The adoption of resolutions D025 and C056 by the 76th General Convention speaks to an unhealthy degree of theological ignorance and ecclesiastical incoherence at work within the higher councils of The Episcopal Church [TEC], Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said in a statement released July 27.
 
While the adoption of resolutions on rites for the blessing of same-sex unions and the consecration of gay clergy to the episcopate have not created a de facto schism, they do signal TEC’s likely removal to the periphery of the life and witness of the Anglican Communion through the creation of a two-tier communion of covenanting and non-covenanting provinces, Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote.
 
A spokesman for the archbishop said the statement titled “Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future” had been released via the Lambeth Palace website as a “reflection” on the actions of the General Convention.
 
Archbishop Williams offered thanks to the convention for the “generous welcome” extended to him, and acknowledged the concerns of many bishops and deputies for the wider Anglican Communion and for the “crushing” social and economic problems faced by the developing world. He also affirmed that he had received Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s and president of the House of Deputies Bonnie Anderson’s assurances that the passage of D025 and C056 did not “have the automatic effect of overturning the requested moratoria, if the wording is studied carefully” on gay bishops and blessings.
 
However, he said these assurances would not be found persuasive by some and would be “unlikely to allay anxieties” within the Communion that TEC was going its own way. There were “two points which I believe need to be reiterated and thought through further” by TEC, Archbishop Williams said.
 
By moving forward on same-sex blessings and gay clergy, TEC erred by not engaging in a “painstaking biblical exegesis” and seeking a “wide acceptance of the results within the Communion” as “a major change naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding.”
 
This work has not been done, Archbishop Williams wrote. He emphasized that “a blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole.”
 
Nor should any member of the clergy—bishop or priest—be “living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond,” Archbishop Williams said. The homosexual or unchaste heterosexual “chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church's teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires.”
 
By permitting gay clergy and same-sex blessings without first “including in its discernment the judgment of the wider Church,” TEC risked “becoming unrecognizable to other local churches,” the archbishop wrote. The actions of General Convention necessarily reconceived “the Anglican Communion as essentially a loose federation of local bodies with a cultural history in common, rather than a theologically coherent 'community of Christian communities',” he said.
 
The way forward, Archbishop Williams said, was through an Anglican Covenant that provided structures of “mutual recognizability, mutual consultation, and some shared processes of decision-making.”
 
He acknowledged that within TEC “some will not choose this way of intensifying relationships,” but he believed that “it would be a mistake to act or speak now as if those decisions had already been made.”
 
The Anglican tradition had “thus far” been able to contain “diverse convictions more or less within a unified structure,” Archbishop Williams wrote. If the present structures “turn out to need serious rethinking,” this was not a statement of the “end of the Anglican way,” but an opportunity for a “new era of mission and spiritual growth for all who value the Anglican name and heritage.”
 
(The Rev.) George Conger
 
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