The L.A. Fissure in the Anglican Church Divide

By Joseph Wakelee-Lynch

Since I moved to Long Beach, Calif, three months ago, I have felt as if a conflict rumored to be raging on a faraway front has overtaken my village. For three weeks in August and September, the Los Angeles Times and the Long Beach Press-Telegram published almost daily updates on the local fissure in the Anglican Communion. Three local churches—All Saints in Long Beach, St. James in Newport Beach, and St. David's in North Hollywood—renounced their ties to Bishop Jon Bruno, the Diocese of Los Angeles that he leads, and the Episcopal Church in the United States (ECUSA). But, they claim, they have not separated themselves from Anglicanism. They have gained the pastoral oversight of Bishop Evans Kisekka, an evangelical Anglican bishop in Uganda, even though critics argue there is no provision for such a relationship in Anglicanism.

In mid-September, as I write, the local dispute appears headed for a courtroom. Bruno announced that the diocese would sue to regain possession of the parish properties—the financial records, the buildings, and even the prayer books. Earlier, he ordered the churches' rectors and a deacon to cease all priestly activities. Bruno appointed two assistant bishops to oversee the parishes and began planning to replace their vestries, although no representatives of the diocese have physically taken over the churches' facilities.

[T]he breakaway churches created a situation that flouts one of the defining principles of Anglicanism—the geography-based pastoral integrity of the local bishop. The worldwide Anglican Communion cannot ignore this realignment. To do nothing would be tantamount to allowing parishes to disassociate and associate at will, and perhaps over any issue.

By placing themselves in Kisekka's care, the breakaway churches created a situation that flouts one of the defining principles of Anglicanism—the geography-based pastoral integrity of the local bishop. The worldwide Anglican Communion cannot ignore this realignment. To do nothing would be tantamount to allowing parishes to disassociate and associate at will, and perhaps over any issue. The Anglican Communion could be completely shattered, a catastrophic scenario to those who want to retain the Communion. Yet, there may be little, beyond issuing statements of disapproval, that can be done in response.

Perhaps I read this crisis cynically, but there appear to be no compromises to be struck. The rhetoric of the conservatives leads me to believe that forcing a divide is a result that they consider both politically achievable and theologically important. By establishing a relationship with a bishop whose see is outside the ECUSA, conservatives have upped the stakes. Any international Anglican body that takes on the question of proper jurisdiction could find itself turned into another forum to debate the question of whether the U.S. church is teaching error and should be further isolated. At this point, it should not surprise anyone if arguments begin to be floated by conservative leaders that Anglicanism's international institutions need enforcement capabilities to help buttress the faith, or, that those institutions have them.

Not long ago, many of us would have found it hard to believe that these scenarios would even need to be taken seriously. The reasons for this dispute that may sunder the worldwide Anglican Communion are complex and numerous. But, the current Anglican crisis is not simply about justice issues in the sanctuary, and neither is it simply about secularized Christians abandoning the Bible. This conflict, at a still deeper level, is another round in the church's unresolved conflict with the Enlightenment.

I suggest that Western Christianity is still in the throes of dealing with the impact of the Enlightenment. The pre-modern Western church typically offered biblically based explanations for natural phenomena, answering both the “how does it work” questions and the “what does it mean” questions. But new, often secular, knowledge in last four centuries has revealed that the churches' answers to “how?” were often insufficient, or wrong. Often the church saw that process as an assault on God's sovereignty. Yet, in general, Christianity in the West has made its peace with rational explanations for natural events. In fact, for many Christians the revelations of scientific inquiry have only heightened God's magnificence.

The debate over homosexuality is a part of that process as well. Although the church is more skeptical of psychological truth claims about human behavior than about the observable and predictable motions of the planets, it is nonetheless confronted with secular knowledge that contradicts a religious moral framework. At the end of the twentieth century, modernism increasingly asserted that homosexuality is not strictly a chosen behavior but an inherent characteristic. That secular perspective raises the theological question, “How can it be sinful to act out of an orientation that is not chosen but granted or deposited upon us by God in a way that is little different than skin color?”

For those branches of Western Christianity that most strongly resisted the Enlightenment and modernism, the fight over homosexuality is a return to a familiar battle. But Anglicanism, with reason as one of its pillars, traditionally has valued sound learning and openness to new knowledge.

For those branches of Western Christianity that most strongly resisted the Enlightenment and modernism, the fight over homosexuality is a return to a familiar battle. But Anglicanism, with reason as one of its pillars, traditionally has valued sound learning and openness to new knowledge. Anglican progressives, then, assert that modern science again is offering new knowledge to the church, and that our church traditionally has been open to that process.

Bishop Charles Gore (1853-1932) summed up the Anglican Church's complex identity when he described its breadth, writing, “[W]e have been enabled to combine in our one fellowship the traditional faith and order of the catholic Church with that immediacy of approach to God through Christ through which the evangelical churches especially bear witness, and freedom of intellectual enquiry, whereby the correlation of the Christian revelation and advancing knowledge is constantly effected.”

The inclusiveness of Gore's vision is inspiring, but not because Gore anticipated 20th and 21st century ideas of expanding human rights. Rather, he expresses what I see as one of Anglicanism's greatest strengths: It consciously accepts the notion that the church together weaves together tradition, the revelation of scripture, and reason to understand the Bible and how it governs believers' lives in every era.

Not long after arriving in Long Beach, I heard a rector speak to Anglicanism's turmoil by recalling words of Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple (1942–44):

“It is a sad reflection upon the sincerity of the Christian discipleship that so often in the history of the Church controversy has been conducted with bitterness and has been associated, as both cause and effect, with personal animosity. It is truly said that to become bitter in controversy is more heretical than to espouse with sincerity and charity the most devastating theological opinions . . .”

Temple speaks as pointedly today, but the conflict that divides us has moved beyond conversation, even beyond heated debate. The lines in the sand have been drawn. Organizations are acting, and they often do so in accordance with organizational imperatives. To some degree, they must, and any resolution of this conflict requires it. But one temptation many of us as individuals will face is to act only as members of organizations, rather than as followers of Jesus. William Stringfellow (1928–1985) described that phenomenon as a way through which the powers and principalities, including the church, behave in the world. He also believed that those very same powers and principalities could be redeemed, a hope in which I am far more skeptical.

As a progressive Christian, I find Anglicanism's bleak future distressing. It disturbs me that some who see themselves as more Anglican than others transgress the Anglican principle of the pastoral responsibility of the local bishop. Equally, that they pose that Anglicanism teaches only one reading of the scriptures. But I'm even more concerned that their solution to our crisis is separation. I have friends who are conservative Anglicans, and I can testify that they have helped me become a more faithful follower of Jesus. If the church is the gathered people of God, then it is an illusion to believe that we can free ourselves of our responsibility for and our relationship with one another. That may be the least Anglican, and perhaps the most un-Christ-like, teaching of all.

Joseph Wakelee-Lynch is a Witness contributing editor, and his regular online column is The View from Sardis . He lives in Long Beach, California, and may be reached by email at wakeleelynch@earthlink.net .