Global South Anglican

TheStar.com - Religion

Stuart Laidlaw
Religion reporter

On his way to Rome to be executed for spreading Christianity, St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote letters to leaders of a still-small church emerging around the ideas of Jesus Christ, crucified only decades before.

His letters spelled out what it meant to be Christian and formed the basis of the Catholic Church and, later, the Anglican Church. too. This week, some 1,900 years later, Ignatius’s words are echoing in a legal battle over church property.

At issue is what it means to be an Anglican; at stake is who can claim title to three conservative churches that have voted to break away from the Anglican Church of Canada in a dispute essentially over the blessing of same-sex marriages.

For the Anglican Church of Canada, Ignatius’s emphasis on loyalty to the local bishop as a defining characteristic of church membership is as important today as it was in the 2nd Century.

“He pushes hard for unity centred around the bishop,” Anglican canon law expert Rev. Alan Perry says.

“Ignatius says to the people not to gather at another table for the Eucharist, but gather with your bishop as a symbol of unity.”

Yet some self-professed conservative Canadian congregations are implicitly taking issue with Ignatius, leaving the mother church and hoping to take parish property with them.

In all, there are 10 breakaway churches, members of the Anglican Network in Canada, who say the national church has become too liberal and can no longer call itself truly Anglican because it doesn’t follow the tenets of the faith found in the church’s historic Book of Common Prayer.

“The Canadian church doesn’t want to go along with the faith. They want to set their own rules and their own faith,” says Cheryl Chang, lawyer for the Network. “They want us to leave the buildings and say we are no longer Anglican.”

Tension among Anglican factions spilled over into a Hamilton courtroom yesterday. A court rejected an attempt by the Anglican Diocese of Niagara to seek joint custody of churches run by two breakaway southwestern Ontario parishes.

In Ignatius’s time, the fledgling church was also struggling to survive as the apostles died off and a new generation of leaders took their place, says Perry, a Montreal priest. In response, the story goes, Ignatius proposed the office of bishop as a way to organize the church after the apostles, with membership in the church contingent on loyalty to the local bishop.

That principle holds to this day, says Perry.

“The bishops have pretty much always been understood to be the successors to the apostles.”

To be Anglican, then, requires being a member of the national church and loyal to its bishops. As such, Perry says, the 10 congregations in Ontario and British Columbia that have broken ties with the Anglican Church of Canada are no longer Anglican.

“There is no such thing as an Anglican church which isn’t part of a diocese,” Perry says.

For breakaway Anglicans, however, it’s not so simple.

Rev. James Packer, a leading conservative Anglican theologian, says the principle of episcopal loyalty is generally sound, but tends to fall apart when congregations find themselves at odds with their local bishop.

“ In both Vancouver and Niagara, where the majority of congregations that have left the national church are located, a handful of parishes that are among the most conservative in the country find themselves headed by very liberal local bishops, he says

In such a situation, Packer says, the strict geographic definition of Anglicanism doesn’t work, and may have outlived its usefulness.

While he agrees that faithfulness to the bishop is a key component of being Anglican, Packer questions why it has to be the local bishop.

The congregations that have left the national church are members of the Anglican Network in Canada, which operates under the episcopal oversight of Buenos Aires-based Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

As such, Packer says, the breakaway Canadian churches continue to be Anglican because they are members of a recognized Anglican church – just not the Canadian one.

“You can’t be an Anglican on your own,” he says.

What it means to be an Anglican, Packer says, is much more than a matter of geography.

It’s about adherence to centuries of beliefs, as outlined in the Book of Common Prayer, the 39 Articles printed in the back of the book outlining the basic tenets of the faith and the Solemn Declaration of 1893 detailing the Canadian church’s relationship with the rest of the communion.

“To be an Anglican, first of all, you must believe what Anglicans believe,” he says.

The 39 Articles, rewritten and revised several times since their original incarnation as 42 Articles in 1553, spell out the primacy of the Bible as the word of God, the divinity of Jesus and the meaning of sin, among other matters of faith and church structure.

And for conservative Anglicans, they are a better measure of Anglicanism than membership in the national church or allegiance to the local bishop.

Canon law expert Perry says, however, that the 39 Articles also spell out that a priest must be appointed by the local bishop to be allowed to preach within a diocese, something the Network churches have relinquished by voting to split.

“The notion that a parish could be freestanding and claim to be Anglican is perverse in the Anglican structure,” he said. “It just wouldn’t exist.”

Liberal Anglicans also argue that theological understanding continues to evolve.

“It’s an ongoing revelation,” Niagara Archdeacon Michael Patterson says.

And there is no requirement that the revelation be the same for everyone, says Perry, adding that a founding principle of the church was that, unlike the Catholic Church from which it split in the 16th century, there is no central authority decreeing the beliefs that define an Anglican.

Says Perry, “Somebody once said that the good thing about the Church of England is that it doesn’t tend to interfere with your religion.”

In fact, he says, the openness to diversity of opinion has traditionally been its strength, enabling it to span divergent cultures around the world.