Did Peter Jensen Save the Global Anglican Communion???

A benign picture of a recently departed but scary prelate.

11 days ago, after a tumultuous term for a dozen years, the most Reverend Archbishop Peter Jensen retired as the leader of the Sydney Anglicans.  I hate many of his views but he may have saved the Anglican denomination from tearing itself to bits.

The Anglican Communion matters.  At 80 to 85 million adherents, it is the third biggest Christian denomination after Catholicism and Orthodoxy. 

Anglicanism matters also because it represents the tensions all the big denominations of faith face – diversity and disagreement.  How they manage this critical to the future of the denomination concerned.  It is also a pointer to all global organisations, secular and sacred, on the question of managing change when we have divergent global views. As change hits different countries in different ways and at different speeds, global churches (and other global institutions) have a real problem keeping it all together.

In the homeland of England, the C of E is sclerotic.  Click on this PowerPoint discussion by Prof Linda Woodhead.  http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics/faith-in-research-2013.aspx

This survey of English belief discloses a Church sliding into irrelevance. Even 33% of Anglicans are “doubters”.  Only 6% of the community turns to God for moral guidance.  68% (including “don’t knows”) of the community don’t really think about the established Church at all and of the rest, only 18% see it as positive.  Last year at the November Synod, the idea of women bishops was rejected to massive public derision.  They had another go last week at the Synod in the beautiful northern city of York where the Synod agreed to a new glacial process to decide on this unexceptional idea.  Instead of derision, this development elicited a yawn.  In its home of Great Britain, Anglicanism appears to be a train wreck.

Anglicanism very roughly follows the boundaries of the British Empire with adherents in the UK, Africa, here and increasingly Asia. Anglicanism and indeed Christianity in general are having a growth spurt in the developing world at the expense of Islam. There is a claim by a Muslim scholar that 6 million Muslims are lost each year to Christianity particularly in Africa. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/AlJazeerahAfrica.php

 One of the beneficiaries of this trend is African Anglicanism.  There are more Nigerian Anglicans than in the home of this denomination, England.  Thus the Africans are claiming to have more power in both Catholicism and Anglicanism.  Catholic and Anglican Africans can mount a claim for more power in their respective churches.  They are growing.  They are waging the often bloody war with Islam.  They have the numbers.  They ought to have the power.  And these congregations are often hopelessly conservative on the two topics that that churches traditionally do poorly – sex and gender.

Anglicanism is being stalked by the prospect of Schism because its conservative wing cannot deal with pretty unremarkable ideas such as ordination of gays and women.  The conservatives can be found in every part of the Anglican world but the Africans are big on these topics and the Nigerians in particular make no bones about it.  They will not tolerate ordination of gays and women.

The Dioceses in the West naturally find these ideas not too confronting.  The northern Americans embrace gay and women leadership.

To the outside world, there is a temptation to see the divide over doctrine as a racial divide.  That is not the case.  But it does have a superficial look of the black versus white wings of the church.  The reality is that the American diocese is bitterly divided with the conservatives gravitating towards two movements – the Continuing Anglican movement which is outside the main denomination and the Anglo Catholics who were poached by Pope Benedict in 2007.  The can keep their Anglican liturgy and their married priests but are hybrid Roman / English Catholics. 

Peter Jensen allied himself to a similar conservative grouping called GAFCON – the Global Anglican Future Conference.  This mob includes the Africans and other conservatives.  I think that it may have saved Anglicanism from schism.  For it spoke to the African conservatives and gave them an outlet for their grievances.  Archbishop Jensen was an important leader of this gang. It also made obvious that this is a doctrinal fight not black versus white divide. 

In 2008, GAFCON met in Jerusalem prior to the Lambeth Conference which is the meeting of worldwide Anglicanism.  The Conference is so named for it takes place a Lambeth Palace which is the headquarters of the boss of Anglicanism, the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

The GAFCON views are loathsome to me and I imagine most of the godless. But I suspect that it saved Anglicanism for the time being.  Within that faith there are intractable disagreements.  These disagreements must have an outlet or the discontented will walk. If organisations do not provide the disgruntled with outlets for their rage, then schism beckons.  

I sense that GAFCON kept the conservatives in the Anglican community. I sense too that it showed that the clash of ideology is not a sectarian and racial one but doctrinal debate. That is a wonderful thing for the last thing the world needs is another fight between races.  Indeed that is probably the best thing about the Commonwealth Games and Anglicanism – differing races, ethnicities and groups can share communion brought about by the dying embers of the global anachronism that was the Empire.

So I sense that Archbishop Jensen, though championing views that are utterly repugnant to me, and in the long term, not viable for any modern organisation, did squirt some glue into the fraying Anglican Communion.  I will pine for him for he is such an easy target for us atheists to aim at.  However, we cannot deny his role globally.  And locally, whilst I despise their liturgy, there is no doubt that Jensen’s Evangelical foot soldiers slugged it out better than most for planting new Christian bums on seats.  Oh yes, Jensen was belligerent, intelligent and annoying.  But he was the sort I love to hate and I think I may miss him.

Am I mad?  Should I be dancing a gig at the prospect of his departure?

Would you miss Archbishop Jensen more that Cardinal Pell or do you hope that someone stuffs Cardinal Pell and mounts him permanently on a plinth?

How do global organisations deal with the fractious few who stand in the way of progress?

When should schism triumph over compromise and moderation?

Over to you guys.