No Monopoly on God
Diocesan Press Service. September 3, 1963 [XIII-4]
(Toronto Daily Star editorial, August 20, 1963)
The Anglican Congress here may be rather a shocker to people who have thought of the Anglican Church as a stuffy hangover from colonial Family Compact times, or, as is sometimes said of it in the U.K., "The Tory party on its knees."
The fellowship and deliberations of the Congress show the Anglican Communion to be universal, radical and revolutionary, crossing racial and national boundaries, facing the frontiers of faith and reforming itself for the world as it is today.
Bishops from the Orient have taken precedence over priests from England; black African priests have shared prayer rails with white delegates from the southern United States.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has preached with fervor of the central truths of Christian belief; Canon Max Warren of the Church Missionary Society has spoken against "pigeon holing God" ("We claim no monopoly on God") and the need to "joyfully accept the complexity of our time."
Two major events of the Congress -- apart from the great services of music and worship -- have been Canon Max Warren's address to the first plenary session and -- the issuance of the "Manifesto" about the church's "mutual responsibility."
In a sense, Canon Warren was calling for a theological re-assessment in the face of secularism in our world. He said it was important to see God at work in the non-religious (citing Marx and Freud). He welcomed within the church itself the "tremendous movement toward experiments in worship." Thus has the Congress been attempting to deal with the "fact of general unbelief" and what the Archbishop of Canterbury ---- called "religionless Christianity."
The Congress is facing not only the need to speak out to the world of unbelief in modern terms, significant of a moral universe, but also the mission to reach out to the "unevangelized" areas. The Manifesto calls upon each of the 18 national churches in the Anglican communion to pool their money, preachers and teachers.
"We need to examine our priorities . . . . A new organ in Lagos or New York, for example, might mean that 12 fewer priests are trained in Asia or Latin America."
The framers of the Manifesto - the Advisory Council of Missionary Strategy (composed mainly of bishops) - say: "What we are really asking is the rebirth of the Anglican Communion, which means the death of many old things - but infinitely more, the birth of entirely new relationships."
The Congress has the document under deliberation. Well may all heed the criticism of Bishop J. C. Vockler of Polynesia concerning the luxury in affluent churches. He said he runs the biggest diocese in the Anglican Communion for an entire year on less money than some Canadian parishes spend in one month.