A groundswell movement is pushing for the Anglican Church of Australia to claim its broad variety, at a time of fracture and division.
After the founding of GAFCON Australia’s Diocese of the Southern Cross in August 2022 and the Kigali Commitment a year later, Australian Anglicans began discussions about how to express different expressions of the church — and remain Anglican and in communion.
The result of those discussions, the National Comprehensive Anglican Network (NCAN), is still sorting practical issues like creating a decent website, and exactly how it will function as a movement. But it already has drawn interest from progressive and conservative wings of the church, hundreds of clergy and lay people from all of Australia’s 23 dioceses, and people from many backgrounds.
The group supports the many streams of theology and spirituality that have been part of Anglican history — “even when they are in tension with each other, or apparently contradictory, for the sake of comprehending the whole truth,” its founding statement says.
At a meeting in Adelaide in February, NCAN chairman Bishop Stephen Pickard smiled at the question of whether GAFCON members would be welcome. “Anybody is welcome,” he told TLC.
Pickard is a former assistant bishop in Adelaide and in Canberra and Goulburn, scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brisbane, and adjunct professor of theology at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. NCAN, he said, values a church that welcomes differences and diversity of gifts and perspectives and that wrestles with disagreements. Ultimately it is committed to finding and living in truth together and not apart.
It is “less of a pick and choose,” he said, and “more of an open invitation for those who want to come on the journey, which captures this sense of the love for the unity of the church and its witness to the gospel.”
He said different traditions in the church will help it deal with the pressing issues of modern life, such as climate change, racism, sexuality, poverty, inequality, technology, care of children, and war and peace.
The movement is not trying to recreate a golden age.
“You might look back in the time frame of the Christian tradition and see elements of genuine openness and zeal for the gospel and the church — and usually they are full of controversy at the same time,” Pickard said.
“The Reformation, for example, had golden nuggets of insights, but we are not to scratch where the 16th century itched. We are to scratch where it itches now, with the wisdom of where those golden nuggets can be found, but there is no pure place, because amidst the gold there is always contestation and controversy.”
Paul traveled the Mediterranean with the golden nugget of the gospel and preached it everywhere, but he still found conflict, Pickard said.
NCAN wants to focus on the present and the future.
The Rev. David Covington-Groth, a local convener, is clear that NCAN is not a synod lobbying group and is not “them and us” in its perspective.
“It’s finding ground we can stand on and respecting each other’s opinion,” he told TLC.
The group is committed to the understanding that divisions will be with the church for some time and healing will occur slowly.
He quoted Australia’s cartoonist and philosopher, Michael Leunig: “Nothing can be loved at speed.”
“We remain really hopeful that the work of the Spirit might guide that work without making any crazy claims for ‘This is the true and only way,’” Pickard said.