The Holy Spirit and the church

 I noticed this sharp, waspy Tweet a day or so ago, by a veteran Vatican commentator, Austen Ivereigh:

It is striking how those who believe they are saving the Church from itself — Jesus’s promise of the HS being, they presume, at best unreliable — never think of themselves as schismatics. https://t.co/a9UpNG3ilV

— Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) June 27, 2026

It is (in my experience) easy to forget the Holy Spirit. Trusting in our own efforts (for any purpose in life, not just ecclesiastical purposes) is much more immediate and likely (to ourselves at least) a reliable way to achieve something. Now Ivereigh is commenting on the brinkmanship (as I write) of SSPX threatening to ordain bishops with or without the Pope's authorization, and "without" means, so pundits say, according to canon law, that there will be excommunications. I have no comment to make on this particular matter, not least because I am no kind of expert in Roman canon law.

But it is a thought, is it not, that we might wonder more about what the Spirit is doing in the life of the church, than what we ourselves might do about the life of the church. The wondering, Ivereigh makes the point, includes whether we might wonder about what kind of faith we have in the promises of Jesus.

Now, this, surely, is a thing to consider whatever our station in life or the church, and whatever church we belong to, whether one on the verge of schism or just on the verge of deciding what kind of instant coffee to buy for next Sunday's morning tea. (Yes, no need to comment on the word "instant" being paired with "coffee", I know there are strong feelings about these things.) 

Dare we believe that the church is Christ's and he has the church in hand, working the purposes of God out in ways we cannot imagine, to a timetable our impatience disables our discernment thereof, and with greater power - the Holy Spirit - than is in the possession of any synod or bishop or session clerk or patriarch/matriarch?

As the ACC meets in Belfast through these days, I must say to myself, you might also choose to say to yourself, 

"Holy Spirit, come, fill their hearts (and our hearts) anew, refresh your Communion, open our ears to hear what you are saying to your church."

The true church is hard to find

To be frank, not a lot this week is motivating me to blog Anglicanly (though see further below). Next week might be better, I think the ACC meeting in Belfast starts later this week. But my ranging eye never ceases to keep an eye on "ecclesial things", and among other things I notice, is continuing attempts to find or make the "true church".

If we head over to the Southern Baptist world, for one example, we can see a recent definitive decision to exclude women from church leadership. The true church has no place for women in leadership.

Much more locally, a few days ago there was further news of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, an order out of communion with Rome, with branches in Scotland and here in Canterbury, New Zealand: their lead priest here, Fr Michael Mary, is to be ordained a bishop - an "illicit bishop" according to The Press. Interestingly that bishop, Pierre Roy started life as an SSPX priest - SSPX has also been in the news recently, threatening to proceed with ordinations of bishops not approved by Rome - but fell out with SSPX due to his view that SSPX was compromised because it wished to find a way to stay in Communion with Rome. The gist of the story here is that the Roman Catholic church has not been the true church of God since the time of John XXIII.

Of course, looking ahead to ACC in Belfast, and its discussion of the so called Nairobi Cairo Proposals, we might consider a few moments spent reading three closing opinions published at The Living Church, answering the question, "Should the ACC endorse the Nairobi Cairo Proposals?": by Paul Avis, Glenn Davies and Graham Tomlin/Sarah Rowland Jones/Andrew Khoo. None are proposing the true church is the Anglican Communion in any of the particular forms it presently thinks it is or imminently might become, but each are acknowledging that there are motivations within the Communion that robustly propose where the true church might lie and consequently who among the Anglicans of this globe are falsely claiming to be church.

Oh, well!

For what it is worth, I continue to think, as I survey the scattered and fragmented landscape of global Christianity in 2026, that the true church is the church of Jesus Christ, by which I mean, the people who keep coming to Jesus, to his teaching, and ask of themselves, am I living the way of Christ, the way of the Beatitudes, the way of the cross, the way of service and of love for neighbour and for one another as a concrete expression of love for God.

That church is everywhere and has no single name on its letterheads.

Who or what is a person?

Last week, posting on AI, I noted a post by Ilia Delio "a Franciscan sister, teacher and writer in an unfinished universe", titled "Are we defending a corpse? Magnifica Humanitas and the Person we no longer are".

Delio's dissection of Magnifica Humanitas is as cutting as any an anatomist might make during an autopsy because she strikes at one of its core concepts, the human person. Thus:

"The encyclical presents AI as the problem. But AI is not the problem. The problem is the human person — specifically, the philosophical and theological categories through which we have defined human personhood, categories that are now so rigid, so fixed, and so incompatible with our actual understanding of reality that they are cracking under the pressure of a world they were never built to describe. By insisting on a traditional Catholic conception of the person as the operative framework for global AI governance, Leo is not defending humanity. He is defending a portrait of humanity that no longer resembles the living thing."

Wow! That is sharp and the next paragraph sharpens up the challenge further:

"The personhood that Magnifica Humanitas seeks to protect is not a generic one. It is a specific philosophical product — the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology, in which the human person is defined by a rational soul as substantial form, possessing intrinsic dignity derived from being made imago Dei. This is a powerful and coherent framework on its own terms. But its terms are not the terms of the world we now inhabit."

The pointedness of this critque is brought out at the end of the next paragraph which notes consequential problems (if Delio is correct) for Catholic social teaching, based, as it is, on a or the Catholic conception of personhood:

"Everything that follows in Catholic social teaching, including its strong positions on human rights, the inviolability of conscience, and the dignity of labor, flows from this foundational essentialism."

Why does Delio draw out the inherent problem with an Aristotelian/Thomistic definition of personhood? Evolution is the problem/challenge for such thinking and the opportunity for a new conception of the human person:

"Evolution does not offer a different answer to the same question. It dissolves the question. There is no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. There is a continuous process of increasing complexity, sociality, and reflective capacity that stretches from the first self-replicating molecules to the beings who are now building machines that think. To insert a substantial form into this process — to say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born — is not to reconcile theology with science. It is to use science as scaffolding and then remove it once the theological conclusion is in place."

Delio compliments Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner as 20th century Catholic theologians who permitted evolution to influence their theology of personhood so that they offered:

"genuine attempts to think personhood as a process rather than a given. But neither was permitted to follow the logic all the way, because the logic leads somewhere the tradition cannot go: to the admission that personhood is not a kind of being but a degree of becoming, and that its boundaries are therefore constitutively fuzzy, constitutively relational, and constitutively open. This admission would not merely complicate Catholic anthropology. It would transform it beyond recognition."

Then follows a caustic sledge of Magnifica Humanitas:

"Magnifica Humanitas does not take this step. It acknowledges modern science in the way that a building might acknowledge the weather — by noting its existence, perhaps making some adjustments around the edges, but not allowing it to touch the foundations."

We might say (if following Delio) that Magnifica Humanitas deserves this caustic remark because it fails to understand the effect of evolution as a cause of who we, in fact are, as humanity.

Delio then draws out the challenge which Leo both faces, and makes a good but not decisive response to, about how the dialogue on AI and human personhood he seeks Magnifica Humanitas to be part of fits with the absoluteness of his Thomistic suppositions:

"Leo is aware of this problem. He spends nearly half of Magnifica Humanitas recounting the history of Catholic social teaching precisely in order to forestall the objection that this is a form of institutional imperialism dressed in the language of universal values. The Church, he insists, does not impose but accompanies; it does not dictate but offers the treasury of its tradition to a pluralistic world in a spirit of dialogue.

The problem is that the structure of the encyclical’s argument contradicts this self-presentation. You cannot simultaneously hold that there is one correct account of personhood — derived from a specific metaphysical and theological tradition — and that you are merely offering a perspective in a plural conversation. The insistence on universality and the practice of dialogue are not compatible moves in this context. They require each other’s cancellation."

What, then, might be an acceptable way forward for Delio? She refers to Raimon Panikkar approvingly:

"The philosopher Raimon Panikkar, whose career was devoted to exactly this problem, developed the concept of diatopical hermeneutics as a corrective. Genuine cross-cultural dialogue about foundational concepts like personhood, dignity, and rights must begin, Panikkar argued, from the recognition that each tradition’s starting points are topoi — particular places in conceptual space — and not universals that transcend culture and history. A Buddhist understanding of selfhood, a Confucian understanding of relational personhood, an Indigenous understanding of the human as embedded in a web of cosmic obligations — these are not deficient versions of the Thomistic account, waiting to be corrected by the encyclical’s superior metaphysics. They are different starting points, each of which has developed internally coherent implications.

To anchor global AI governance in one tradition’s account of personhood is not to protect humanity. It is to perform a kind of epistemic colonialism, even when performed with the gentlest of intentions."

Let's come back to these two paragraphs shortly. Delio then looks at how we understand intelligence, and finds there to be less difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence than Magnifica Humanitas supposes. I pass by the details of that section of her critique. She then writes:

"This experiential, participatory, feedback-driven model of knowledge is far more consonant with what we now understand about cognition, about ecology, about the dynamics of complex systems, and — most urgently — about the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, than anything the Thomistic tradition can offer. And it points toward a genuinely new understanding of personhood: not as a fixed essence that must be preserved, but as an ongoing process of self-organization within a web of relationships that is itself always in formation."

We are able to become clearer through such a paragraph that a person is more process than fixed entity. The following two paragraphs elucidate exactly where Delio wants theology of personhood to go and how Magnifica Humanitas fails:

"What is worth protecting is not a static human nature but the conditions for human becoming: the capacity for genuine relationship, for error-correction, for the kind of participatory knowing that Bonaventure and Morin both describe, for the experience of being embedded in a web of relationships that extends beyond the individual to include community, ecology, and — on some accounts — cosmos. The new materialisms and the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship. The human is not a monad that happens to interact with other monads. The human is constituted by its relationships, and it becomes more fully itself as those relationships deepen and diversify.

AI is one of those relationships now. It is not an alien force threatening a pre-given human essence from outside. It is a new node in the network of relationships through which humanity is continuing to constitute itself. The question is not whether to resist it but how to remain in a genuinely adaptive, feedback-driven, error-correcting relationship with it — how to ensure that the purposes built into it are, in Wiener’s phrase, the purposes we really desire."

If, following the cited paragraphs above you have been thinking, the theological approach here is "process theology", then it is indeed so, "the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship."

Now, it is tempting to riposte to Delio's riposte at this point with an "Oh, so you're a process theologian. That means what you say is faulty and I need not engage further" line. To do so would not be fair to her insights about the relationship between evolution and personhood (there is one) and to the possibility that artificial intelligence (appropriately governed) could be friend and complement to human intelligence and thus supportive of our value as persons rather than foe of our personhood.

Further, sitting as I do within the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, where various theologies and anthropologies jostle for attentiveness and mutually interact, I acknowledge the important challenge that Maori and Polynesian worldviews pose to some views among Pakeha which have helicoptered their way from the northern hemisphere to the Blessed Isles down under. In particular, we are consistently invited to recognise the importance of relationships in our descriptions of ourselves as human persons: what family do I belong to? Which tribe do I identify with? Who are my ancestors? On what boat or plane did they come to these shores? This is a richer conception of personhood than "I am X and these skills, experiences, attributes and personal testomony make me the amazing individual that I am."

Incidentally, a relationship-based account of the individual person will always be richer than an account of an artificial intelligence "person" who will be, at best, a set of things spread across data centres of the world.

So, there is something in what Delio says which contributes to a larger account of the human person than Magnifica Humanitas offers, but is the latter as wrong as Delio makes out?

Time does not permit me to do a similar setting out of key paragraphs in Magnifica Humanitas' argument and then a to and fro between the two with subsequent declaration of "the winner." So, something a little shorter from me, or even much shorter ...

A strength of Magnifica Humanitas' position, even if the Aristotle/Thomistic line within it is subject to critical condemnation, is that it places all human persons in the equality of being made in the image of God, thus all of intrinsic worth as human beings. This is, of course, a well founded conception in respect of the Bible itself: humankind is made in the image of God, without exception; Christ dies for all and is raised to life for all people, without exception. Jews and Greeks, slave and free, men and women: all are redeemable through Jesus Christ.

If a strength of what Delio offers via the De Chardin, Rahner, Panikkar line is a richer account of who we are as human beings, then a weakness of a more "process" oriented understanding of personhood is that it opens the door to some human beings being treated as more valuable than other human beings. We are evolved creatures, but what if an anthropological line of thought is that the X race is more evolved than the Y race? We are developed and developing persons in an ever changing world, but what if we permit that to offer a new classification of society, into the developed and under developed? (We have enough class differences to battle with without introducing more). We are relational beings and it is right and proper to give an account of ourselves which emphasises the social more than the individual, but what if this leads to a stratification in which those belonging to tribe A are more important than those belonging to tribe B? 

Slavery as an example of humanity dividing persons up into superior and inferior groups based on the perceived differences in the worth of the person is a phenomenon of history which traverses generations and eras, polytheistic and monotheistic religions, European and other cultures, the European Enlightenment and the cultures it influenced, including the United States of America and Polynesian cultures of the South Pacific, including Maori culture.

Within the Christian faith, which line of theological evaluation of the human person offers the better pathway to challenge and abolish divisive approaches to personhood such as slavery?

On that one, I am inclined to foster Magnifica Humanitas (while avoiding assigning it infallible status) rather than Delio's approach with its view that in the former, the person is some kind of theological corpse!

In saying this, I am offering an appreciation of a strength of Magnifica Humanitas and am not offering a "knockdown, take it away from further consideration" argument against what Delio offers. 

In an evolved world, so evolved that it offers artificial intelligence to be whatever we might permit it to be, whether competitor or complement to human intelligence, whether influential on our understanding of personhood (e.g. so that we shift from emphasising the human character of personhood to something broader) and so forth, we can and should engage with a dynamic rather than static understanding of who we are and how we value one another. 

Our greatest care should be - following our Lord's teaching to "love our neighbour as ourselves" and to "love one another" - that we do not consequentially de-value another human being.

In effect, we might offer back to Delio, a Riceour "second naivity" reading of the human person. Sure, "There [was] no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. ... [nor should we] say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born ... [see full paragraph above]." But that is not the same as saying, looking around us, at my family and your family, at my tribe or race and your tribe or race, at the most intelligent/creative/gifted among us and at the least so, that each person we see is not a person-with-a-soul, meaning not a person to be distinguished from plants and non-human animals. Indeed, with an appropriate definition of soul, and whether or not we envisage a moment of infusion in time past, there is (and as Pope Leo and many would argue) and always will be, a distinction to be made between the human person and the personable machine.

2020s, the decade of AI flourishing, addressed in Magnifica Humanitas - and a significant ordination

First, before we get to AI, it has been an absolute privilege this weekend to participate in the ordination and installation of Susan Wallace as bishop in order to be Te Pihopa o Te Hui Amorangi ki Te Waipounamu (for overseas readers, Susan is a bishop of the Anglican Church In Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, whose territorial/people jurisdiction is over the Maori Anglicans of the South Island/Te Waipounamu).

When it is posted I will make a link to Anglican Taonga's forthcoming report [It is here]. I managed to snap the two photos above after the service, the first of Bishop Susan with Archbishops Justin, Sione and Don - our three Archbishops, who led the service. 

The second photo is of Bishop Susan with fellow women bishops who were at the service: Archbishop Kay Goldsworthy (Perth), Bishop Waitohiariki Quayle (Te Upoko [south North Island, NZ], Archbishop Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto (Bishop of the Amazon, Archbishop of Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil), and Bishop Ana Fletcher (Wellington, NZ).

It has been a weekend in which the "grandeur of humanity" has been on display.

Now to AI and Pope Leo's Encyclical Magnifica Hunamitas. This can be read in full at this link.

Before we get to my less than magnificent thoughts, here are a few links to head to, either about the encyclical or about AI more generally:

- A Living Church article "An Anglican Reception of Magnifica Humanitas".

- A critique of Magnifica Humanitas which questions its Thomist metaphysical perspective on who the human person is. (I have a critique of this critique developing in my mind - I may come back to this in a future post).

- Edward Feser's appreciative review of MH is here.

- Some charts on the  rise and rise of AI, its capabilities and costs (though not charts about effects on power prices for households everywhere).

- A reminder that AI has profound uses as a tool in research to speed up development of medical capabilities to rid the world of that which kills us. A correspondent, for example, has pointed me in the direction of a local researcher, Dr Arthur Morley-Bunker who is exploring the role of AI in research on cancer.

There are many more links to be found on the internet.

Something which has some thoughts from me on it - a panel discussion = podcast, so there are other, better thoughts on it can be found at "Leo's letter & life". This podcast is part of Food for Faith podcasts, run by Fr John O'Connor, a Catholic priest based here in Canterbury NZ.

OK - to some of my thoughts - very briefly - and in no particular order of priority, but numbered for the sake of my rational process!

1. This document is a (pun intended) magnificent recitation, and extension of Catholic social teaching. A wonderful primer on subsidiarity, solidarity, synodality (i.e. human participation in the church), common good, the family in society, the dignity of work and so forth. In the context of the elucidation of this teaching, Pope Leo sets out his major thesis, "the grandeur (or magnificence) of humanity" means that AI must serve humanity rather than diminish or even enslave humanity.

2. The encyclical is wonderful as a document of public theology - theology engaging with, appreciating and critiquing an important issue of our day, AI, and, as well, related issues of our day, including work, war, attitudes to women, slavery (with an apology for the church's slowness to condemn slavery) and its modern forms, and truth in democracy. The world, if it ever looks to the church, looks for guidance which converts the divine word into a word for humanity. This document does that.

3. The Pope is fair. He finds good in AI (which he should, which we all should, it is a tool which enables important advances in human understanding and problem solving) and he warns against the bad in AI (it has capacity to enhance rather than diminish the gap between the world's "haves" and "have nots."

4. While AI is not the sole focus of the encyclical, it is the whole focus in the sense that the Pope keeps weaving his way back to and then out from AI as his "social theology" survey of the world connects AI to topics such as war and work.

5. Nevertheless, I think there are some weaknesses in the document, and by that I mean, areas I would like to see further work on if and when there were ever a second edition. These are:

6. There is one paragraph in which the ecological cost of AI re its power and water usage is touched on, and an appropriate plea for work on sustainability of AI is made. But I think this is the major issue for our reception of AI, not something to make passing comment on. The sheer consumption of power and water to run AI datacentres is extraordinary and it is pushing the price of power for households and industries up. It is insufficient to say that some datacentres are powered by new power sources (such as a windfarm or a solarfarm built nearby to provide power for a datacentre). If we can build more power sources, shouldn't we be doing to do make life better for people as they do the basics of life: cooking heating/cooling homes etc? It is not as though we do not have an alternative to AI. (Hint: it's called "God-give brains."). That is, there is a significant ethical issue about the draining of resources in our world to produce something we do not strictly need (that is, we have gotten by for millennia with our God-given brains). But the encyclical has no urgency about this issue (even as it rightly has urgency about other ethical issues concerning AI).

7. The encyclical has a continuing and correct set of themes about AI's development and implementation. There needs to be accountability for AI (e.g. those controlling the rise of AI, tech moguls and so forth should be accountable for the non-neutral moral character of what they are doing) and there needs to be regulation of AI, so that it is used wisely and well rather than, say, wrongly (such as controlling courses of wars) and unjustly (such as contributing to greater poverty for the poor of the world). But I do not see the encyclical as saying anything helpful about how such regulation (with consequences for accountability) will actually take place. Whatever the merits to date of global tech phenomena such as Google, Facebook and X (and I use each of these), we have seen regulation of these giants (e.g. to get them to pay more tax on their earnings) as limited and often ineffective. On what basis do we think that we will have success in regulating AI?

8. The articulation of Catholic social theology is superb and inspiring. As an Anglican I wonder where we have anything similar well-developed, globally adhered to and regularly updated? But this same superb and inspiring teaching raises questions! If social theology endorses justice for all, including women, and inspires creative momentum towards true participation for women and men in the life of the church (i.e. in modern Catholic parlance, synodality), why is the possibility of women having a full share in the ordained ministry of the church ruled out again and again, at odds with the teaching Catholics have magisterially developed on social theology?

9. Back to AI: I don't think the encyclical goes far enough in assessing the dangers of AI for humanity because AI-in-robots has capacity to generate new AI-robots (no other tool developed by humanity has had procreative abilities). Such capacity could yet dominate and eventually rid the world of the human species. Of course, in 2026, this sounds alarmist and fantastical, but is it not a question to be considered? Everything about AI is about its rapid development. No one know what capabilities AI-robots will have by 2030 let alone 2040.

10. Nevertheless I do take on board the relentless optimism of Jonah Lynch (on the Leo's Letter & Life podcast noted above): AI is for our good. Humanity has survived all threats to its existence to date. We are remarkable and adaptive! 

But, please, please, if you have time, read the encyclical. It is deep and wide, it takes us to the heart of being human, and it offers needed commentary on a fast moving phenomenon of this era which has implications for all future eras of humanity.

2020s, the 1930s are calling

I would like to post extensively on Magnifica Humanitas (which I am working through this week ahead of sharing in a podcast about it, organised by a local Catholic priest). Alas, time is short this week, and urgent people-oriented tasks must be concluded before week's end - which has an exciting end to it, the ordination of Archdeacon Susan Wallace as the next Pihopa o Te Hui Amorangi o Te Waipounamu, at 11 am on Saturday 6 June 2026.

So, failing that, but in the hope that perhaps next week is chronologically less challenged, I simply post the link to this article by keith Johnson, "A Strange Examination" which is a reflective account of a significant couple of moments in the 1930s history of German Christianity, with Karl Barth in a starring role, challenging the notion of God speaking through two voices, and the notion that grace perfects nature.

Although the article does not draw all implications out, the voice of Karl Barth in this article is a challenge to me (re some of my posts here), to some currents in Roman Catholic theological debate in the 20th and 21st centuries (re nature/grace), as well as to "Christian nationalism" in its various, current manifestations.

A big "hat tip" and thank you to a commenter here, Elizabeth, who supplied the link to the article in a comment to last week's post.

Onwards!

Occasionally, I think we should

For all the obvious reasons, I am generally keen to avoid posting on homosexuality and the church. There have been many posts over the years on ADU and the result has been maximum number of reads, maximum number of comments, minimum signs of anyone's views changing.

But, occasionally, we should post, if only to make a potential new point for consideration or a familiar point for new reconsideration.

So, I draw your attention to this essay, by Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, published online as "Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco on Gays and Catholics" by Outreach: An LGBTQ Catholic Ministry, and published in print in 

(ET = Gays and Catholics: The Church Put to the Test of Reality, published by Desclée De Brouwer).

I suggest these are the money paragraphs:

"Yes, how difficult it is to put homosexuality into words. It is not an illness; there are no chemical treatments, and attempts at psychological treatments are sickening. It is not a sin, for sin is committed freely, and no one chooses to be homosexual. Nor is it the result of educational or social conditioning, for within the same family where siblings have received the same upbringing, one child may be homosexual while the others are not.

Social acceptance does not make one homosexual, but it makes it easier to acknowledge it, to share it with others, and to live one’s emotional life as serenely as possible. Homosexuality has no obvious reason, and we must accept this element of ignorance regarding God’s creative work.

Nor is homosexuality part of the norm, and in that sense it is not normal—provided, of course, that the opposite of normal is not abnormal. I like the definition given by James Alison in his contribution: homosexual orientation is a regularly occurring non-pathological minority variant in the human condition. This definition places homosexuality within the order of creation and not within that of disorder or pathology. It also places it within the realm of singularity."

Why do I make this suggestion for your possible reading?

Because, in my summary of debates through past decades, at the heart of our differences is not only how we approach the Bible, it is also how we approach homosexuality as a human phenomenon. We seem to do this in two ways:

1. It is "abnormal" or a "disorder" or a "pathology" or a "sin" or "sinful disposition". Essentially we see homosexuality as something which can be fixed or something which should not be and so the holy and heroic thing to do is to overcome it via abstinence and celibacy. (With the consequence that those who propose differently are disregarding the Bible and/or disobeying the teaching of the church, and, thus and so, we cannot have communion across this divide.)

2. It is a variant within the human condition. As the Cardinal writes, 

"I like the definition given by James Alison in his contribution: homosexual orientation is a regularly occurring non-pathological minority variant in the human condition. This definition places homosexuality within the order of creation and not within that of disorder or pathology."

If we agree on 2, then we must revise the way we approach the Bible and the church's teaching on the matter. (There should be no problem doing so: if we are willing to change our understanding of Genesis 1 and 2 (creation did not literally happen per these chapters, but has involved evolution through a long period of time) on the basis of modern scientific knowledge, we could change our understanding of homosexuality from "disorder" (a moral assessment) to "variant within the human condition" (a scientific assessment).)

And if we so revise, we might have civil debates about the ethics of homosexuality (as we do about the ethics of contraception and the ethics of marriage and divorce)?

And if we could have civil debates about the ethics of homosexuality, we might not break communion with each other (as we do not break communion over contraception or marriage or divorce).

I will not necessarily publish every comment submitted here. My attention will be on whether the comment is focused on discussing what I have written (two approaches, how to have civil debates) or ranging more widely and into much discussed matters in past blogs.

Try harder :). 

 

Why did the disciples follow Jesus?

Thank you for an amazing and invigorating thread of comments to last week's post.

This week I am going to "cheat" a little - time is pressing because our annual Clergy Conference begins today, and I am concerned that if I posted something controversial, then there might be many comments to moderate during the next few days when my mind needs to be focused on the conference and our collegiality there.

So, kind of a non-post, but definitely a question, noting the end of the thread to the last post (i.e. on Monday morning NZ time), where the question is posed, Why did the disciples follow Jesus?

That is, what were they hoping would happen (such as the overthrow of the Roman rule over Israel)? What spiritual need was beating in their hearts? What was it about Jesus that drew them to himself (noting, of course, that the same Jesus gathered a significant number of enemies during the days of his mission)?

Answers/suggestions from you will be posted as and when I am able to.

Have a great week.

The Fullness of the Church?

Continuing to roll with thoughts about true church, best church, infiltrators in the church, basis or bases for communion and so forth ...

One challenge with focusing on being "true church" is that a logical consequence is that other churches are "false churches" or, perhaps more accurately "not-actually-churches-because-there-is-only-one-church-and-that-is-the-true-church". A number of  Catholic Tweeters on X are certainly meeting that challenge with zest and joy e.g. cheerfully repeating the mantra that Anglican orders are null and void, for everyone and especially for women who dare to take up roles such as, oh, I don't know, Archbishop of Canterbury, or pouring scorn on all things "Protestant." But others, I sense, are caught between joy in being in the one true church and the agony of not wishing to deem fine Lutherans, Anglicans etc as unfit for heaven.

While an advantage of taking the "best church" approach is avoiding that challenge above, even "best church" people can end up looking askance at members of less than the best churches. 

Driving to one of our parishes recently, a familiar route on a Sunday morning taking me past a well-attended Open Brethren assembly, I got to thinking as follows.

Perhaps the important thing to focus on is the fullness of the church, by which I mean the church grows into the fullness or completeness of what is intended to be in Christ, and Christ continues to fill the church, more and more, with his fullness. Ephesians offers these thoughts on the fullness of Christ in and for the church:

"And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." (Ephesians 1:22-23)

"... the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God." (Ephesians 2:19c - 22)

"I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." (Ephesians 3:18-19)

Can we say of any church, "Ah, that one has reached the fullness captured in these visionary texts?"

I think not. We all fall short, we are all provisional approximations to the fullness of the church envisioned in Ephesians (and in, say, John 17, 1 Corinthians 12-14, 1 Peter, Revelation 4-5). But, every church has something working well within it. Every church has an aspect of the fullness of the church which we can learn from. Here it might be depth of fellowship, there it might be perfection in liturgy, across the town a church may have the best (most devout, most beautiful, most God-honouring) music, and in some places of oppression, there lies the bravest and most faitful church.

Etc.

Rather than look askance at other churches as "false" or "not the best", what if we said, with ecclesiastical humility, "What can I receive from this church? What can I learn?"

Goddard v Avis and a few other things

Introduction

A few days ago, Mark posted this - thank you - in a comment which is worth posting as introduction to this week's post, assisting us in keeping perspective on the importance of the church ... the kingdom may be more important ... and also, brilliantly, connecting the Jesus of history with the Christ of faith:

"One of the great works of the Spirit has been not allowing Jesus’ dream of the reign of God to die. It was the Spirit who enlivened the apostles desolated by the failure of Jesus…[pouring] into them an unexpected and surprising energy for continuing to proclaim what Jesus proclaimed and did. The church as community of the faithful as we have it today is as much fruit of the Spirit as of Jesus. Jesus was seeking the reign and did not intend the church, but with his death a vacuum was created…It is the Spirit who comes to fill this vacuum, generating communities that propose to follow Jesus and attempt to make real his dream of the reign…

Without the Spirit there would be no way to understand the resonance achieved by Jesus in subsequent history. It was the Spirit who led communities to discover that beneath that weak man of working-class stock, itinerant prophet, was indeed hidden the incarnate Son of God. This discovery is still being made today by each generation.‍ ‍

- Leonardo Boff, Christianity in a Nutshell (2013)"

Once again into the NCP foray

Continuing to think about Anglican Communion present and future, with particular reference to the "NCPs", I see that Andrew Goddard's article titled, "The Wisdom of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals: A Response to Paul Avis" has been re-published on Psephizo. A couple of further reflections by me:

First, I note that a commenter there offers these figures re attendance at ++Sarah's installation as Archbishop of Canterbury: 26 of the 42 global Anglican primates did attend Mullally’s enthronement and a further 6 sent representatives and indeed five African female Anglican bishops were there supporting our new Archbishop of Canterbury. This underscores at least a question if not a rejoinder to the NCPs, do they give too much credence to minority views about the future of global Anglicanism?

Secondly, while I appreciate both Avis (in sum: the proposals are seriously deficient) and Goddard (in sum: the NCPs make the best of a bad situation), I continue to be concerned that the NCPs do give way too much - far too much - by allowing for "historic connection" to the See of Canterbury to have priority ahead of "communion with the See of Canterbury", and prioritzing "baptism" ahead of "communion" as bedrock to being our label on our tin "Anglican COMMUNION" (caps mine!). Ultimately my views do not matter much, but it will be for the forthcoming Belfast meeting of the ACC to carefully consider where we head on this critical issue of communion for the Communion.

Again, into the True Church foray

Then thinking more generally about church life on this planet, not solely about Anglicanism ... the question of 'true church' figures on X again which draws attention to the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer (a Catholic order with presence in the Canterbury region in which I live). According to this article, these Redemptorists "have issued a strident statement condemning the teaching of Vatican II, and rejecting the legitimacy of the popes since the council." (This "strident statement" is a 21 page letter issued on 2 May 2026 which may be found here.)

Within the 2 May 2026 letter is this stirring paragraph:

"The problem is, as St Pius X warned, that the structures of the Catholic Church have been infiltrated by men of a different non-Catholic religion. They use the Catholic name, they occupy the Catholic buildings, they know the Catholic culture. From the outside they look to be Catholics, but they do not profess the Catholic Faith as taught through the centuries. In reality, they have been formed as revolutionaries committed to the condemned Freemasonic heresies of Religious Liberty, Religious Indifference and False Ecumenism. Their infiltration has struck a lethal wound to the Catholic religion; they have brought about a major schism from the Mystical Body. We must stand firmly with the Catholic Church and move well away from the camouflage of its counterfeit."

I leave to the Catholic Church their engagement - if they choose - with this particular critique (save for one observation I make below). But what is of Anglican interest is that the above paragraph could be re-written for a certain kind of Anglican perspective (and no doubt, turn and turn about, Baptist ... Lutheran ... Presbyterian ... perspectives), thus:

"The problem is, as St Someone warned, that the structures of the Anglican world have been infiltrated by men and women of a different non-Anglican religion. They use the Anglican name, they occupy the Anglican buildings, they know the Anglican culture. From the outside they look to be Anglicans, but they do not profess the Anglican Faith as taught through the centuries. In reality, they have been formed as revolutionaries committed to the the following heresies ...* Their infiltration has struck a lethal wound to the Anglican religion; they have brought about a major schism from the Mystical Body. We must stand firmly with the authentic form of the global Anglican Church and move well away from the camouflage of its counterfeit."

*From one Anglican perspective, the warmly inclusive, broad Anglicanism of the accommodating Church of England-spread-unto-the-world has been infiltrated by a calculating exclusive, narrow Anglicanism reminiscent of the Puritanism that Richard Hooker so adroitly steered Elizabethan Anglicanism away from. From another Anglican perspective, the doctrinally sound Church of England spread large upon the world, disseminating the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles around the globe has been infiltrated by a cadre of theologians, clever lay synodspersons and errant epsicopoi preaching a message of liberal progressivism which would have Cranmer turning in his grave.

I am reminded, as I write, of an astute observation of St. Augustine (incidentally, formationally significant for Pope Leo XIV) which is noted on the side column of this blog:

"“The clouds of heaven thunder forth throughout the world that God’s house is being built. But these frogs sit in their pond and croak: ‘We’re the only Christians’!”"

Somehow I think Leonardo Boff would heartily endorse St. Augustine on this observation.

Best church, True church, NT church?

Introduction

Kind of continuing in the vein (vain?) of the past few posts, I offer further reflection this week on what it means to be the church (or, should we better say, "to be church"?), including being "Anglican church", in a world where an amazing and admirable run of public witness form by Pope Leo XIV is exemplifying the Catholic church in a wonderful way. Frankly, more wonderful because potential "rivals" (if we so may speak in ecclesiastical reflections) are contemporaneously attesting to forms of Christianity that at best are deeply unattractive and at worst base heresies relative to the Gospel of Christ the Prince of Peace: American Protestant evangelicalism (which gave rise through the middle of the 20th century onwards to Billy Graham, a dominant and much admired figure, capable of significant media interest) and Russian Orthodoxy (which through much of the 20th century was to be admired for its faithful witness to Christ in the face of continual persecution by the Soviet government).*

True church?

Present debates about church, whether we look at Anglican debates about the NCPs, the respective roles and aspirations of Gafcon and Global South or we look at Catholic debates, especially the allegations by some Catholics that Roman Catholicism has lost its way since Vatican 2 and there hasn't been a "real" Pope since ... [name your last real Pope] or look at Protestant debates in the USA where people seem to be ecclesiastically "cancelled" because ... [name your issue: support women in leadership ... do not unquestionally support President Trump ... etc], or dive into the claims and counter-claims of Eastren Orthodoxy generally (the true church continuous with the apostles) or between versions thereof in particularity, all amount to debates over the "true" church - the church as God has and presently intends it to be, as absolutely and clearly revealed through ... [again, name your preferred measure of "true church"].

It is noble to propose that one's church is the true church. It is impressive in certain cases to make such claim (e.g. it would be an odd God who only got around to revealing the true church in the 16th century (Protestantism) or in the 20th century (Pentecostalism), so, impressive indeed are the claims of churches that they date backwards to Jesus and the apostles with continuity of teaching and of practice.

It is not my present purpose to debate those claims save for observing that "true church" claims are proposed by more than one church, so merely making the claim does not void the need to examine such claims.

But, in principle, it is possible that the true church may yet be agreed on, and when and if so, we should all join up, merge into and gather under its ecclesial umbrella.

Best church?

Given potential to get stuck on "true church" claims, we might opt for "best church" claims. I suggest (at least) two levels of "best church" claims.

One is "best church for me or for my family." I see this working out in many Christians' lives these days which could be described as a "post-denominational" era. John and Mary have grown up Presbyterian, married in the Presbyterian church one of them belonged to, but worshipped in the other Presbyterian church until a shift of jobs takes them to another town. They have two children by now and a thriving children's ministry is sought, which is best found in this town's central Baptist church. Some years later, the children now teenagers, there is a move to another town, and this time it seems natural to join the church where their children's peers are involved in an excellent youth ministry, a relatively new church belonging to a network of independent Pentecostal churches established a few decades ago. Later, when the children are grown up and left home, a move to the leafy suburbs of the town seems a natural progression in life, and, for various reasons, the local Anglican church beckons. In each case John and Mary have belonged to the best church for them and their family, and they have enjoyed the advantageous features of each church, untroubled by any formal ecclesiological assessment of whether the church they were attending was the "true church."

A second way in which "best church" might work (as it does for me!) is a little bit of ecclesiological assessment, either choosing a church de novo or choosing to continue in a church for ecclesiological reasons - this church represents the best church of all possible churches. Pretty much, for example, this is why (having been brought up Anglican and in a vicarage) I choose continually to be Anglican. It is a church in which the best of being Catholic and the best of being Reformed can be and is expressed through judiciously balanced liturgies which themselves ensure that what we pray is what "we" believe and not what "I" as worship leader/priest/minister determine to be our belief. There are other "best" aspects but my point here is not so much to argue that the Anglican church is "the" best church but to make the point that whether or not the Anglican church is the "true church" it is (to my and many adherents' satisfaction) the "best church".

I fully expect there are happy Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and, of course, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox who see similar satisfaction in their "best church".

Back to the Anglican considerations of the past couple of posts: what the NCPs miss is this sense of what makes the Anglican Communion the "best" global communion of churches, because "best" includes communion with the See of Canterbury (continuing communion with an historical see, a strong and admirable feature of the Roman Catholic Church, of various Eastern Orthodox churches), visible, locatable leadership in the Archbishop of Canterbury rather than in a "duty primate" (I note that "as I write" it is the Archbishop of Canterbury who is being welcomed ecumenically in Rome, even to the consternation of some Catholics on X who are aghast that the Pope should recognise the ABC/a female ABC by praying with her), and "communion" being a drawing together in fellowship of those in common Anglican heritage even when there are differences and disagreements (rather than communion being a means of asserting who belongs to the 'true" Anglican communion/conference and who does not).

New Testament church?

Is there an even better way than "true church" or "best church"? One of my reflections through these weeks of some pretty intense ecclesiological debate - think not only about intra-global-Anglican debates, but also intra-Catholic-debates as (e.g.) the Pope speaking about peace, capital punishment, homosexuality etc occasions carping comments from some and laudatory reTweeting from others, and then, as the ABC visits Rome, all kinds of, frankly, uncharitable and (in my experience of majority Catholicism) unrepresentative criticisms of both the ABC (the usual "not a real bishop" stuff) and of the Pope and other Roman prelates who are welcoming her to Rome - is that the New Testament charts another way ...

The New Testament is not, frankly, much help when it comes to settling "true church" or even "best church" debates. It just doesn't say enough to (say) nail down that the Bishop of Rome is to be the Prime Bishop of All Bishops. It doesn't even say enough to make crystal clear that the church is to be ordered by bishops, priests/presbyters and deacons. On the eucharist, it does set out Jesus' command to 'do this', but, intriguingly, for something we make much of and debate heaps and even divide one from the other over, only one epistle, 1 Corinthians, actually says something about the eucharist as common church practice. (Perhaps most intriguingly, the Pastoral Epistles, which do say a number of things about the ordering of church life, say nothing about the eucharist, and Hebrews, which has a lot to say about the inadequacy of the worship life of Israel (sacrifices, tabernacle, etc) says zilch about the eucharist as a replacement for that particular form of worshipping life.)

But what the New Testament does have a lot to say about is what constitutes authentic Christian life aka being church. That authentic life, whether we focus on, say, Jesus washing the disciples' feet, or Paul talking about the Philippian Christians having the same mind as the Christ who gives up all divine privilege in order to save us, or James' urging congregations to live justly and mercifully, or Matthew charting the way of following Jesus through the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with the Beatitudes, is all about quality of life - quality of the inner person (Be-attitudes), quality of relationships with one another (Love one another), quality of relationship with God through allowing the Spirit of God to fill our lives, gifting us and making us fruitful. 

The church of such people is not best defined in terms of "order" or "office" or "conciliar decision" (though these are part of the NT church). If we think in terms of "judgement", does the NT invite us to think we will be judged by whether we have belonged to the "true church" or the "best church", whether we have approved of women being ordained or resisted the possibility, and the like? No. Not at all. But the NT does provoke us to think that we will be judged on the quality of the lives we have sought to live in response to Jesus calling us to follow him in the light of what has been revealed to us through Scripture.

Turning this around a little, to current debates, what matters is not, say, whether the ABC has "valid orders", is a man rather than a woman, acknowledges the authority of the Bishop of Rome, and so forth, but whether Sarah, baptised child of God, is a true follower of Jesus Christ, the best disciple she can be.

When I engage with you, and you with me, when we engage with another Christian - be they Methodist or Baptist or Coptic Orthodox etc - do we find in each other a true Christian?

Thankfully, on that count, in my experience, there are wonderful people of God spread throughout the world, belonging to many different denominations, carrying all kinds of labels. The truest, bestest church of God in the world today is the church of authentic believers.

*By "Russian Orthodoxy" I mean the Russian Orthodox church in Russia itself, which with a few notable and often defrocked exceptions, is led by warmongering, Putin-supporting prelates and priests. Outside of Russia, Russian Orthodoxy often is, and thankfully so (as locally here in NZ) less bellicose.

POSSIBLE BONUS READ

God is back in fashion – and topping the bestsellers list https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/christianity-back-books-publishing-return/

I say "possible" because the article is behind a paywall though I was able to read it via a "gift article" from a Tweeter on X.

Avis v Goddard

The article by Paul Avis I drew attention to last week has had a reply by Andrew Goddard, in The Living Church, which you can read here. In my assessment of this response I acknowledge some very helpful thinking from a correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous.

Paul Avis makes this critical observation about the so-called Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (as I cited last week):

"THE core proposal is to demote the see of Canterbury and to promote the Primates instead. One goes down, and the other comes up. The NCPs want to delete “in communion with the See of Canterbury” in the benchmark Lambeth Conference 1930 Resolution 49, and insert in its place “a historic connection with the See of Canterbury”, thus removing the reference to “communion” and to the unity of episcopal sees.

This follows from the claim that baptism, not holy communion, should be a sufficient future basis for the Communion, and that “Communion” in the term “Anglican Communion” should be understood as at least baptismal communion. Baptism is the ground of communion, but it comes to fulfilment in holy communion, and that is how “communion” in the Anglican context has been understood hitherto."

The tin says "Anglican Communion". The contents of that Anglican Communion tin should be identifiable as "Anglican" (connected to the Archbishop of Canterbury) and Communion (in communion with the Archbishop and with each other). 

What is not in the tin called "Anglican Communion" is a bunch of commestibles such as "a historic connection with the See of Canterbury" (Methodists could claim that! Roman Catholics too!! Tourists visiting the Cathedral in Canterbury could claim that, especially if they made a donation to its upkeep as the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury!!!) or some link via baptism (which could include all Christians).

Andrew Goddard has responded to Paul Avis' concern with, in my view, this key statement:

"He [Avis] opens with an account of IASCUFO’s mandate and here he fails to acknowledge a key element of the mandate that sheds light on his fundamental disagreements. The ACC resolution which he quotes not only referred to the need to “address our differences in the Anglican Communion” (3(a)). It also affirmed “the importance of seeking to walk together to the highest degree possible, and learning from our ecumenical conversations how to accommodate differentiation patiently and respectfully.”

This recognition of the need to acknowledge degrees of communion among the churches of the Communion and to accept we now have to consider some form of “good differentiation” (the resolution’s title), learning from ecumenical conversations, is part of the mandate. It seems Avis is unwilling to countenance these steps as regrettable necessities even as he recognizes that the Communion is “currently fractured and dysfunctional.”

It could be argued that these steps have for some time been necessary, but they became even more pressing once a growing number of provinces in the Communion felt unable to continue in full communion with the see of Canterbury (a core feature of the historic 1930 description of the Communion) amid Prayers of Love and Faith as made clear in, for example, the 2023 Ash Wednesday Statement by Primates of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA)."

On the face of it, this is all entirely reasonable: the family union of Anglican provinces has become frayed and faulty, we are now in a relationship marked by "separation", in varying degrees, from all but "divorced" (Gafcon) through to "separated" but in complicated ways if one measures things such as who will turn up to which meetings with whom and so forth, and, consequently, the terms of reference for get togethers, who sits at the head of the table for family meals and so forth, need adjusting towards the reality of being an unhappy and divided family.

But, when was ecclesiology "reasonable"?  Church as the body of Christ is unreasonable. Disparate individuals form one entity, by virtue of sharing bread and cup together in which Christ is actually present, with bonding via the unseen glue of the Holy Spirit, flowing with unendingly patient love (1 Corinthians 10-13). That's irrational. 

More simply, the church is called to mimic and to witness to God who is Trinity who is a Communion-of-Love.

What Andrew Goddard proposes - taking account of differences between provinces, varying degrees of willingness to meet together or even to not meet together at all, fracturing of the whole body of the Communion into sub-body networks and conferences such as Gafcon and Global South - makes reasonable allowance for the reality of our frayed and faulty Communion. But it pays a price in doing so. The price it pays is the giving up of a wonderful theology of communion underpinning the meaning of "Anglican Communion" (pace 1930 Lambeth Conference etc) for a barebones, "what is the minimum we can agree on in order to keep some semblance of connection with each other as provinces of an entity called the Anglican Communion?"

I would also make the point that talk of "degrees of communion" is unfortunate. Communion is something you are either in, or not in. If you are not in full communion - completely and unreservedly willing and able to share in the bread and wine of communion - then you are not in communion.

Now, let's be clear, Goddard's support for the NCPs is support for the Communion failing as a communion and Avis's support for the Communion being a communion is potentially support for a very slimmed down communion with (in my view) some danger that it is a very "white Anglican" dominated Communion.

Neither outcome is inspiring.

But the advantage is to Avis: he advances the theology of being "Anglican-in-Communion", and that theology is historically coherent with the Church of England - the one church for the whole nation, in all its diversity and difference, the church in which Evangelicals, Broad Church and Anglo-Catholics found themselves at home - a Protestant church with Catholic vision for its indivisibility and for its universal reach to the whole of society.

Goddard is, to be sure, wholly realistic and fulsomely pragmatic. Things are in a sorry state and we just have to make the best of it. But "the best of it" is neither Anglican (IMHO) nor Communion, yet there is no proposal to change the name on the tin.

What might be different?

I would like to see from both the modern apostles of Anglicanliness, Paul and Andrew, that there is a call back to Anglican first principles, an appeal to the better hearts of Anglicans around the globe, that is, a cry to re-find our unity in our differences, sharp though they are, to renew commitment to communion as Christ's inclusive fellowship with those whom he has called to follow him (remember, Judas took part in the last supper, as did denying Peter, and doubting Thomas), and to refresh our love for one another a la 1 Corinthians 13 with its strenuous code which spares no effort to truly, deeply, lastingly love the other. Or, again, more simply, might we call ourselves back to what God calls us to as church, to be on earth what the God who is Communion-of-Love is in heaven. This call is not made by the NCPs.

In sum, an appeal to be Christian in a Trinitarian manner coherent with the English form of being Christian - a form of being Christian which has borne many challenges and found ways to adjust to and live with change but seemingly in the late 20th and early 21st century hit a rock and founded.

I would also like to see a re-think, on all sides, on the question of how and why, of all possible issues to found the good ship Anglicana upon, it is the issue of humans unable to marry in the usual way seeking nevertheless a pathway to permanent, loving, faithful partnership. 

Why has this issue, and no other issue, become the rock on which the ship Anglicana has crashed? Should we not be re-addressing this issue and possible ways to live with our varied responses to it rather than completely re-configuring what we think being Anglicans-in-communion means? As best I understand the NCPs, if followed through and agreed to, we would be revising what the Anglican Communion means to the point where we would be an association of Anglicans, but without the courage to re-name ourselves accurately and honestly.

So, in the battle of proposals, in the field of Anglican dreams, Avis is the winner.

Postscript: an observation from a correspondent, "The ACCs haste to push the NCPs at this juncture sets it against the more authentic See of Canterbury. Why should we not view the Nairobi-Cairo Report as an assault of one ambitious "instrument of communion," the ACC, on another one. the ABC? ".

Why we need the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead Anglican Communion (and bonus Easter reflections)

Why We Need the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead the Anglican Communion

Pope Leo has been in terrific form as a global Christian leader in recent weeks, unashamedly, un-backing-downed-ly, consistently speaking for and praying for peace in respect of current wars. For a sample article on this pacific leadership see here.

It has gotten me thinking a bit about some current analyses and prognoses for global Anglican leadership. You know, the ones that sum up as "We don't need the Archbishop of Canterbury," with the Gafcon version being the hard one, "We really don't need the Archbishop of Canterbury and you shouldn't either if you want to be a Gafcon leader" and the Anglican Communion one itself (according to the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals - still being discussed) being the soft version "We don't need the Archbishop of Canterbury, do we? Well, okay, some kind of role, but let's share Communion leadership round the globe."

But, here's the thing which Pope Leo's leadership in recent weeks highlights: the world pays attention to the Christian leader who bears the title and holds the mana of church office which is both "high" and "historic". The Roman Catholic Church itself pays attention to its high, historic office holder: "the Pope says ..." has impact more than "the Bishop of Oxbridge says ...".

What would be the global impact of, say, "the duty Anglican primate for 2026 says ...".

You're correct: Zilch!

Let's stick with, let's support, let's settle on the high, historic leadership office for Anglicans which is ... the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Important Addendum: since drafting the above paragraphs, I have noticed an article by Paul Avis in Church Times, highly critical of the N-C Proposals. Key citations from that article are:

"Some emphases of the NCPs are welcome: the equality and autonomy of the Churches (“Provinces”) of the Anglican Communion, and the wider sharing of chairing positions. But the Commission’s key proposals are deeply troubling.

The NCPs contain factual errors, both historical and constitutional; and they exhibit an animus against the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury which is uncharitable. The Communion is currently fractured and dysfunctional, but, if the NCPs were accepted, the Communion would not be a “communion” at all, as ecclesial communion has been universally understood: namely, as a eucharistic communion with an interchangeable ordained ministry."

Then:

"THE core proposal is to demote the see of Canterbury and to promote the Primates instead. One goes down, and the other comes up. The NCPs want to delete “in communion with the See of Canterbury” in the benchmark Lambeth Conference 1930 Resolution 49, and insert in its place “a historic connection with the See of Canterbury”, thus removing the reference to “communion” and to the unity of episcopal sees.

This follows from the claim that baptism, not holy communion, should be a sufficient future basis for the Communion, and that “Communion” in the term “Anglican Communion” should be understood as at least baptismal communion. Baptism is the ground of communion, but it comes to fulfilment in holy communion, and that is how “communion” in the Anglican context has been understood hitherto."

And (pretty much my point above):

"Any form of primacy needs to be recognisable and “findable”. Rome is the locus of the papacy, and Constantinople is the locus of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Anglican primacy is located at Canterbury, and so is recognisable and findable. A floating Primates’ Council, which exercises the functions of primacy but has no home, no base, does not do it."

Avis is particularly focused on the proposed change from "communion" to "baptism" as key to gloabl Anglican relationship and rightly points out that this is an ecumenical basis for any and all Christian, inter-church relationships:

"THE proposal that baptism should be sufficient for “communion” rests on a confused cross-over from Anglican relations with Churches with which Anglicans are not in ecclesial communion to Churches with which they are in ecclesial communion. The relationship between the Churches of the Anglican Communion would then be no different in kind from the relationship between the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain through the Anglican-Methodist Covenant (2003), or between the Church of England and the EKD (Protestant Churches of Germany) through the Meissen Agreement (1991)."

Bonus Easter Reflections

Preparing for yesterday's sermon, focusing on readings, Acts 2:41a, 22-32, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31, got me thinking a little more about Easter in this Easter season of 2026.

1. Simon Peter via Luke's reporting to us says "Nuts" to all those theologians/preachers who attempt to make the case that "It doesn't really matter whether Jesus' body remains in the tomb, Jesus still rose from the dead." In Acts 2, he cites Psalm 16 (Greek Old Testament version), not once but twice"

Verse 27 (=Psalm 16:10): "because you will not abandon me in the world of the dead; you will not allow your faithful servant to rot in the grave." [GNB]

Verse 31 (= Psalm 16:10): "[King] David [writer of Psalm 16] saw what God was going to do in the future, and so he spoke about the resurrection of the Messiah when he said, 'He was not abandoned in the world of the dead; his body did not rot in the grave'." [GNB]

Luke reports Simon Peter arguing that what happened to Jesus' body in the tomb was that it did not rot (that is, in the usual way a body rots when buried following death). By implication the tomb was emptied of Jesus' body when that body was raised to new life: "God has raised this very Jesus from death, and we are all witnesses to this fact." [GNB].

Importantly, Luke also reports Simon Peter strengthening this argument when he makes a plain distinction between David and Jesus in verse 29:

"My friends, I must speak to you plainly about our famous ancestor King David. He died and was buried, and his grave is here with us to this very day." [GNB]

By contrast, everything Peter is saying in this Pentecost sermon is that Jesus died, was buried and is no longer in the grave he was buried in. David's body, in David's tomb could be visited and venerated. Not so with Jesus: rephrasing the last part of 2:31 and 32, "God has raised this very Jesus from death, his body is not rotting in his grave."

2. The three readings for yesterday, from Acts, 1 Peter and John, provide three great themes for resurrection reflections:

- Acts: the resurrection as a question of historical fact, or, "the apologetics of the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead."

- 1 Peter: the appropriate response to the resurrection is Thanksgiving and Praise: "Let us give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!" (1 Peter 1:3).

- John/1 Peter: the resurrection of Jesus Christ is resurrection for us: John emphasises in 20:19-31 (in keeping with Matthew and Luke) that the resurrected Jesus appears to the disciples (and thus also to us his contemporary followers) to direct our discipleship so that we are assured of "Peace", commissioned "As the Father has sent me, so I send you" and gifted the Holy Spirit. All of which is so that "through your faith in him you may have life" (John 20:31 GNB). Peter makes a similar point in his epistle, "... he gave us new life by raising Jesus Christ from death" (1 Peter 1:3 GNB).