A Fallible Church: Lambeth Essays
Kenneth Stevenson (ed.), Darton Longman & Todd

I like the title. “A Fallible Church” indeed; and it’s for fallible people, including bishops!

This is a book by Anglicans, for Anglicans and is a precursor to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. The issues it covers, however, are very real for other denominations.

Much is being written and spoken about the crises facing the Anglican Church and the possibility of schismatic breakaway churches.

The current crisis is of course human sexuality and in particular the ordination to the episcopate of Gene Robinson, a gay man living in a relationship with his partner.

Since the first Lambeth Conference of 1867 there have been many serious rifts in the Anglican Church and there will no doubt be many more.

Birth control, reaction to Charles Darwin, anaesthetics in childbirth, polygamy, liberal versus conservative controversies, liturgical reform, the power of bishops, synodical government involving the laity, women in ministry as deacons, priests and now bishops, homosexuality, to mention just a few.

Not all of these have been resolved and Uniting Church people will recognise many of them in their own church structure.

Lambeth Conference is not a synod, it does not make law, its resolutions are not mandatory on any part of the Anglican Communion. It is a conference to which the Archbishop of Canterbury invites members.

This, by the way, was the issue of great concern in 1867 when the Archbishop of York and many other bishops refused to attend because they felt Canterbury undermined their own authority.

It is a “talk fest” if you like. A manufactured phrase much denigrated by politicians, particularly if they are in opposition; a phrase dismissed in the media as a waste of time and money.

But, hold on, how else are members of any organisation going to share ideas, feelings and visions unless they meet to talk and to listen?

A significant essay in this collection is on ecclesiastical law. Previous Lambeth Conferences have raised the setting up of an Anglican ius commune. Yes, I looked it up; it means a set of laws for the whole of the Anglican Communion.

Norman Doe, Director of the Centre for Law and Religion, Cardiff University, speaking of the push for an Anglican ius commune, writes, “Nor is the ius commune a binding global legal system imposed by a central Anglican authority. It is not a ‘top-down’ entity (like the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law), but a ‘grass-roots’ development: it emerges organically from the exercise by each church of its own autonomy through its own legal system.”

Has the Uniting Church such an ius commune?

“What we have in the Anglican Communion,” writes John Gladwin, Bishop of Chelmsford, “is a model of how on a large and diverse field you put down the boundary markers:

“On that playing field self-governing churches can inhabit their own space and at the same time engage with one another. They may need instruments to enable this process of mutuality and a common inheritance. These can change as the needs change.”

Another contributor says, “I want to continue to be a part of a church ... and I have no intention of letting myself be pushed out by any religious-political thought police … Nor do I want episcopacy to become so consumerised that it is only possible to work with people with whom one agrees on absolutely everything: that would be a denial of catholicity, and set dangerous precedents for the next time we start falling out with each other.”

What makes a person, a parish or a region a member of the Uniting Church?

In the light of some famous heresy charges, how is one expelled from the church? Do congregations who split from their local church over some doctrinal matter still retain their connection to their mother church or are they left to fend for themselves?

As an Anglican I am not being critical here. We have faced such issues in the past and will face them in the future.

This raises for me the issue that, with the decline of church participation, particularly in small country towns, is the amalgamation of a parish with another denomination purely a local matter?

How do such unions share common worship, pastoral care and decisions on the maintenance of church property? How do parishioners of these amalgamations represent their parish at synodical, state or national level?

These sorts of issues have to be faced by all denominations.

This book puts the current schism reports of the Anglican Church in perspective, but also raises many issues for other churches.

Norman Kempson is a retired Anglican priest.