Statements on the nature and development of the Anglican Communion from the first Lambeth Conference to the Anglican Covenant – Part III 1984-2009
by Martin Davie:
This blog contains the third part of my paper tracing the development of Anglican thinking about the nature of the Anglican Communion. This part covers the development of this thinking from the 1984 meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council to publication of the Anglican Communion Covenant in 2009.
Because the concluding reflections at the end of this part were written in the autumn of 2010 they are now dated. Were they to be written today they would need to include the failure of the Anglican Communion Covenant proposal due to its rejection by the Church of England, the fact that a number of other Anglican provinces have followed the example of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada in departing from the position of human sexuality agreed at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the development of GAFCON as a major player in Global Anglicanism and the publication of a new Anglican covenant proposal (the ‘Cairo Covenant’) by the Anglican churches of the Global south in 2019.
15. The Anglican Consultative Council 1984
The nature of Anglicanism
At the sixth meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, held at Badagry in Nigeria in July 1984 a new Section of the Council was established to look at ‘Dogmatic and Pastoral Matters.’ This new Section began its work by looking at the question ‘What is Anglicanism’. The report from the Section states that in answer to this question:
‘We were agreed that the Anglican Communion is not to be understood as a confessional church in the accepted reformation sense. Whatever place the Thirty Nine Articles have occupied in the life of the Church of England (and even there a shift of emphasis has occurred in recent years) the commitment of other provinces to them has been much less. Nevertheless, the Communion seeks to be loyal to the apostolic faith and to safeguard it and express it in Catholic order always to be reformed by the standards of Scripture. It allows for a responsible freedom of the faith within a fellowship committed to the expression of that faith.’[1]
The report goes on to note that:
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