Sea Change in the Anglican Communion

August 17, 2011

By The Rev. Prof. Stephen Noll
for the American Anglican Council

Over the years, my family has welcomed a summer vacation on the Atlantic coast. The sun, the sea, the sand, the shrimp combine for some deep-down rest and enjoyment. We have also encountered occasional storms and even a hurricane or two. Usually storms pass quickly, with a return to sunny beach weather. However, for several days thereafter the sea is roiled with dangerous currents and breakers far up the shoreline before returning to almost lake-like placidity.

I thought about this natural cycle in reviewing the Minutes of “The Standing Committee” of the Anglican Communion. Let’s begin with the storm. The decade following the 1998 Lambeth Conference was quite tumultuous, as I have documented elsewhere. The Episcopal Church (TEC) willfully rejected the biblical and traditional understanding of sex and marriage, as affirmed in Lambeth Resolution I.10 on Human Sexuality and advanced its agenda of promoting same-sex “blessings” and marriage and ordaining practicing homosexuals to the priesthood and episcopate, leading most notably to the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003. This violation in turn led to a flurry of crisis meetings, forced by the Primates of the Global South, climaxing in 2007 at Dar es Salaam with an ultimatum threatening its exclusion from the Communion. the rest image by Les Chatfield

The sea is calm, but the topography of the Communion is permanently changed. In the most severe storms, the surge breaks through the barrier islands and divides them permanently. The complacent, business-as-usual tone of the latest Standing Committee conceals the fact that it now speaks for only a portion of the Anglican Communion. From 2007 on, provinces like Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Southern Cone have stopped participating in the so-called Instruments of the Communion. They are not reading the Minutes of the Standing Committee, nor are they participating in the various Communion networks. They have broken communion with the official Anglican Provinces in North America and recognized an alternative authority. They judge that the breach of biblical faith and practice initiated by the North Americans and condoned by the Lambeth establishment is intolerable and irrevocable. Much as they may have looked to the Church of England as their spiritual and missionary mother, they have concluded that she has broken faith with her own heritage and fostered the current division.