Why is the Anglican crack up news?
If we take the most generous estimate of the number of Anglicans - 70
million,(The Guardian had them at 80 million today, more conservative estimates are at 55 million), they would be
the third largest Christian body in the world
after Catholics (1 billion) and Orthodox (250 million). Anglo-Catholics aside - they would also be
the largest Protestant body and also the Protestants with the most
extensive global reach.
Once largely seen as the English church, the expansion of the British Empire as well as missionary activity - particularly in the 19th century - means this is no longer the case.
Here of course I am just merely talking of those Anglicans who are formally part of the Anglican Communion, a membership defined primarily by being in communion with the see of Canterbury.
So let's take take the BBC's estimates of the larger provinces (i.e. those with over 500,000 members) totalling 60.3 million
Source: BBC
There are about 880 bishops of which 650 are attending Lambeth,** the meeting of Anglican bishops held once every 10 years.
The bishops
boycotting the conference largely comprise of Africans (Nigeria, Kenya,
Uganda, Rwanda) but include Australians (Sydney), English (Rochester, Lewes, Willesden, maybe Ebbsfleet given the recent CoE Synod)
and others. Let's put that down to 230 (26%) bishops representing 30
million (50%) or perhaps more Anglicans declining the invitation. They can all be described as falling towards the conservative end of the theological spectrum. But this is not to say that all conservative bishops are boycotting Lambeth - quite a number from other dioceses around the globe are attending.
Anyway, of the 650 attending, 136 are American Episcopalian bishops and about another 124 or so from the U.K.
Just do the maths.***
Number ofAnglicans
Population (millions)
%Anglicans/ Population
Number ofBishops
Anglicansper bishopNigeria
17.5
134
13%
122?
194,444Uganda
8
26
30.7%
31?
258,064Kenya
2.5
32
7.8%
28?
89,285US
2.3
300
0.76%
137
16,788UK
13.4
60.7
22%
128
104,687
A bit of overrepresentation here in more than one way, don't you think?
If you look at the
graphic from the Times
(real statisticians please cringe and look away) you can get an idea of
episcopal inflation in the Church of England, and can amuse yourself predicting when Anglicanism will totally die out in England.
113 bishops for less than a
million people regular worshippers in the Church
of England, and 15% of the English population baptised Anglican.
(England's population is about 49-50million; UK in total is about 60.7
million;). Add to that the 6 bishops of the Church of Wales, 12 from the Church of Ireland, 7 from the
Scottish Episcopal Church and that's 128 bishops for moribund Anglicanism in the U.K.
Despite what people think, and despite its established status in England, the Church of England is not financially supported by the government.
While asset rich, it relies mostly on donations and endowments, and is
not exactly in a healthy financial position. It has had to send out a
call for help this week to finance Lambeth.
But its very establishment in England - where it faces its own problems and declining influence in the face of hostile secularists and the growth of Islam - presents a wider structural
problem to the Communion. Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti, Bishop of the Diocese of Recife in Brazil, now under Primatial
Authority of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone of America explains:
The first indication of inadequacy is the fact that the Anglican
Communion is an international organism led by a national established
church, which, through political mechanisms chooses its principal
leader. 163 nations of the 164 which comprise the Communion, have no
participation in this decision making process, and are compelled to
wait passively the decree of the British government. It would be naïve
to think that these 163 countries – some of which contain the majority
of the Communion’s membership – would accept indefinitely such an
arrangement, the product of an imperial history, and choose not to
pursue changes in this process, which, in one way or another includes
everyone.The function of a world leader chosen by the British government is
not as formal, as symbolic as some might think, since this leader has
the authority to call and preside the other so called “Instruments of
the Communion” and to affix the seal of qualification with regard to
who is and is not considered an Anglican.The national leader of a national Church will always bring the
possibility of visions and decisions marked by his or her culture,
idiosyncrasies, ideologies, and by an inevitable ethnocentrism and
parochialism. The symbolic centre is situated in Western Europe,
developed, post-enlightenment and post-modern, and this affects the
life of millions of powerless Anglicans. With the expansion of the
Communion it’s virtually impossible for the British leader to know what
is really happening on the periphery, and official reports are liable
to be coloured by opinions and decisions, which may not do justice to
the facts on the ground.
This before you even get to the theological differences between say, the namby-pamby girlie-men which pass for bishops in the U.K. with say, the Africans.
Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya - conservative in theology - are growing.
Fast. And they are not alone amongst African Anglicans or African Christianity in general. And this despite enormous challenges they face such as insufficient trained clergy and pastoral workers, AIDS, poverty, corruption,
tribalism, political instability, Islam and more.
Here too one sees a source of tension between the
conservative faithful in the Global South and the liberal limp-wristed homosexualists
and their attendant fetishists in the West. You don't tell the Ugandan Christians whose church was founded on the blood of martyrs about what it means to be a disciple of Christ. You don't tell the Ugandan Anglicans, who have played a major role in Uganda's winning war on AIDS with their emphasis on Christian sexual
ethics, about your fancy free-sex and condom programs. If you don't know why the Nigerians are especially peeved
with Williams' hairy-lefty kumbayah attitude towards Islam, you have to
remember that you don't tell
someone whose children have just been burnt to death by jihadists
enraged over a cartoon of Mohammed that a little sharia is good for
you. You don't apologise for evangelisation to people who see evangelisation as not only a responsibility of every Christian, but the only peaceful non-violent means to curb radical Islam. This is not to say the church in Africa is pure and spotless, or doesn't suffer from its own internal problems or complacency. It does. But one thing you can say: 'god' is not an abstract noun in Africa.
A completely different proposition in the U.S.A. Membership in the U.S. church -
the ECUSA (also known as TEC) - is in free fall. Someone else has done the maths for you: by 2025...the Episcopal Church will have one priest for every congregant (and probably ten bishops for every priest!) However, thanks to some generous benefactors in its past history - including Queen Mary, the Stuyvesant family and more - it has some of the biggest endowments and pension funds as well as possibly the richest parish of any church anywhere in the world: Trinity Wall Street in Manhattan. That parish alone - if one could even disentangle the labrynth of its wealth - would make the Vatican (which publishes financial accounts) look like the pauper it is, in comparison.
Most of those ECUSA endowments and funds, are now controlled by a hierarchy which sometime in the 1960s, writes Joseph Bottum,
... became Bishop
Pike—with the perverse effect that Pike’s ostensible rebellion turned,
at last, into the norm. Formed in the victory of civil-rights activism,
a new version of the social-gospel movement became the default theology
of church bureaucrats in the Mainline. The churches “increasingly
turned their attention to the drafting of social statements on a
variety of contemporary problems,” as the religious historian Peter J.
Thuesen has noted, and their statements “revealed a shared opinion
among Mainline executives that the churches’ primary public role was
social advocacy.”
The result is an ethical consensus
unfailingly consistent with the political views and cultural mores of a
particular social class—in fact, the class of professional women in the
United States since the 1970s. Certainly on the question of abortion,
and probably on the question of homosexuality, such bishops as Jane
Dixon and Katharine Jefferts Schori face no serious opposition among
the elite of their denomination in the United States. The Episcopal
Church remains the chaplaincy of an establishment, but it is an
establishment much diminished—in class, numbers, and influence—for only
Pike’s heirs have stayed in the church bureaucracy, and they have no
one to speak to except themselves.
H.L. Mencken is usually credited with dubbing
the Episcopal Church of the 1920s “the Republican Party at prayer.” The
Episcopal Church today seems hardly distinguishable from the small
portion of America that is the National Organization for Women at
prayer.
That would be women like Louie Crewe a.k.a. Queen Lutibelle (amongst others) and June bride, V. Gene Robinson. That would also make the ECUSA's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts-Schori nothing more than "rentier...living
off the income from the property her predecessors purchased, strolling
at sunset along the strand as the great tide of the Mainline ebbs
further out to sea."
Now trying to win friends and buy influence for The Gay Gene and the MDGs (peace and blessings be upon them) at Lambeth with her gifts of prepaid British mobiles.
There's a common saying amongst Anglicans, which is not without a fair measure of truth: the Africans pray, the Americans pay and the English write the resolutions.
It forgets to add that all three are going in completely different directions.
Makes for a slow-moving train wreck.
And train wrecks are news.
*note too the Guardian's usual errors - Williams didn't
force John to resign, and he appointed him later to a more influential
position as Dean of St Albans
**there's a slight variation in the figures reported in the press.
***I'm not a mathematician; estimating numbers of Anglicans is problematic and I
have also had to infer some bishop figures from various websites;
corrections welcome but I think the numbers still speak for themselves. Yes I've included The Gay Gene in the ECUSA figure of 136 ECUSA bishops attending; there may be other ECUSA bishops staying at home.
