The CRISIS ZONE

a meditation to assist other meditations

It has become commonplace, since the close of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the USA in August 2003, to refer to the ECUSA and the Anglican Communion as being in crisis. However, the truth of the matter is that an already existing crisis in the Anglican Family has now been extended and deepened, with intense emotions being released at the present time.

In words written in 1990, Gillian Evans, a well-known Cambridge scholar & writer, offered this [correct] judgment: "But above all, it [the ordination of women as bishops] makes the Anglican Church not a single Communion seeking unity with others [e.g., Lutherans & Orthodox], but itself a crisis zone, in which the desire for unity struggles to hold together what structural anomalies pull apart. That must be frankly confessed." (Authority in the Church, p.80)

Let us frankly confess this truth with Ms Evans.

But what are the "structural anomalies"? They are two aspects of order in conflict - that which places the emphasis upon the local diocese/province as calling and appointing Ministers & that which sees Ministry as belonging to the universal Church and thus only authentic if acceptable to the whole Church. The Anglican Family of Churches has been experiencing for over a decade what is called "impaired communion" because what has been decided upon and done locally when a woman has been ordained has neither been accepted by the whole Anglican Family nor by major ecumenical partners.

The Anglican Communion [Family] of Churches became a crisis zone when local wishes were preferred to universal order, especially and directly so when the first women were consecrated. And that crisis zone becomes larger year by year as more women are ordained, and especially as more women are consecrated.

The crisis began because what had been previously been believed, taught and confessed as belonging to ordination was brought into question, doubted, and set aside. Ordination to the presbyterate [priesthood] or to the episcopate may be said to contain three elements - the gift of the Holy Spirit to the candidate from the Lord Christ for the office; the acceptance by the parish/diocese of the candidate; and the being placed in the universal order of the Church by the act of the laying on of hands by the bishop (s). In the case of women candidates none of these elements is either clear or sure for there are large parts of the visible Church that do not accept that the Spirit is given to women for priestly ministry, that oppose the ordination of women and that state that they are not placed in the universal order. (It may be recalled that the Anglican doctrine of reception was invented in 1988 in order to seek to deal with this real problem on the basis of charitable assumptions, testing and discernment and to maintain as high a level of impaired communion as is possible in the Anglican Family of Churches.)

It is generally accepted that at the very least UNITY, and the Episcopate as the sign of that unity, belong to the bene esse (and more likely the plene esse or even the esse) of the Church. In the Anglican Family the unity of the dioceses and of the Church has been seen as centered upon and in the Bishop on what may be described as three planes. In the diocese he is the chief Pastor, Teacher and Celebrant, and he shares these offices with his presbyters; he unites his diocese with other dioceses in province and worldwide by his sharing in the universal Episcopate; and he unites the church of today with the church of yesterday through his belonging to a historical line of Bishops, through time and across space. Now it is clear that a woman cannot fulfill these three relational aspects of the Episcopate simply because she is not accepted by all in her diocese, all in her province and all in the universal Church. The esse of the Church is shattered by the innovation of the ordination of women and especially by the consecration of women and so we talk of "impaired communion" as a nice way of handling it.

One major reason (not often realized) why the innovation of "gay" unions and ordinations is felt so intensely now is because within the Anglican Family of Churches it entered into an already existing crisis-zone, a zone which the leadership has attempted to avoid, play down and minimize. Whether the latest addition to the crisis can be permanently solved without solving the former is a major question.

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.)