'Matured' Role Of Anglican Council Noted
Episcopal News Service. May 24, 1979 [79173]
LONDON, Ontario -- In its eight years, the Anglican Consultative Council has come a long way toward becoming the "cement" of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
That was the assessment of the Council's three principal officers as the Council neared the end of its fourth regular meeting at Huron College in this southern Ontario city.
Brought into being through the 1968 Lambeth Conference, the Council meets every two-to-three years to study and deliberate on matters touching all branches of the Communion. The first meeting, in Limuru, Kenya in 1971, consisted of 53 members representing 22 regional or national Churches. At this meeting.-- May 8-18 -- more than 65 persons represented 29 Churches.
The continuing work of the Council is carried on through a standing committee and the office of the Secretary General in London, England.
During the 11-day meeting here, the Council explored the complex web of ecumenical dialogue, proposed a theological basis for human rights activity, examined the direction of the Communion's place in Christian mission and sought to provide support and guidance for the problems which various branches of the Communion brought before them.
The Council has no direct legislative authority. Its counsel and proclamations must be taken up and dealt with by each of the member Churches and what emerged from this meeting is likely to spark a good deal of deliberation among those Churches.
For both participants and observers, the careful study, hard work and open, free exchange were at least as important as the actual papers in creating the increasingly significant role that the Council plays in Anglican affairs.
In the press conference, the three officers agreed that the Council had "matured," had become a forum for full, open exchange throughout the Church and, in the word of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Donald Coggan, was now seen as the "adhesive" of Anglicanism.
Dr. Coggan is President of the Council and his views were shared by the Secretary General, the Rt. Rev. John W.A. Howe and Mrs. Marion Kelleran, Chairman, of the Episcopal Church.
Mrs. Kelleran, a pastoral theologian who served on the faculty of Virginia Seminary from 1949 to 1973, has been an officer of the Council since its inception and chairman since 1974. She is retiring from her post as chairman and said of her years on the Council, "The ACC may have been responsible for the growing influence of the third world in Church affairs. " She said that members from developing nations were much more willing to speak out on issues now than they had been and were responsible for much of the language and theology that went into the Council reports.
She noted that some formality still lingered in plenary sessions but that old caste systems were breaking down and she saw a time when informal consensus might sometimes replace formal votes and rules of order.
Presiding Bishop John M. Allin, who headed the Episcopal Church delegation, echoed the Council officers with a personal observation: "I found participation in the meeting to be helpful in many ways. The contact with Anglicans from other parts of the world was both informative and also inspiring, a reminder of the diversity that exists in this one Communion of Christ's Church. The small group discussions allowed participants to become acquainted on a deeper level than would have been afforded through large gatherings and social contacts alone. I came away with a renewed appreciation for the vital role played by the Anglican Consultative Council, and it is my hope that this role can be expanded and made even more effective in the future to enable the Anglican Communion to fulfill the Church's mission."
Bishop Allin chaired the section on Mission and Unity and presented the report on the Unity section. The other members of the Episcopal delegation are Mrs. Carter C. Chinnis of Washington, D.C., and the Rev. Rustin R. Kimsey of Eastern Oregon.
Secretary General John Howe pointed out that the Council "was maturing faster than I had thought. The Communion is getting itself in shape. The structures are there. Our task is getting the structures to work. " On the open nature of the debates, he expressed satisfaction that "we now have a place where these issues can be discussed and we can face contemporary situations not just our built-in perennial views. "
Bishop Howe's remarks were borne out most strongly in debate over the report presented on the Theological Basis of Human Rights. The debate led to revision of key sections of the report and a strengthening of the resolution to include a concrete call for action in human rights issues.
When the report was initially presented, it opened with explicit, systematic statements of Christian doctrines. After a short explanation, in which the committee stated that its purpose was to attempt to examine the situations in which Christians found themselves and then draw theological conclusions from that, the paper presented case studies of human rights violations.
The early parts of the debate were given over to attempts to strengthen or reword the statements of doctrine. Many sought to make the document more "Christ-centered" than they believed it was, while others spoke in favor of clarifying concepts of sin and responsibility.
At one point, the report stated that "human beings and the basic communities in which they come into being and grow to maturity have no ultimate worth. " Archbishop Bill Bendyshe Burnett. of Capetown and Metropolitan of the Church of the Province of South Africa, noted that assigning "ultimate worth" to communities provided the theological basis for apartheid. The line was changed to read that human beings and their communities "must be respected."
As the debate wore on, the focus shifted to a discussion of the more traditional ways of doing theology over against the growing desire, as the paper put it, to "struggle with the facts as they are in all situations" and from those facts seek theological understanding.
The committee held firm to the latter as the approach that the Council should offer to the Church and agreed to rewrite part of their paper to clarify the approach and rearrange certain sections.
When the revised paper was presented the following morning, it and the accompanying resolution won nearly unanimous support and a round of applause from the Council members.
The three-part resolution calls on member Churches to study the society in which they live and develop "a Christian approach to action;" "rigorously assess their own structures" in order to make the Church "truly an image of God's just kingdom;" and "involve themselves in all possible ways with the struggles of peoples who are denied human rights."
That style of open, thoughtful consideration and eventual approbation carried through into all the other section reports, calling the Churches to further examination of the role of the Anglican Communion in Christian mission.
The section specifically entitled "mission" focused its work largely on the Partners in Mission process which the Council has created. The process is now entering a second phase of consultations and the section asked the Council to begin to move beyond the consultation process and begin to establish procedures for study and review of mission work in the Communion.
Noting that Partnership had "proved more attainable than a new commitment to mission, " the report urges the Church to think in terms of "Mission in Partnership" in order to restore the primacy of Christian mission.
The report held that the work of forming self-governing and self-supporting churches was largely accomplished and set out to explore ways in which evangelism, development and shared resources, as well as honest evaluation of current problems, could lead to more widely-shared mission.
The Episcopal Church's Venture in Mission was cited as both a development tool and a resource for sharing and Presiding Bishop Allin pleaded with members of the Council for "more and wider consultation so that this Venture can enable us to move the whole mission forward and so that we can learn from one another rather than run the risk of hurting one another."
The other major section, on the Anglican Communion, had the task of responding to the many jurisdictional and doctrinal issues that face the Communion. However, the report also reflects the thoughtful approach to the future place of Anglicanism.
In a subsection on "Direction in the Anglican Communion, " the report noted: "We hope that membership of the Anglican Communion everywhere will both lead individuals to a deeper knowledge of and commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord, and will also in the same Spirit help in the creation of a community which challenges and supports persons, individually and corporately, to bear witness to God's love and concern for His world made known in Jesus Christ. "
While providing a continuing forum for emerging ideas and scholarship is one role of the Council, much of its work this time also involved creating structures and authorizing steps that will help each of the member Churches share in the actual work of mission.
These steps included creation of an Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission; guidelines for Church polity (Provincial Constitutions, metro political authority, standards for autonomy, etc.); authorizing studies; surveys and dialogues in areas of ordained ministry; full reports on all ecumenical relations and supporting resolutions for those conversations.
The Council also decried a schismatic episcopal consecration that threatens the unity of the newly-created Province of Nigeria after Archbishop Timothy Olufosuye explained that there seemed little hope for a pastoral solution as the dissidents in his Warri region seemed "to feel no guilt whatever." The Council decreed that the ordination done by a retired bishop "acting alone and without canonical authority is irregular and unacceptable."
The full report of the fourth meeting of the Council is expected to be available this summer. The report will include the resolutions, and the revised papers that are the backbone of the Council work. Procedures for obtaining the report will be announced later.
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