To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Anglican Congress and to evaluate its legacy, the Canadian Church Historical Society and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church hosted “MRI at 60: Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence” April 12-13 at St. Paul’s, Bloor Street, in Toronto.
Organizers in 1963 hoped that the congress would radically change the Anglican attitude to mission. Over 1,000 bishops, clergy, and laity from almost every diocese of the Anglican Communion attended as delegates. Seventeen hundred people heard the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, preach at the opening service. The gathering’s primary document, “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ,” became known as MRI and was described by Time as the “Toronto Manifesto.”
The congress met in the middle of the post-war dismantling of the British Empire. For the Anglican Communion, decolonization meant creating new self-governing ecclesiastical provinces, led by bishops from local populations. This development disrupted England’s dominant position in Anglicanism. Instead of rich provinces merely giving to those that were poor, there would be new and mutually beneficial relationships. One of the key messages of the congress was “mission is everywhere to everywhere, no senders and receivers, no mother churches and daughter churches.” Mission was to move away from paternalism to partnership and sharing power.
The Rt. Rev. Stephen F. Bayne Jr., Bishop of Olympia from 1947 to 1959 and the Anglican Communion’s first executive officer, was the architect of the 1963 congress and drafted most of the MRI.
“Mission is not only a giving to others, it is equally a sharing and receiving,” Bayne wrote. “Every church has both resources and needs. … Mission is not the kindness of the lucky to the unlucky; it is mutual, united obedience to the one God Whose mission it is.”
Dr. Alan Hayes, professor emeritus of church history at Wycliffe College in Toronto, observed that in the published proceedings of the congress, “few speak directly of the end of colonialism. Those that do are either racialized clergy, or laypeople with third-world experience.” Hayes suggested that the congress “sublimated” decolonization into the discussion of mission. “For many in England, decolonization was humiliating, and for many Africans and Asians, it was painfully incomplete. By contrast, ‘world mission’ sounded constructive and hopeful. This sublimation was designed by the program committee, which was dominated by Canadian white male clergy.”
“The congress had a profound effect on the church’s self-identity and especially on the host diocese of Toronto,” said Dr. David Danner of Trinity College in Toronto. “[Composed] of over 1,000 delegates from 17 independent churches, the gathering represented a multiplicity of ethnicities, tongues, and cultures. Delegates from primarily WASP countries such as Canada were awed by the rich diversity on display. Toronto Anglicans billeted most of the delegates, making for an eye-opening interchange for local hosts otherwise accustomed to a staid, Anglo-centric view of Anglicanism.”
That said, most of the primates were Anglo-Saxon. Organizers had hoped a third-world province might host the congress. And of the 26 speakers, two were women.
Canon Mark Chapman, professor of the history of modern theology at Oxford University, explained in his keynote address at “MRI at 60” that there had been two earlier congresses involving all three orders of ministry. The London Congress in 1908 was “the closest thing that Anglicans ever staged to a World’s Fair,” Chapman said. “Over 17,000 people from across the Anglican world attended daily sessions in various London venues from June 15 to 24. Importantly — and for the first time in Pan-Anglicanism — it included a number (admittedly modest) of indigenous laity and clergy from across the Anglican Communion.”
The Lambeth Conference of 1948 welcomed the suggestion of a second congress. In 1954, the Episcopal Church’s General Convention passed a resolution inviting a bishop from every diocese and missionary district, along with one priest and one lay delegate, to a Pan-Anglican Congress, which met August 4-13 in Minneapolis. It was the first representative gathering of the Anglican Communion outside the British Isles.
The Rev. Dr. Ben Ngaya-an, church history professor at St. Andrew’s Theological Seminary in Manila, said that MRI was “a concerted effort to redefine mission in response to two closely related issues, namely: the prevalence of dependency issues in most if not all the former parts of British and U.S. empires and the growing clamor of ‘daughter’ churches in the aforesaid places for self-governance. Unwittingly, however, the MRI [has] generally continued to maintain a divide between the former masters and their subjects. The former masters have ended up funding most MRI projects, and therefore resulted in the apparent perpetuation of dependency on the part of those in the side of ‘receivers’ of grants.”
He added: “Yet there were cases where less financially endowed churches have played the role of ‘givers.’” He cited the example of the Philippine Episcopal Church, which sent missionaries and teachers to what is now the Diocese of Sabah. Also, the PEC has encouraged its educational institutions to open their doors to international students. St. Andrew’s Theological Seminary now enrolls students from Asia and Oceania. The MRI also successfully challenged the seminary to aggressively campaign for local support of its operation.
The Rev. Rakgadi Khobo, chaplain to St Mary’s School, Waverley, Johannesburg, described Henry VIII’s separation from the Church of Rome as decolonizing. “I firmly believe that Anglicanism is inherently decolonial,” she said. “Anglicanism’s self-understanding as the Catholic Church in England exemplifies its decolonial character. The English Reformation had in its DNA decolonization.”
She maintained that Anglican missionaries in South Africa “never contemplated church along racial lines.”
The sixth Metropolitan of British Columbia, Bishop Ralph Dean, who was program chairman of the congress, declared that we cannot serve Jesus Christ “except insofar as we are prepared for personal and ecclesiastical and parochial self-sacrifice, dedication, and whatever else it may cost us. There never can be a resurrection without a death. And when we die to ourselves, the Church of God, which is his body, will go forward.”
Matthew S.C. Olver, executive director and publisher of The Living Church Foundation, also spoke at the “MRI at 60” conference. “[A]s the Anglican Communion’s need for structures to help hold it together in the face of new struggles became more pressing, the language of mutuality, of self-sacrifice, and even of death has slowly receded — died, we might even say. In place of this language emerged the dominance of the cold descriptor, autonomous.” Olver argued that autonomous has moved “well beyond its plain meaning (that each province had its own canon law) to an existential claim (a ghost, we might say, that haunts our synods and councils — a ghost that whispers to us about the ones with whom we disagree: ‘You have no need of them’).”
“Let me speak plainly,” Olver said. “Our churches have no hope unless we can truly believe, and then truly act, as though we truly and devoutly need each other — especially the ones with whom we disagree within our particular church and in other churches, Anglican or otherwise. For unless we wish to unchurch them (a bold move indeed), those ‘others’ are God’s hands, his feet, and his eyes.”
Tensions
MRI certainly ruffled ecumenical feathers. Dr. Jesse Zink, principal of the Montreal Diocesan Theological College, noted that MRI was written and publicized at a “critical ecumenical moment. The International Missionary Council had recently become part of the World Council of Churches, and there were several serious movements towards church reunion in countries around the world. In this context, MRI was greeted with worry by some ecumenical partners as representing an overly specific focus on one denomination.” At the 1964 meeting of the Council of Churches of South-East Asia, MRI came under “significant criticism” and occasioned subsequent correspondence and meetings between Bishop Bayne and British missiologist Lesslie Newbigin.
Who should a local mission or parish, especially in a remote area, relate to first: the other local denominations ministering in the same region, or Anglican churches spread across the communion? MRI hardly mentioned other denominations.
In his diary entry of August 17, 1963, Max Warren, one of the key figures behind the Toronto Congress and its manifesto, admitted that the document “unfortunately suggests that the Anglican Communion is the Body of Christ. There are only two incidental references within the body of the document to the ecumenical enterprise.”
Some Anglicans wanted greater confessional unity. The Lutheran World Council (later Federation) had just formed. Such unity would require more inter-Anglican structures. Others wanted more local ecumenism, local organic unity such as the Church of South India had achieved in 1947. There can be ecumenism at the top with interdenominational dialogues, but perhaps more importantly there needs to be local organic unity on the ground.
Canon Paul Mitchell of St Francis College in Queensland, Australia, told the anniversary gathering that nearly 90 percent of Australian dioceses were represented at the Toronto Anglican Congress in 1963. “The returning delegates brought mixed reactions. Archbishop Hugh Gough, Primate of the Church of England in Australia, enthusiastically pursued the ‘Congress Message’ and established a national MRI Committee in 1964. … Despite support at many levels in the hierarchy of the church, MRI was strongly opposed and ridiculed in some places. The main response, as happened elsewhere, descended into preparation of lists of projects to be funded by the Australian dioceses. MRI seemed less a miracle and ‘more ruddy interference.’”
Dr. Christopher Brittain, dean of Divinity at Trinity College in Toronto, said that he “can’t see a scenario” in which the first Instrument of Communion, the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, “can remain indefinitely limited to candidates from the Church of England and Wales.”
The “MRI at 60” conference was dedicated to retired Bishop Terry Brown, the CCHS president who died just days before the event he had organized. In his abstract, Brown wrote that while publicly the Diocese of Niagara and its bishop fully supported MRI, “there were also many tensions when what were considered well-run diocesan programs came under MRI scrutiny. Likewise, Bishop Walter Bagnall was very jealous for the clergy he had recruited and nurtured, and was initially privately hostile to their interest in MRI appeals to work overseas.” Bishop Bagnall was probably not alone.
