My friend the Rev. Samuel Van Culin, when he served as secretary for World Mission in the Episcopal Church and subsequently as secretary general of the Anglican Communion, liked to regale audiences around the world with his version of a popular song: "There's No Business Like Church Business."
Indeed! But now the Episcopal Church cannot continue on the basis of business as usual. Although sex is the issue du jour, the real issue is Holy Scripture, God's Word Written, and the church's theological faithfulness to it.
A recent book by A. N. Wilson, provocatively titled "God's Funeral," questions whether contemporary theologians still believe in anything like the biblical God, anything other than a projection of their own spiritual fantasies.
In the Episcopal Church today, the question might well be extended beyond professional theologians. For laity and clergy alike, it is a spiritual, far more than a sexual, crisis. Who is God? How do we know God's will for the church? Our Lord promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church, but he never specified any particular denomination.
Spiritual and theological "pluriformity" is the current fad among our Episcopal national leadership. Yet even diversity, particularly of a kind inclusive of traditionalists, often is trumped at General Convention by ecclesiastical correctness. This in turn leads to a new hegemony that seems to be elevated above both Scripture and creed.
The immediate question for Anglicans, however, is whether a way can be found to deal with our denominational crisis such that orthodox theology might coexist with ecclesial flexibility and pastoral magnanimity.
After all, Jesus said his disciples should love even their enemies. And St. Paul said we should honor and "prefer" one another even in the midst of our differences. Surely those among our denominational leaders who believe there is only "plural" truth should at least be able to live with plural ecclesiastical structures?
After the last Lambeth Conference, Episcopal Life invited me to write an article making the case for an extra-territorial province in order that push might not come to shove for traditionalists in the Episcopal Church. The proposal went unheeded then, but perhaps there is now a last chance to prevent outright schism.
Such a province would provide for those Episcopalians seeking alignment with the Anglican majority worldwide rather than going with the flow in our own very small American denomination. Few in our national church leadership have so far seemed inclined to such flexibility. Do liberal credentials run that far or not?
In the sweep of church history, Anglican experience should teach us that the letter of the law concerning ecclesiastical structures cannot be successfully enforced. Surely that was one lesson of the English Reformation, not to mention American independence as it affected Anglicanism.
What is needed now is a new ecclesial alignment liberated from the idolatries of ecclesiastical politics. Formation of an extra-territorial province could be a redemptive way to preserve some measure of unity amongst us and even (God willing) restore within the fold of the Anglican Communion those who over the years already have been separated. The only losers would be jurisdictional autocrats. The winners would be evangelism, mission and communion.
Such a provision would allow those alienated by General Convention, as well as the present Episcopal Church leadership, to negotiate their own relationships with Canterbury. Anomalous though such an arrangement might be, some such provision is essential to avoid disintegration of Anglicanism in this country, precipitated not by traditionalists but by the actions of General Convention.
Until now, Anglicanism has been sustained precisely by making provision for anomalies within the church catholic: not ambiguity of faith but anomaly in practice. From the 16th century, this is part of what has differentiated us from both Counter-Reformation Catholicism and radical Protestantism.
But beyond possible interim measures, what is the bottom line? It's theological: whether those who profess and call themselves Episcopalian Christians still share a common understanding of the faith or, on the contrary, whether (as the Baltimore Declaration implied more than a decade ago) we even still worship one and the same God. Only when that question is resolved will we be in a position to know whether or not Anglican comprehensiveness has a future in the Episcopal Church.
