unity, what price, what shape?

Bp. Iker said at the San Juaqin convention last weekend:

"The purpose of the Report was to call our Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to halt these unbiblical innovations in order to allow reconciliation to begin in our fragmented Communion. "

Nothing in the report claimed this purpose. This may be the purpose to which the bishop wishes to put the report, but the report set out with the purpose of describing how the communion might learn to live together. I think it failed utterly, but that was its purpose.

This sentence however does explain, to a degree, why the report has been and remains a non-starter. Indeed that WAS the purpose of the legalist primates in the "global South." The outraged reaction of ++Akinola to the report when it issued, demonstrated the same view.

I was recently a delegate to the convention here in Chicago. No one I heard, was prepared as Bp. Iker suggests, to simply wave the communion a fond (or less) farewell. What we were, at least a few of us, willing to say is that while unity is a value, it is NOT the only value or even the pre-eminent one. Unity at the price of discarding our lesbian / gay clergy? Nope. Unity at the price of telling lesbian / gay laity this church only wishes to see them at the altar when it is pledge Sunday? Nope.

The Gospel of John famously has Jesus pray, "Father I pray for them that they all may be one." Leaving aside the scholarly quibbles about John, why pray for that unless it was at least an incipient issue? If, as I do, one reads John as putting some words into Jesus' mouth that dealt with the issues of the day, and reads Paul's struggles in Acts and his epistles as a fight for unity, then we have to ask if it has ever been more than Pius hope. Consider the fine work on unity done by the Zebedee boys!

What we can have, if we want it, is unity of mission that is a cooperative when it makes sense sharing of assets and goals towards the preaching of the Gospel. We can have, if we want it, a unity of charity, an agreement that using funds from any of us for things that reduce poverty, suffering and premature death is possible. We have not had for decades, unity of orders, ask any woman who has been to the "global South." We probably will never have (and I pray we do not) a unity of culture.

There is a place, a level if you will, where we can have unity. It is not the unity of approved views of scripture, or of approved sexuality, or of views on issues that some seek. It is precisely unity in diverse opinions. It is the unity that brings us to the same communion rail with people whose views, culture, gender, sexual expression, and social standing is not our own. It is a unity of faith without a conformity of viewpoint. That we can have, if we want it.

FWIW
jimB
lurking in Chicago