Michael Poon: A Brief Response to Gregory Cameron's Hellins Lecture on Anglicans and the Future of the Communion

The Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia, Singapore
posted July 10, 2008

Gregory Cameron’s recent lecture is a most sensitive treatment on the Anglican Communion today. His position as the Deputy Secretary-General of the Communion and as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s confidant makes his proposal all the more significant. It marks a strikingly new departure and positive way forward towards resolving the present crisis.

My present aim is to highlight the main features in his proposal, and to underline points of convergence between Cameron’s proposal and those of the Global South.

Cameron from the outset offered a sober historiography of the Communion, in marked contrast with the confident note the Windsor Report took towards ecclesiastical and institutional authorities. He reminded his audience from the outset the Communion itself “is something of an accidental creation”. “The Anglican Church as a universal entity has never existed. . . . Anglicanism is far more wedded to the legitimacy of its national and regional expressions than its international expression.” What holds churches in the Communion together is not formal authorities. The ties are rather sustained by the bonds of affection – “the very real personal and continuing bonds of study, friendship, identity, and mutual discipleship”.

At the end of his lecture, Cameron made a case for the Communion against “the levels of anger, political subterfuge and almost histrionic rhetoric” that are pulling the Communion apart. Cameron suggested the Communion’s ill cannot be solved by “externalising the issues and demonising those parts of the communion, liberal or conservative, with which we find ourselves most in disagreement”. Further, “the true bonds which hold the Communion together [are] not bonds of constitution and canon law, but bonds of affection. . . . the heart of our lie is not history or heritage or even ecclesiastical politics, but the reality of lived and shared discipleship.” The Communion’s future lies, so Cameron suggested, not in power realignment, whether “North or South or East or West, but to the reality in each heart of the living experience of Christ. . . . to the Cross wherein God’s love is revealed to the world”. the rest