Seeing this was heartening: Truro Anglican’s bishop, +John Guernsey, finally pulls the plug on Truro’s rector Tory Baucum’s “reconciliation” with Episcopal bishop Shannon Johnston.  This was doubtless a hard pill for Baucum to swallow (as one could feel in his response) but that’s what happens in situations like this.

It’s good to note that the breaking point came over Johnston’s endorsement of another loose cannon of the left: John Dominic Crossan, one of Roman Catholicism’s career deniers.  In some ways Crossan lives in a time warp, and perhaps that’s one reason Johnston felt it was uncontroversial to bring him in.

I mentioned in my last piece on the subject that there have been two rounds of major Episcopal decline: Round I in the 1960′s and 1970′s, and Round II from 2003 onwards.  Almost all the Round II disputes have centred around sexuality.  Although that topic was certainly a big deal during Round I, the core contention (which for Episcopalians was masked by the Prayer Book controversy) was about basic issues of doctrine and belief.  The left’s point of attack were the basics of the faith; when the Episcopal church blinked over James Pike’s challenge of same, things went downhill.

Since that time we’ve had a shift from the “modern” approach, where the Bible’s truth content was denigrated and the basic beliefs were challenged, to a “post-modern” approach, where we say that the Bible is all good but means something entirely different from what it says.  That shift changed the character of the debate, which is why the current acrimony centres around behaviour and not belief.  To a large extent Crossan is a relic of the old pattern, still dangerous but not necessarily the current way of pursuing liberal religion.

But belief drives behaviour.  Had the Episcopal Church or any church stuck to its guns on the essentials of the faith and the truth content of its Scriptures we wouldn’t be where we’re at now, i.e., having to fight the war over human sexuality within the borders of the church, with split following.  (I hope that Evangelicals will take note of this).

Evidently Johnston, like in the movie The Sting, figured that bringing in an old con that everyone had forgotten about would work.  To the credit of Bishop Guernsey and many others, it didn’t.  It’s good that the tipping point came over this and not the usual subject, although that too is present.  My prayer is that the ACNA, Guernsey, Baucum and Truro Anglican will hold fast and not repeat the mistakes of the past.

As we march through this Lenten season, complete with the silliness over the sequester and the post-modern version of the Great Refusal, we come to yet another saga in the Anglican/Episcopal world–the volte-face that has taken place by the Truro Anglican Church and its rector, Tory Baucum, vis-à-vis the Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, Shannon Johnston. It’s amazing, after the public acrimony, cost and litigation that has taken place, that we have so soon an attempt at “reconciliation”, but we’ve got one. It’s even inspiring the new occupant of Lambeth Palace in his quest for same reconciliation on a broader scale. The obvious dumb question is why.

Let me begin by stipulating that, as is usually the case with politics of any kind, there are untransparent complexities at work here.  There are always things going on behind the scenes that move situations in one direction or another that really don’t have much to do with the principle issues at hand, but are the product of the organisational situation on the ground.  In a metropolitan area like Washington with three state/district jurisdictions and Episcopal dioceses to match, both secular and ecclesiastical politics get murky quickly.

The fact that it’s in the capital region, however, is a good place to start in our attempt to pinpoint the underlying problem.  It’s as old as the Episcopal Church itself in this country, but now driven by the change in our country’s power structure and the values held by that power structure.

If we go back to colonial times, the Church of England was the official state church in the colonies south of the Potomac, and thus the preferred church of people of property.  The ones without it, or the ones with property in remote areas, often preferred to go somewhere else.  That, of course, was illegal, and those on the wrong end of things helped to fuel the disestablishment of same Church of England after the American Revolution.

When the remnants of the old Church of England picked themselves off of the floor and pulled themselves together to form the Protestant Episcopal Church, the intent was not to be the people of property at prayer, but that’s how it turned out.  The effect was mutual: the Episcopal Church both shaped the ethic of the upper reaches of society and in turn was shaped by those reaches.  After World War II it became part of the church’s marketing strategy for an upwardly obsessed society, which produced a spectacular roller coaster ride in terms of membership numbers: straight up through the 1950′s and 1960′s, straight down in the 1970′s.

The left lurch of the Episcopal Church is well documented, although many in Round II (in the 2000′s) weren’t around for Round I (in the 1960′s and 1970′s).  The big difference between I and II was that the latter actually resulted in a meaningful secession.  That secession has left some loose ends, and evidently they’re no looser than in the shadow of our nation’s capital.  I suspect that it’s not an accident that this first serious threat to the unity of the ACNA is coming from there.

To start with, a church which appeals to the upper reaches best does so with an appeal to tradition, an appeal that needs to be more aesthetic than one of conviction.  That’s at the core of the property disputes: both sides know that much of the pastiche of Episcopal religion is tied up in its historic properties.  Although the left has grossly overplayed (and overpayed) their hand on this one, they know that the appearance of continuity can mask the lack of real continuance of belief.  The other side, believing they have both, struggle to get the property so that they may present the appeal to the truth through the appeal of tradition.  Losing that advantage is the key setback of losing the property litigation.

Turning to the issue that detonated Round II, the LGBT has become to the American élite left what the Communist Party was to the proletariat: its vanguard.  A church which is started in opposition to same is bound to put itself in the crosshairs of the toughest, most tenacious force in the American political and social scene today.  It’s not a formula for popularity, especially with those who are at the heights.

And being in the capital region makes an élite appeal unavoidable, especially for a church somewhere in the Anglican/Episcopal world.  Beyond their bouncing from one moral crusade for “justice” to another, our elites’ dream is to make the U.S. like Europe, where the wealth of the nation is sucked into the capital, which takes a generous cut of the proceeds and redistributes the rest back out as it sees fit.  Under these conditions, we really don’t have a left-right divide: we have an us-them divide, which explains, among other things, why our media is so deep in the tank for Barack Obama.  Under these circumstances, presenting the Gospel to “us” is challenging: “us” takes one look at it and sees a competitor to “our” control, which is the underlying reason “us” are going secular.

My guess is that Baucum and his parishioners are beaten down on the one side by an Episcopal Church which manages one property victory after another (whether they can replicate this in SC is a whole different subject) and on the other by a mission field which has turned blue.  They’re looking for relief, and coming from a tradition where the emphasis is on comity, the idea of burying the hatchet with the likes of Shannon Johnston is a major temptation.

Baucum–and indeed the ACNA in general–must realise, however, that seeking such accommodation defeats the reason for the ACNA and the Anglican revolt.  What was the point of secession, of the cost of litigation and for most of the losers relocation, when you’re just going to throw in the towel?  And, to get back to the key issue, what’s the purpose of a church whose beliefs are little different from the world around it?

In such a hostile environment, presenting and living the life that Jesus Christ offers us will need an entirely different way of doing things than conventional, open-society church.  First, however, we must, like the song from India, decide to follow Jesus and not turn back.  We must understand that such a choice is not going to be popular, especially in a place where Our Lord’s proclamation that all power is given to him and not to the mission field’s paymaster.

The higher one goes in society, the greater the temptation for Christianity to attempt to strike a nice accommodation with the world around it.  That’s the occupational hazard of churches in general, but of the Anglican/Episcopal world in particular, given its “target demographic” on this continent.  The price to live for Our Lord is high, but the price of caving has been even higher.  What makes anyone believe that the latter will get any lower?

Ever since the hapless Rowan Williams began his exit from the stage of Lambeth Palace, and the former oil executive Justin Welby began measuring the curtains, there has been a great deal of optimism about the future course of the Church of England.  Would there be a way of putting the Communion back together again?  Would the revisionists be sent packing from Albion’s state church?  Would the Evangelicals be triumphant in the end, as their numbers show they should?  Once again we see hopeful signs.

However, in the Anglican Communion, which has in the eyes of much of Christianity the reputation of boring, repetitious liturgy and even more boring homiletics, there’s never a dull moment, and even before the mitre was officially passed the word got out that Canon Jeffrey Johns, the poster child for full inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the Church of England, was being considered to succeed Welby++ in the see of Durham.  This has generated the predictable reaction from the Central African provinces and a cloud for those in the U.S. for whom recognition by Canterbury is the silver lining of ecclesiastical life.

Let’s start with the obvious: does anyone really believe that the relationship between Canon Johns and his partner is celibate?  The LGBT community is about a lot of things these days, but celibacy isn’t one of them: not for themselves, not for anyone else either.  If the Church of England seats him on the same throne that once held up N.T. Wright, it would only do so on that representation of celibacy.  What’s going to happen if, after this is done, he comes up with the lame “I lied” admission that’s so fashionable these days?

Even if that event doesn’t happen, the transformation of the Church of England into an irreproachable repository of the orthodox faith has more obstacles than somewhat.

The Church of England is, after all, a state church.  The brouhaha over women bishops brought threats that the state would take action to override the vote of the laity in the matter.  The debate over same-sex marriage in churches has brought similar threats, although these may be abated for the moment.  But face it: the Church of England was formed so that it would do the sovereign’s unBiblical bidding about a divorce, so why not do some more unBiblical biddings?

As far as Evangelicals and their numbers are concerned, back home in Palm Beach it wasn’t the number of people you knew, it was whether you knew the right people.  The LGBT community has, implicitly or explicitly, worked the system with that ethic, and it didn’t hurt that they were economically privileged in the first place.  Our political and other systems, awash in cash and influence-peddling, only have the form of popular choice; the deal is rigged far more than most will realise or admit.

This whole blather about the Evangelicals’ numbers doesn’t matter: the right people have decided, the rest of us just have to deal with the consequences.  Has everyone forgotten that the revisionists started out in TEC as a minority, well placed in seminaries? (That, BTW, is the message behind the Louis Giglio fiasco, which has led to responses like this. Personally I think it’s for the best; Christians don’t need to give either the UK or the US any more cred than they have to).

Anglicans are and have been for some time in a place to respond meaningfully to this, because they have a new orthodox centre in Africa and elsewhere.  The old colonial powers are doing their best on more than one level to curb their “progeny”, but the world is changing.  It’s time for Anglicans to pull the plug on Canterbury, to leave ethnocentric dreams behind and live in a world where the only blood line they’re concerned about is the one started by Jesus Christ himself.  And wasn’t that the idea to start with?

I’ve thought about writing this for some time, but Stand Firm in Faith is doing what they do best: standing firm, in this case against the “Three Streams” concept of Anglicanism.  Since I have, indirectly, been accused of holding this idea–and more recently gotten myself bogged down in an unedifying debate on the subject of the origins and nature of Anglicanism–and at the risk of starting the blogger’s equivalent of Groundhog Day again, I’d like to say a few things about this.

First, I don’t think that the composite nature of Anglicanism is the result of a conscious effort on the part of its founders.  The whole beginning of the Church of England is a messy, complicated affair that does nothing for the self-proclaimed role of the English-speaking peoples as the human race’s guardians of liberty.  It was in fact a brutal, zig-zag process which cost many of its participants on both sides their lives.  The result was a church basically Reformed in doctrine but with a number of residual “outs” that would either enrich it or come back to haunt it, depending upon how you look at the situation.

Second, the lack of human intentionality doesn’t preclude the fact that God is working in a process even when it looks to us to be flawed or not in a “straight line”.  Too much of the discussion in the Christian world centres around how this or that tradition, institution or doctrinal system is “seamlessly” descended both from above and from the origins of the faith.  The Orthodox, for example, would like for you to think that the Apostles were crossing themselves with three fingers and chanting the Thrice-Holy Hymn (with or without the additions of the Peter the Fuller) before Acts 2 ends, but we know things are more complicated than that.  Part of the nature of the creation is that created beings are imperfect, but that imperfection is the source of their free will.  In this time where everything is a “perfect package deal” that gets lost, but it doesn’t change reality.

Third, the adoption of an episcopal form of government was a strategic mistake from the standpoint of having a truly Reformed church.  Calvin himself commended the Presbyterian form of government, not only because it squared with his concept of what the church was, but also because it represented a clean break with Roman Catholicism, a break that he, a Frenchman in a country where Catholicism was his major opponent, felt a greater necessity for than those in a country where the Roman Catholic church had been effectively nationalised.  I think he knew that, if the bishops were allowed to hang around, sooner or later someone would get the idea that we should start drifting towards Rome.  It took three centuries for that to happen, but happen it did.  Calvin may have been wrong about many things, but he wasn’t stupid.

There were those in England who agreed with Calvin, and much of the unrest in the seventeenth century leading up to Cromwell stemmed from that agreement.  There was also the example of the Scots, who did adopt Calvin’s model.  But if there’s one thing the English hate just about more than anything else, it’s being upstaged by the Scots.

Turning from that unpleasant thought, we need to consider another aspect of the “three streams” analogy that gets overlooked: what happens when the streams overflow their banks.  Much of the impact of Anglicanism on Christianity in general takes place outside of the Anglican confine, and in turn those influences have come back to the Anglican world in one fashion or another.  Other than the residual influence of non-Anglican churches which come out of an Anglican culture (I think of the West Indies at this point) the biggest overflow is the Wesleyan movement.  John Wesley never intended to be anything than an Anglican, and his idea is deeply rooted in Anglicanism, but ultimately it had to go outside of the confines of the Anglican world to flower.  When it did, Protestant Christianity found the strongest alternative to a purely Reformed construct that it has ever had, and of course modern Pentecost came out of the Wesleyan tradition.

Finally, most discussions of streams and what centre on doctrine when the key question is ecclesiology.  I’ve written about this before, but the question we must answer is this: is the church a formal mediator between man and God?  And can the church ultimately make divinely authoritative pronouncements on the meaning and definition of our faith? These, more than anything, are the questions that separate churches which profess and call themselves Protestant and Roman Catholicism.  Anglo-Catholicism is little more than a formalistic spirituality if it does not affirm that it too can bind and loose in the same sense as the Roman Catholic Church, and Anglo-Catholics are not univocal on this.

So there we are.  How to sort this out in one ecclesiastical “structure” where revisionists really make a mess out of things and have the upper hand in many high places is the ongoing challenge in the Anglican-Episcopal world.  If we keep our eyes on the essentials, and realise that the messy origins neither prevent progress nor offer perfect uniformity, we’d go a long way towards realising God’s plan for the Anglican world, if not ours.