Philip Turner and Ephraim Radner. The Anglican Communion Institute. April 29th, 2015
What Then Shall We Do? A Note on the upcoming General Convention of the Episcopal Church
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Synod was “very out of date”, [Pete Broadbent] said. “It’s based on a 1980s or 1970s representative democracy thing, which really doesn’t work.” — from Madeleine Davies, Church Growth: Bishop Broadbent rounds on critics of Reform and Renewal.
The quite radical question that the last General Convention posed to commissioners who were to be “far from power” was this: “In what new shape would The Episcopal Church be more missional?” And now the proposed answer is: “A shape closer to the standard template for mainline American denominations.” That is, faced with frightening evidence that the denomination is in a steep decline, the response was to be less unusual as the steep decline continues. The criticisms of that response from Turner and Radner are reasonable, of course, but a calming outbreak of constitutionalism would not have been a better answer to the question the General Convention posed. The big story is that, even in institutional peril, mere representation lacks the imagination to transcend itself.
Broadbent is right. Synods do not think out of the box; synods often are the box. “A lot of the pushback that we got was about the fact that Bishops suddenly started giving leadership.” said Bishop Broadbent. “And people said, ‘Oh you can’t do that, you haven’t got the Synod behind you; you haven’t got this that and the other’ – because we have this democratic understanding of the Church which is synodically governed and episcopally led, which is a phrase that we trot off without every really working out what that means. When someone starts actually giving leadership that gets questioned. Now I am unashamed. I think we have to give leadership because that’s what our episcopae entails.” And Ian Paul points out that episcope can make a difference. “Dr Paul said that he had been ‘staggered’ by how quickly attendance fell in one diocese after a Bishop who had overseen growth was moved to another diocese, and another with ‘a very different style, different priorities, different background experience’ took over.” On both sides of the pond, Anglicans serious about reform and renewal have some serious ecclesiological thinking to do.