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).
When issued late last year, the IASCUFO’s “Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: Renewing the Instruments of the Anglican Communion” was in response to the request of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in February 2023 to explore “structure and decision-making to help address our differences in the Anglican Communion” (ACC-18, res. 3[a]). Even earlier, the 2022 Lambeth Conference had called for a review of the Communion’s structures, looking to the usefulness of the Instruments of Communion (the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the ACC, and the Primates’ Meeting) and their possible reconfiguration (Lambeth Call on Anglican Identity, 3.3).
The differences mentioned by the ACC are summarized by IASCUFO’s chair, Bishop Graham Tomlin, in his foreword: “Over recent decades … the bonds of unity within the Anglican Communion have been stretched and strained amid deep disagreements concerning the ordained ministry of women within the Church and, more recently, questions about human identity and sexuality. … There is a real prospect of the fragmentation, or even dissolution, of the Communion over the coming years if we do not pay urgent attention to matters of ecclesiology: the contours of communion, the limits of diversity, and means of persevering together amid divisions.”
The paper is well-conceived and theologically deft. It continues the emphasis on communion ecclesiology that has marked major Anglican statements in the past several decades, as well as broader ecumenical trends. This is a welcome emphasis that was by no means certain in the aftermath of the Windsor Report and the failure of the Anglican Covenant proposal. It takes on board and amplifies recent Roman Catholic underscoring of synodality, the “walking together on the way” that characterizes relationships within churches, and (in an ecumenical register) between divided churches.
Even with Anglican divisions in view, IASCUFO’s paper is conceived “not as an end but as the beginning of a new conversation” (sec. 5). The presenting questions concern the faith and order of the Communion: how to think about it in light of disagreement and division, and how to speak directly about this while discerning next steps; also, how to adjust the Communion and its structures to a post-colonial reality. “IASCUFO views these questions as both distinct and intertwined” (sec. 10).
The heart of the paper is an extensive recasting of the vision of communion through examination of the four marks of the Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic (secs. 24-71). This discussion is prefaced by a section on the 1930 Lambeth Conference and its classic definition of the Anglican Communion. This presages one of the chief concerns of the paper: the definition’s reformulation. As recounted in the paper, this definition notes that the churches of the Communion are “in communion with the See of Canterbury”; they “uphold the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order as they are generally set forth in the Book of Common Prayer”; they “are bound together … by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference” (sec. 12).
The paper makes two proposals for the future: a revised description of the Communion, and broadened leadership of the instruments. The latter proposal makes two structural recommendations. First, for a rotating presidency of the ACC between the five regions of the Communion, elected from among the primates by the Primates’ Meeting. Second, for the Primates’ Standing Committee to take a role in calling and convening both the Primates’ Meeting and the Lambeth Conference.
IASCUFO is quite right to point out that its structural proposal will help make the public face of the Anglican Communion look more like what it is in fact: a global communion of churches, in which leadership ought to be broadly shared by people from many different regions and contexts. All well and good. It is worth remarking that both structural recommendations modify the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role in the other instruments. Regarding the Lambeth Conference and the Primates’ Meeting, the role of the Primates’ Steering Committee in calling and convening, and how that relates to the archbishop’s current leadership role, is not specified. It is also noteworthy that additional responsibilities and much greater scope are proposed for the Primates’ Meeting and its Steering Committee. This is a relatively meteoric rise for what is the newest Instrument of Communion.
It is in its revised description of the Anglican Communion that IASCUFO makes the most significant proposal. In short, “communion with the See of Canterbury” is no longer front and center as part of the description: it has been replaced by “historic connection with the See of Canterbury” among a list of other characteristics, including “shared inheritance, mutual service, common counsel (of bishops and others) in conference” (sec. 76) that help to bind the churches of the Communion together. When considered along with the structural proposals modifying the role of Canterbury, this suggests a particular trajectory.
Included in the reformulation is that these churches now “seek to uphold and propagate the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order.” In other words, it is now an aspirational statement, rather than a given. An explanatory note adds, “The churches of the Communion seek to uphold and propagate one faith and order because ‘all of us’ are called to grow into ‘the unity of the faith’ (Eph. 4:13) and because Anglicans disagree about aspects of the one faith and order” (Appendix).
Agreed, to this extent: unity is always something that must be striven for, an objective that must be attained, and seeking is the necessary step toward finding. It is the second explanation, however, that seems a truer account of the reasons for the proposed change; though if that is so, then the disagreement is about faith and order, which we are supposed to be seeking. If Anglicans disagree about aspects of faith and order, then the journey they take together, their synodal “walking together,” will need to be transformative, because the details of the journey’s goal will not be agreed at the start.
The communion between the churches is also aspirational in the proposed description. Through the characteristics that bind them together, these churches “seek interdependently to foster the highest degree of communion possible with one another” (sec. 91). As the paper makes clear, this revised description simply acknowledges the reality of damaged relationships between the churches. This formulation, however, is also in keeping with communion ecclesiology, with an emphasis on the communion that is already shared between Christians, even if it is imperfect. The same theological understanding that has undergirded the ecumenical quest for full visible unity for decades is now deployed to place the relationships of the Anglican Communion’s churches on a new footing, an aspirational quest for the highest degree of communion that may be possible for them.
Here we come to the word whose absence is felt most acutely in the new definition: loyalty. IASCUFO introduces the word interdependent into the definition, harkening back to the need for “mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ” identified by the 1963 Anglican Congress in Toronto. It also moves the word mutual that accompanied the now absent loyalty and joins it to the word service. Mutual service has the virtue of retaining the idea of mutuality, but there is an acknowledged ambiguity in the formula. An elucidation in the Appendix rightly notes that the phrase could mean either the churches’ service to each other, their service together to the world, or perhaps both.
Mutual loyalty is the phrase that has vanished from the definition, and we cannot but feel its lack. It may be objected that loyalty is a word with a sort of old-fashioned British public-school resonance, perhaps an outmoded upper-class conceit that went out with the stiff upper lip. On the other hand, loyalty goes along with solidarity, an element of Catholic social teaching that the Archbishop of Canterbury appealed to in his final Presidential Address at the Lambeth Conference in 2022. Loyalty is also fides, a word that has an even deeper resonance in the Christian tradition: God’s faithfulness to us, and our faith in God, as well as our keeping faith with each other as members of the Church. What affects all ought to be decided by all.
The reason for the absence of this word may be obvious: relationships between Anglican Churches have at times in the past decades demonstrated a singular lack of mutual loyalty, to each other and to the Anglican Communion as a whole. Yet in a definition that is both descriptive and aspirational, the expression of a desire for increased commitment to each other would not be out of place. The IASCUFO paper at several points raises the possibility of such a greater commitment by the communion’s churches (sec. 69), mentioning in particular the Covenantal Structure of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches as a legitimate attempt, through common counsel, at greater coherence in doctrinal and ethical truth (sec. 56).
As the 1920 Lambeth Conference Encyclical Letter noted, the communion’s churches “are not free to deny the truth. They are not free to ignore the fellowship.” Common counsel shorn of mutual loyalty might suggest churches committed to mere conversation without any greater commitment to each other. But setting the reformulated definition within the context of the paper, we have reason to hope that this is not the case. Common counsel in the future will need to be something more than conversation if the Anglican Communion is to fulfill its mission.
The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt is the 11th Bishop of Tennessee. A native of South Carolina, he was consecrated bishop in 2007, having previously served parishes in Western Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
He served in the Church of England from 1987 to 1991, and holds a D.Phil. in theology from Oxford University, where Oliver O’Donovan supervised his work. He has a continuing interest in the early Church (especially Augustine, the subject of his doctoral thesis), as well as in 17th-century Anglicanism. He owes an abiding debt to the Oxford Movement for his spiritual formation.
Bishop John is married to Caroline, and they are the parents of three children.