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Archbishop Runcie Opens Council Meeting

Episcopal News Service. September 24, 1981 [81249]

NEW CASTLE, Eng. -- The fifth meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council began with a flat statement of its task from Archbishop Robert Runcie of Canterbury: "The Church is always under judgement. It is always necessary to ask the question: 'Is the face of the Church turned toward her master, Jesus Christ, or is She pre-occupied with her status and survival?'"

In his sermon at the Mass that opened the Council Sept. 8, the spiritual leader of worldwide Anglicanism told the 61 bishops, priests and laypeople: "It is our vocation as Anglicans to seek for our own extinction by working for the restoration of the one great universal Church -- the coming Church, which Christ promised not even the gates of Hell could withstand. We must regularly judge the life of our Churches by this standard -- are we working for Christ's coming Church?"

The Mass Propers were the "Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary" -- a primary Marian feast in the English Church -- and the Archbishop pointed to the characteristic of "passionate coolness" in Mary which he claimed characterized the greatest of Anglicans. He cited as a particular example, Urban T. Holmes, the recently-deceased dean of Sewanee seminary.

"I recently made a hugely enjoyable visit to the Episcopal Church in the United States and made many friends. One of those who made the deepest impression on me was the dean of the seminary in the University of the South -- Terry Holmes. His tragically early death last month, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, was a shock to the great army of his friends. He personified passionate coolness. He was a patient and careful scholar, a crusader against mindlessness, but he was also fired with a passionate determination to attend to God and to build a Church more expressive of God's word and life."

Before the Eucharist, an organizing session was held which was highlighted by a "state of the communion address" from the man who has been the principle staff architect of the Council since its inception, Bishop John Howe.

Howe, 61, noted that this would be his last such address and took the opportunity to "review the landscape." He is expected to retire sometime in 1982.

In his remarks, Howe noted that the multi-layered, independent structures of Anglicanism were "humanly speaking a recipe for disintegration." In explaining why this did not happen, he sought to explain an emerging consensus on authority in the Church. "The universal family, as any good family, holds together by affection, by Christian love. The procedure that has developed is that representatives of the Churches meet, discuss and share together, as at a Lambeth Conference, an Anglican Consultative Council meeting or a Primates' Meeting, and in the light of that conferring, and in consideration of their own culture and situation, make such rules as may be required in their own Church, acting through their Synod. Essentially authority is not from the center, but to the center. Hence, too, the officers of the Council are elected by the Council."

As has become the pattern in the Council, the members spent most of the first two-thirds of the meeting in five sections exploring a variety of issues and tending to the administrative details of the Council.

The meeting marked a number of firsts in the Council's ten-year life. It was Archbishop Runcie's first as president, and the first of the roughly bi-annual meetings to be held in England. Further, it was the first chaired by Australian layman John Denton who was elected in 1979 to succeed Marion Kelleran of the Episcopal Church.