Editor’s Note: This essay is part of an extended series, February 10-21, focused on the related subjects of the succession at Canterbury and the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals crafted by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO).
The Archbishop of Canterbury, regardless of who the incumbent is, serves as a means of asking about Anglicanism writ large. The nettle to be grasped is that Canterbury means three things, each important and enduring, though they are different in nature.
First it is a legacy of apostolic memory. Canterbury conjures for us Augustine’s mission, as well as the martyrdom of Becket and later of Cranmer. I recall seeing on a night tour of the cathedral the importance that site had for a group of Anglicans from the Global South. Canterbury as a resonant and dense symbol is not evacuated by recent struggles. Nor should the see be denigrated as merely of historical interest, as for example the Book of Common Prayer 1979 did in designating certain parts of the tradition as “historical documents.”
Second, Canterbury has become the center of a vast global missionary outreach. This occurred largely in the 19th and 20th centuries, though there were precursors. It involved the missionary societies, high and low, though the evangelists in the younger churches bore the brunt of the task. The communion is first the fruit of this movement. Much of it seemed historically fortuitous (and morally complicated), but it is for us providential. Canterbury served as shorthand for that remarkable expansion.
Third, then, it became a bureaucracy, with the creation of the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates’ Meeting, etc., with the Archbishop of Canterbury at their center. The Instruments of Communion and the reports (Virginia of 1997, Windsor of 2004, Covenant Design of 2007) were creative conciliar efforts in this trajectory, and Canterbury had a considerable role in all this, though these possibilities now seem to have run aground. Still, it is good to remember that these three meanings are layered, nor can anyone be ignored.
All of this is what therapists call the presenting problem to the pressing question, no less than in the past several generations, whether Anglicanism can survive as a fellowship, at once expansive and capable of expressing what is normative. I served on the Lambeth Design Group, the body tasked with preparing for the last Lambeth Conference (2022), one that had been delayed not merely because of COVID. I would have to say that the conference failed to find a path, either there or ahead, to accomplish this task of fellowship and capable of expressing what is normative — but not for want of effort.
This is a distinct question from what to make of the See of Canterbury, though they are at present related. A way of putting the matter might be that the Archbishop of Canterbury has had a purchase on both our roots back to the ancient Church as well as to the Reformation era. We do indeed need to create a new kind of structure, but Canterbury in its threefold nature helps to ensure that such a structure is not simply our devising (and so a result in some measure of our strife).
Let me add, as an aside, that I suggested in a contribution to Covenant some time ago that an Archbishop of Canterbury for the Communion might be added along the lines of the two Archbishops of Nairobi. It was pointed out that this was impossible canonically, though I do have the sense that “impossible” is what institutions say until they need to accomplish something, at which point the lawyers go to work. An Archbishop of Canterbury from the Global south could make a difference.
It is certainly encouraging, in this regard, that both IASCUFO and, recently, the Anglican Consultative Council have found the Global South’s work on a covenant to be promising. This is no small accomplishment. Surely the Global South’s covenant and the earlier communion’s effort at a covenant are related to one another; the former may accomplish the goal of the latter, as it were from the ground up rather than the top down. In the cases of both covenants, the ultimate end has been to make a claim of normative belief possible for the communion, even if it is not owned by all. Could it be that the recent, seeming dead end may have been a necessary preparing of the ground for an answer to the normativity question? And could it be that Canterbury’s role will come into focus in a new way once progress is made on this latter question?
What we are seeking is some expression of what has been called “differentiated communion,” a concept that draws on the notions in the conciliar documents of recent decades (“greatest degree of communion possible,” various “tiers,” “walking together but at a distance”). We can perceive certain elements that would be required.
First, the voluntary element found in the Windsor document must be present. Second, some version of the doctrine of reception would be necessary, so that the novelty, in this case the new definition of marriage, would be seen as in a time of testing over a longer time frame. This would mean other churches in the communion would have a role. Third, there would need to be some working out of this differentiation. What if Lambeth 2032 were an event of fellowship, study, and prayer (as was 2022); better yet, what if the Anglican Congress were revived, at the end of which the bishops could remain for a time of retreat, prayer, fellowship, and trading ideas? Covenant churches would meet and discuss subjects in a way more akin to the deliberative role of earlier Lambeth Conferences. For example, serious theological responses to documents for ecumenical dialogues have waited in some cases decades for formal responses. The latter would not be recognized as authoritative by some of the communion, but that is inevitable in this differentiated version of Communion. To borrow the parlance of the Episcopal Church, we would be talking, here as elsewhere, about Communion Across Difference.
Let me close with a word of encouragement and exhortation, of paraklesis (2 Cor. 1). We cannot abandon this effort, what amounts to internal ecumenism, because quite simply the Church is called to be “one as [Christ] and the Father are one.” Furthermore, we are all too familiar with the doctrinal debate of the past season of our life. But new challenges loom, especially human dignity in the face of the rise of technology. Here Archbishop Welby’s interest in theology and science might come to the fore, though perhaps in a more somber mood. We may well be in solidarity in ways we cannot now fully anticipate. We cannot only prosecute the last dispute when a new one is visible on the horizon. Maintaining a twofold koinonia of friendship on the one hand and deliberation on the other rightly awaits the day in which fuller cooperation may be possible and indeed imperative. We may look back and realize that the recent travails of the Anglican Communion were the growing pains of its adolescence.
The Rt. Rev. Dr. George Sumner, ordained priest in Tanzania in 1981, is the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. He has served in cross-cultural ministry in Navajoland and has a doctorate in theology from Yale.