The Primates and the “reality” of the Anglican Communion
by Neil Dhingra, The Living Church:
Earlier this month, the Episcopal priest Jesse Zink posted an interesting article that encouraged rather low expectations for the now ongoing Primates’ Meeting (“On beyond Primates“). Some of it is based on a historical claim, that “calling together a group of bishops has rarely been a good way of resolving conflict.” Zink also downgrades the present “conflict” behind the Primates’ Meeting, claiming that “contentious matters” and “differences” do not actually prevent Anglicans from, at day’s end, coming together for “prayer, Bible study, and worship.” I’m not going to engage with these historical and sociological claims here.
What I find most interesting in Zink’s piece is the way he positions the reality of Anglican life against the apparent unreality of the Primates’ Meeting. A few years ago, Zink journeyed to a Nigerian village in which there is a noticeably small Anglican church in a humble room. The appreciative handful of Anglicans showed warm hospitality to Zink. With them, Zink read the Bible and talked “about what it means to us to be Anglican, and how we read the Bible.” The conversation was meaningful to those involved, and, indeed, I found myself wanting to know more about their discussion — how it manifested their “common baptism” and a “shared willingness” to follow Jesus Christ through the Anglican tradition.
In decided contrast, we have the strange world of the Primates’ Meeting. Its distance from the humble room in the Nigerian village is not merely geographical. The Primates’ Meeting exists in a world of “posturing.” The players have fixed “views” easily identifiable with political taxonomy that need defense in the form of anathemas and likely “vitriol.” Worst of all, the senior bishops exist in gendered, hierarchical alienation from the “voices” of most Anglicans. Blessedly, whatever happens in the Primates’ Meeting — a “recent innovation,” after all — has little to do with the reality of communion in the local church. The Anglican Communion will survive in villages much like the one that Zink visited.
Is the Primates’ Meeting unreal? The question is impossible to answer in the abstract. Obviously, it is somewhat unreal to Jesse Zink. The question I’d like to ask is how the Anglican Communion might make the Primates’ Meeting more real to its communicants, perhaps including Jesse Zink. I think that there are difficult but useful lessons to be learned from two fellow Christian traditions.
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