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The Anglican Communion: Does it Exist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

John Rees
John Rees
Affiliation:
Joint Registrar, Diocese of Oxford Legal Adviser, Anglican Consultative Council
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The title of this article is deliberately provocative: what meaning can be attached to a concept which lacks all the classic jurisprudential marks of authority, by those who concern themselves with the legal aspects of Anglican churches? Conversely, what lessons can be learned by them from the very persistence of such a concept over so very many years?

Type
Research Article
Information
Ecclesiastical Law Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 22 , January 1998 , pp. 14 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 1998

References

1 Owen Chadwick in Coleman, R. (ed). Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences (Toronto 1992), p viiGoogle Scholar. As to the Colenso case (Colenso v Gladstone, sub nom Re Lord Bishop of Natal 1865) 3 Moo PCCNS)Google Scholar. see (1989)1 Ecc LJ(5) 16–19.Google Scholar

2 Henson, H. H., Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (Oxford 1943). vol ii. p. 7.Google Scholar

3 See eg the (still useful) Anglican Communion. A Surrey, compiled by Wand, Bishop J. W. C. (Oxford. 1948)Google Scholar: and, more recently, the festschrift for Bishop John Howe (as outgoing Secretary-General of the Anglican Consultative Council in advance of the 1988 Conference) edited by Sykes, Bishop Stephen, Authority in the Anglican Communion (Toronto 1987)Google Scholar. A helpful recent treatment of the issues surrounding the Anglican Communion may be found in William Sachs, L., The Transformation of Anglicanism (Cambridge 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 18 July to 9 August 1998.

5 An example will be over the recognitiion of women in episcopal leadership in various parts of the Communion, which promises to be more pnoblematic in 1998 than it was in 1988, if only because of the numbers involved. On this issue, see the Report Women in the Episcopate (ACC 1987), commissioned by the Primates in advance of the 1988 Lambeth Conference, and a helpful chapter (chapter 13) in the Report of the Archbishop's Group on the Episcopate. Episcopal Ministry (Church House Publishing 1990).

6 The Report of ACC-10 has yet to be published, but the Guidelines are available on application to the Anglican Consultative Council at Partnership House. Waterloo Road, London SE1 8UU.

7 Constitution of the Anglican Consultative Council, art 6(a).

8 Lambeth Conference Report 1930. Resolution 49.

9 ACC–7 Report, p 130.

10 [The Anglican Communion] had been an enthusiasm of Fisher in the optimistic post-war years: Fisher was a kind of ghost we kept running into when we went overseas. A policeman in Chicago remembered him bouncing out of a hotel like a schoolboy, jumping on to the cop's motorbike and making vroom vroom noises: quoted in Carpenter, H., Runcie, Robert, The Reluctunt Archbishop (Hodder & Stoughton 1996), pp 198, 199Google Scholar. He was, of course, describing a time before Michael Ramsey's death, or they might equally have encountered Ramsey's sizeable shade in many quarters of the Communion!

11 His argument, in part, was that there should be no breach of Article XXI of the Thirty-nine Articles, which states that ‘General Councils may not be gathered together without the commandment and will of Princes’. However, there may have been other, less worthy, motives. For a thorough treatment of the events culminating in the First Lambeth Conference, and its transactions, see Stephenson, A. M. G., The First Lambeth Conference (SPCK 1967).Google Scholar

12 Lambeth Conference Report 1988, p. 217.Google Scholar

13 Chadwick, Owen in Coleman, R. (ed). Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences (Toronto 1992), p. x.Google Scholar

14 ACC Handbook 1994, p 19.Google Scholar

15 ACC–7, Resolution 17.

16 See eg Lambeth Conference Report 1897, Resolution 5. Bishop John Howe's semi-autobiographical account of the ACC's work in Highways and Hedges (ACC/CIO 1985) is probably the most accessible introduction both to the work of the ACC and of the Anglican Communion generally.

17 See the current ACC Handbook, pp.7–10,14,15.

18 Professor Henry Chadwick, commenting on a draft of this article, made the arresting comment to the writer that a careful distinction should be drawn between ‘sentimentality’ and ‘sentiment’, the latter having a not inconsiderable force of its own (see eg the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, definitions).

19 Even the Archbishops' Commission on the Central Structures of the Church of England, Working as One Body (Church House Publishing 1995), seen by some as epitomising a top-down management structure, emphasises that ‘the mission of the Church of England is most clearly and gloriously seen in the parishes’ (p. 15).

20 As he commented, ‘Not everyone has what it takes to be an Anglican’ (Neill, S. C., Anglicanism(Penguin 1958), p. 423).Google Scholar

21 Lambeth Conference Report 1988, p. 298.Google Scholar

22 Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission Draft Report(1996), para. 3.44.Google Scholar

23 The famous title of the Anglican Consultative Council's Conference in Badagry. Nigeria, 1984 ACC–s7