualResponsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ" (MRI). MRI proposed aradical reorientation of mission priorities and stressed equality andpartnership between all Anglicans. It stated in part:
In our time the Anglican Communion has come of age. Our professed nature as aworld-wide fellowship of national and regional churches has suddenly become areality.... The full communion in Christ which has been our traditional tie hassuddenly taken on a totally new dimension. It is now irrelevant to talk of"giving" and "receiving" churches. The keynotes of our time are equality,interdependence, mutual responsibility.
"Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence" stood as a challenge to the Anglo-American preeminence in the Anglican Communion during the nineteenth and firsthalf of the twentieth centuries. The Rt. Rev. Stephen Bayne, Bishop of Olympia(Washington, USA) and the first Executive Officer of the Anglican Communion,played a central role in the development of MRI. He knew that the changes afootin the Anglican Communion of the 1960s would require a radical readjustment inunderstandings of Anglican identity and mission. Recalling his diocese in theUnited States, Bayne reflected on the changes in thinking that needed to occurif Episcopalians were to live into the truth of MRI.
They [the people of the Diocese of Olympia] need, as I need, to rethink thewhole meaning of mission, and that as this happens, the cost of it in theabandonment of old ways of thinking and old comforts and old priorities is goingto be very great. Many people in the Diocese of Olympia between 1947 and 1960had the feeling that the Church was an association of people, a kind of memorialassociation for a deceased clergyman named Christ, whose ideals were importantand who was an early supporter of the "American Way of Life." To such peoplemission was something you did for somebody else. Mission was a way of keepingGod in business.
Unfortunately, Bayne's challenge to the church in the United States has remainedlargely unheeded. MRI remains a goal to be achieved rather than a reality thatis lived. The prime question for Anglicans today is how does mutualresponsibility and interdependence play itself out in a community of thirty-eight equal and autonomous churches? What are the challenges prohibiting us fromrealizing the vision of the 1963 Anglican Congress? I believe that there are twosignificant and related forces, one political and economic, the otherphilosophical and theological, that stand in the way of the Anglican Communion'sgenuine embrace of mutual responsibility and interdependence.
The first force prohibiting our living into the vision of a mutuallyinterdependent community in Christ is the ongoing legacy of colonialism. Asmentioned above, the Anglican Communion, for the bulk of its history, has beenclosely linked to of Western colonialism. If one considers a map of today'sAnglican Communion, this fact is undeniable. The majority of Anglican churcheslie in areas of the world that at one time or another were territories of eitherEngland or the United States. With the advent of political independence forcolonies in the southern hemisphere, the missions of the Church of England orthe Episcopal Church USA "grew up" into autonomous churches of the AnglicanCommunion. These churches were no longer to be considered outposts or provincesof the Church of England or the Episcopal Church USA. Although many of thesecountries where the newly independent Anglican churches have come into beingstill suffer at the hands of economic colonialism (witness the sin ofinternational debt), by and large with political independence has come ecclesialindependence. Whether Anglicans in the West are prepared to accept it or not,the Anglican Communion today has begun to move from being a colonial church to apostcolonial reality. As a result, the political and economic structures ofpower associated with colonial dominance have begun to lose their efficacy inthe new Anglican Communion.
The second major force that hinders an embrace of the new Anglican Communionlies in the ongoing dominance of the philosophical and theological underpinningsof modernity. Whether one marks the beginning of the Anglican Communion at 1784with the consecration of Samuel Seabury as the first bishop of an autonomousAnglican church outside of the British Isles, or with the first LambethConference of Bishops in 1867, the Anglican Communion as a family of churches isapproximately 200 years old. The Anglican Communion therefore is a thoroughlymodern phenomenon—with "modern" understood as the age of modernity, the last 500years, the Age of Enlightenment.
The philosophical constructs of the Age of Enlightenment elevate rationalthought and the modern scientific method to a place of preeminence andauthority. Trusting in the reliability of human reason, Western scientists, oneby one, seemed to unlock the inscrutabilities of nature. The subjugation of thenatural world gave way to the advent of manufacturing and the IndustrialRevolution. By the end of the nineteenth century the West, with its political,economic, military and industrial might, had been able to claim both knowledgeof and power over peoples and places in all corners of the world.
Subjugation perhaps properly defines the order of the Enlightenment; subjugationof nature by human intellect, colonial control through physical and culturaldomination, and economic superiority through mastery of the laws of the market.The confidence with which the culture of the West approached the world toappropriate it reflected in the constructs of science, industry, and empire thatprincipally represent the wealth of the period.... The scientific catalog ofracial otherness, the variety of racial alien, was a principal product of theperiod.
Enlightenment thought and colonial domination go hand in hand, with the formergiving rationale to the latter and the latter ensuring the world view of theformer.
The Anglican Communion has historically traded on the power of Enlightenmentthought as much as it has on the power of Western colonialism. Anglicanism, upuntil very recently, has rested on the philosophical and theological formulariesof the Enlightenment that value either/or propositions, binary constructs, anddualistic thinking. Anglicans formed in Enlightenment thought pride themselveson being able to figure things out, to know limits, to be able to define what isright and what is wrong, who is in and who is out. Modern man (and I use thisnon-inclusive term deliberately) values clear lines of authority, knowing who isin charge, a hierarchical power structure. Pluralities and multiple ways ofseeing the world are an anathema to modernity and thus to many who have been incontrol in the Anglican Communion for most of its history.
But all of this is changing as the majority of Anglicans today are located inplaces where the constructs of Enlightenment thought have less efficacy. I donot mean here that sisters and brothers in the South and those who are more freefrom the constrictions of modern thought are less educated or caught in a worldof superstitions, as the Rt. Rev. Jack Spong, now retired Bishop of Newark, NewJersey, asserted at Lambeth 1998.15 Rather, the majority of Anglicans in theworld today are able to live in multiple realities, which include WesternEnlightenment constructs as well as their own local contexts. It is important toemphasize here that the marginalized in the West, especially women, people ofcolor, gay and lesbian individuals, have always lived multiple realities, theirown particularities and that of the dominant culture. It is only those in power,historically heterosexual, white, clerical, males in the West, who have theprivilege of believing and acting as if there were only one reality, their own!The movement within Anglicanism from being a church grounded in modernity andsecure in the Enlightenment, to postmodern or extra-modern reality is astumultuous as the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism.
The transition in the Anglican world from colonialism to postcolonialism andfrom modernity to postmodernity is terrifying, especially for those individualswho historically have been the most privileged, most in control, most secure inthe colonial Enlightenment world. The radical transition afoot in the AnglicanCommunion is terrifying, for it means that Anglicans in the West—especiallyheterosexual, white, male clerics—will no longer have the power and control thatthey have enjoyed for so long. They thus feel anxious, confused, lost in a seaof change. The movement from being a colonial and modern church to that of apostcolonial and postmodern community in Christ, with its concomitant specter ofloss, is vigorously countered by those who have been historically the mostprivileged in the Communion. Various attempts to reassert control, reassertpower, put Humpty Dumpty back together again, with all the King's horses and allthe King's men, are dominating inter-Anglican conversations at this point inhistory.
Two attempts to maintain old structures of power and privilege in response tothe changing face of Anglicanism are particularly insidious and thoroughly un-Anglican. The first is a rather diffuse attempt to claim "historic documents" ofthe church as authoritative for all time. Driven by fear of change, some want tolook backward to a perceived simpler time to claim clear definitions of what itmeans to be an Anglican today. There are increasing attempts in various cornersof Anglicanism, especially in the West, to raise the Thirty-nine Articles orsome other theological affirmation to be the defining statements of whatAnglicans are and are to believe. What results is a new confessionalism, asinsecure individuals and those who fear loss of power in these changing timesstruggle gallantly to nail down Anglican theology and beliefs. Armed with cleardoctrinal definitions and limits, the same folk are then able to count who is inand who is out. Control is reasserted, ambiguity is overcome, and traditionalauthority is maintained.
