Family Matters

THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION is a beloved, global, traditional, innovative, challenging, frustrating, and sometimes very confusing institution. A lot like families I know.

On Jan.14, a majority of the Anglican senior leaders voted that, for a period of three years, no one from the Episcopal Church’s 109 dioceses in the United States and 17 other countries may “[any] longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee, and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.”

This action came in response to a decision made by the Episcopal Church last July to remove its canonical language that confines marriage to unions between a man and a woman and authorizes two new marriage rites with language for use with same-sex or opposite-sex couples.

Yet the Anglican leaders also unanimously expressed their desire to “walk together in the grace and love of Christ” as this process unfolds.

This situation is being handled far differently than was women’s ordination. In 1994, I was one of the first women to be ordained a priest in the Church of England, also a member of the Anglican Communion. Though Florence Li Tim-Oi became the first woman ordained as an Anglican priest in January 1944 in Hong Kong and the Episcopal Church in the U.S. legally ordained women in 1976, it took almost another 20 years for the Church of England to come to a common mind. And it wasn’t until 2014 that the Church of England allowed women to be consecrated as bishops. There are still seven provinces in the Anglican Communion that do not allow women to be priests.

This is the slow process of watching a global family change. In the case of women’s ordination, each part of the family decides for themselves, within their own cultural context, the right way forward in the right time.

It is clear that this recent act of censure on the part of the Anglican senior leaders is a desperate attempt to maintain unity in a communion whose more conservative members have threatened to walk away.

During our campaign for the ordination of women in England, the phrase “two integrities” was used. It was language that allowed for respect and understanding within a community where people hold very different views and interpretations of scripture. For us, it was a key to unity. It required open-hearted conversation, which required relationship, which required proximity.

I am encouraged that the Anglican leaders have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint a working group “to maintain conversation among ourselves with the intention of restoration of relationship, the rebuilding of mutual trust, healing the legacy of hurt, recognizing the extent of our commonality, and exploring our deep differences, ensuring they are held between us in the love and grace of Christ.”

In looking for new ways to work out differences, the Anglican leadership would do better if women were represented in their number. (The only female provincial head retired last November.) Most Anglicans are women. Where are they when far-reaching decisions are made?

In 2007, when similar tensions arose in the Anglican Communion, Anglican women meeting at the U.N. and representing the diversity of women across the worldwide church issued this statement: “Given the global tensions so evident in our church today, we do not accept that there is any one issue of difference or contention which can, or indeed would, ever cause us to break our unity as represented by our common baptism. Neither would we ever consider severing the deep, abiding bonds of affection which characterize our relationships as Anglican women.”