Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

Reflections On The Emerging Church

After The Trinity Ancient Wisdom-Anglican Futures Conference

By The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

We just had a really stimulating conference here at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge PA on the relationship between what is called The Emerging Church and the Great Tradition and what role Anglicanism plays now and could play in the future with this new movement in the church. The Emergent Church is a term that characterizes a wide spectrum of Christians and churches often composed of young adults that are seeking an “ancient-future” way of being the church. These young Christians often come out of Evangelical and Pentecostal circles, though there are refugees from the Mainline Churches as well, and they are looking for something more significant than the trendy consumerist relevance that has characterized many of the approaches to reaching a secularized society in the Twentieth Century. It is a very disparate movement and includes examples that resonate deeply with the orthodoxy of the ages and other examples that seem, as one of the conference presenters George Sumner said, the latest installment in the long book of Gnosticism. (In fact a book I would recommend for self described emergent types is Against the Protestant Gnostics by Phillip J. Lee.)

As I listened to the themes that were attracting these young Christians: a more narrative understanding of the message of the Bible, an interest in ancient practices of prayer and spiritual discipline, a turn toward the writings of the earliest Christian centuries of the Patristic period, an interest by formerly free church types in sacramental theology and in the theology of the church, I was struck by the way in which this movement is revamping much of what was good about the story of the church and theology in the Twentieth Century. At the end of the conference the Trinity faculty members present were asked to reflect on a series of questions one of which was, “where are we now?”

I think we are in a moment when there is a fresh wind of the Holy Spirit moving to renew the ecumenical church. The Twentieth Century saw a series of movements in the theology and the life of the church which were clearly movements of the Spirit. The Century started with the great missionary gathering in Edinburgh with the vision of winning the world for Christ in one generation. There was the movement of Biblical Theology and the turn toward the narrative represented in figures like Karl Barth. There was the movement of Liturgical Theology which produced among other things the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer. There was a new interest in the mission of the church to the poor and the marginalized. There was the Charismatic revival that swept through all the churches including the Roman Catholic Church and which had leaders of the stature of Cardinal Suens. All of these movements in some way brought with them a painful consciousness of the brokenness of the body of Christ as it faced the challenge of an increasingly hostile and secularized world. Out of the renewal in theology, liturgy and mission came a new desire for ecumenical healing and partnership. The apogee of this convergence was the formation of the World Council of Churches, the production of the consensus on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry in Lima Peru, and the formation of the Church of South India. It is striking how the saints of the ecumenical convergence of the Twentieth Century are the figures that interest the emergents of the Twenty First the most. Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Michael Ramsey, Yves Congar, Alexander Schmemann were names that were invoked constantly during the course of this conference.

During the Twentieth Century God gave to the broken and fractured global church a gift of the Holy Spirit, an ecumenical moment of mission and renewal. It was for the most part squandered and has been allowed to fall to the ground and especially by the daughter churches of the Reformation in the old Christian homelands including Anglicans. It seems to me that God is doing in the Emergent Church movement something that He does over and over. When His gift is rejected by the people He has prepared to receive it, He seeks out a new people. So it is that sons and daughters of Anabaptists and Pentecostals are being drawn to the Great Tradition. It is a moment for repentance for those of us in the historic churches which have stewarded the Great Tradition but have lost touch with the life which generates the tradition and which carries it forward. It is also a moment of testing for that which is emerging. Will they marginalize doctrine and the labor of seeking a consensus in faith and order? Will they succumb to the motto that deeds unite and doctrine divides and then find themselves in the midst of church dividing controversy with no deep doctrinal consensus to guide? Will they be lured into trivial and faddish relevancy and all too worldly politics at the expense of a more profound service of peace and justice? Will the established churches who are in a panic about their declining influence in the culture repent of quick fixes and pandering to culture and engage with a new generation in a deep renewal of the roots of Christian wisdom and practice? Will we all catch this new wind of the Spirit or let it pass us by? What an exciting time to be a Christian.

This is something that I wrote shortly after I came to Trinity. I am posting it because I keep the Feast of Pentecost as the anniversary of my ordination and this piece tells the story of that day.

Ontology vs Function

In the Church, Ministry and Sacraments class at Trinity we spent one three hour session on the theology of ordination. The hoary question of whether ordination is a functional reality or an ontological reality was hotly debated by the students with surprisingly strong feelings on both sides. Strong Evangelicals hear the language of ontological change as a claim to a superior and super-holy status with magical powers. It sounds superstitious and magical and the worst sort of works righteousness to them. The more Catholic minded hear the functional language as a denial of any real change made in the individual by the power of the sacrament and as an understanding of the ordained ministry that has no way of comprehending the mystical dimension of holy order. Functional language sounds secular and earthbound in Catholic ears.

The terms of the debate are the terms of the polemic that has developed since the Reformation. On the Reform side the rejection of any notion of ontological change has been driven by a desire to foreclose any possibility of an opening for works righteousness. On the catholic side the upholding of the ontological language is driven by a desire to honor the power and grace of God working sacramentally in the church and by the desire to honor the irrevocable nature of God’s call and action in making a person a priest of the church.

To say that there is an ontological change in the ordinand is not necessarily to say that the person is super-holy or has magical powers. It is simply to say that a real change has taken place, that the person will never be, can never be the same again. The person may be a good priest, a bad priest, a spoiled priest but never again someone who has not made these promises and had hands laid upon them and been set apart by the prayer of the church for the ministry of word and sacrament. Something real has happened. To deny this seems to deny both the reality of human action and of God’s action. To say as Evangelicals are wont to do that ordination is the empowering of the Holy Spirit for specific functions in the church sounds in the end very much like an ontological change. For how is it that vows are made and the Spirit poured out and nothing real and irrevocable happens?

I remember very powerfully my own ordination. I was ordained on the Feast of Pentecost, June 7, 1981, in St. Anne’s Church in Mars Hill, Maine. The little church had been a chicken house that was moved across the town and set on a little hill overlooking Route One. The church was beautified by being lined with pressed tin on the walls and ceilings. I had always imagined being ordained in a beautiful Cathedral and my ordination was more beautiful than I could have imagined.

The church was packed. We had over a hundred and twenty people in this small building that had seating for maybe fifty. There were two dozen clergy, everything from Baptists to Roman Catholics. Most of the Anglican clergy present were from Canada and there was one priest from the Church of Sweden who was serving the Lutheran congregation in New Sweden. He was invited by the bishop to join in the laying on of hands.

There was a tremendous wind blowing that day and it was very warm and all the windows of the church were open. We were also in the middle of an army worm outbreak and the roads were slick with the bodies of the migrating worms. The worms had denuded many of the trees. The landscape was devastated and exquisitely beautiful at the same time.

The little church had a small sacristy in which there was a mirror. Two dozen clergy were taking turns before the mirror trying to look presentable. Hair provided a particular challenge. The heat and the dry wind blowing through the church created abundant static electricity, causing everyone’s hair to stand on end. Of course the more you tried to comb your hair down the more it stood up and the clergy clustered around the one mirror trying to get presentable. I remember being especially anxious about it and very frustrated that I couldn’t get my hair to lie down.

The priest that sponsored me for ordination was a bit of a holy fool and could always be counted on to do the unexpected. While we all stood jostling in front of the mirror he came into the sacristy and pulled his hair straight up until it literally crackled with electricity. With an ecstatic expression on his face Fr. Watson said, “This is what it was like on the first Pentecost!” We were stunned and then he reached his hand out to touch me and a spark a hand’s breath wide jumped from him to me and I was schocked in more than ways than one.

I remember so much from that day, the smell of the incense, the people, the reverence of the two boys who were the acolytes. (One is now a teacher and the other a physician’s assistant.) I remember signing the ordination document and making my subscription. I had prayed and thought hard about this working my way through in particular to being able to profess the resurrection of the body. I remember the bishop vesting himself just before the laying on of hands in tunicle, dalmatic and chasuble and I remember being overwhelmed by a perception of the fullness of the church as a sacred mystery, of the body of Christ pouring down upon us from antiquity and streaming out before us into eternity.

Then there was the laying on of hands. The physical pressure was immense. I had been prepared for it and was ready but it took real strength to bear the weight of the hands upon my head. At the prayer of ordination I was shot through with the most holy fear, right through from head to foot. Indeed it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

I was ordained with all the Anglo-Catholic ceremony. After being vested my hands were annointed with chrism and bound together with a stole in a posture of prayer with the thumbs free. A Bible was placed on my hands and I gripped it with my thumbs. Then a chalice and patten were placed there and I gripped them. It could not be more clear that my life from hence forth was to be tied to the minstry of word and sacrament. I looked down at my bound hands and thought, “perfect freedom is to be the slave of Jesus Christ.”

The service went on and I shared the canon of the Eucharist with the bishop. We processed out of the church and stood by the door. I was quite overcome with emotion and put my hands to my face. The smell of the oil was strong and a balm and I breathed it in. I was dimly aware of someone calling my name and I spread my hands just a bit and looked down to see the bishop kneeling at my feet. “May I have your blessing, Father.” I was completely undone and utterly humbled. It was at that moment that the reality of ordination came thundering in upon me. I was nothing, had nothing, had done nothing, could do nothing but hang on to Him and pronounce His blessing and marvel at the calling and promises of God. One by one every person in the congregation knelt for an individual blessing. It was as if something were being hammered into my soul. It was death and then dying again and again and again. I cried all the tears I had before the end of the line of people came. I thought I couldn’t go on and I did. Pure grace. Really the whole ministry was there in those few minutes. “A broken and contrite heart, I will not despise.” It was as they say real.

God grant it shall be so to the end of my days. One can only marvel at the treasures that God conveys through earthen vessels and broken hearts.

Leander S. Harding, copywrite 2005.

The Priesthood and Sacrifice
Sermon Preached at the Ordination of John Mason Lock

At All Soul’s Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City

May 9, 2009

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

I’m Fr. Leander Harding, and I’m very grateful to be here today. I was one of John’s teachers at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge. I am very grateful to the bishop, and to Father Bright, and to John for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful day today, this day that comes after a long period of preparation. I want to talk this morning about an aspect of the priesthood; I want to talk about how it is that the priest offers sacrifice.

 This is a controversy that is in the church. Should we even have priests in the church? Should we call them priests? This is something that is disputed in the church. There has been a tremendous ambivalence about the priesthood the whole time that I’ve been ordained. It’s understandable that there should be somewhat of an ambivalence and a hostility towards the priesthood outside of the church, but the whole time that I’ve been ordained, there’s been a kind of crisis of identity and ambivalence about the priesthood within the church. And sometimes that masquerades as a concern for Reformation theology, and sometimes it masquerades as a concern for egalitarianism: we don’t want to have something that isn’t democratic enough. I think mostly it’s just a camouflage for an allergy to the supernatural.

So, I want to make a case, if I can today, for the priesthood, the sacrificing priesthood of the ordained priest within the church of God. Now, first of all, what is a sacrifice? What was it that those Old Testament priests did, those levitical priests when they went into the temple? What they did was they took the blood of an animal, and they poured the blood out upon the altar. So, a sacrifice is a pouring out, and it’s a pouring out of life. In the Old Testament, people understood that the life of the animal, the life of the person resided in the blood. And so, what the priest did was to pour out this life, and it was felt that this pouring out of this life made an atonement, that it made amends for man’s offense to God and that in some way, in some mysterious way that it cleansed or purified. In the Old Testament, blood is a very interesting thing: on the one hand, it makes people dirty; on the other hand, it makes them clean. And what was the purpose of all that? The purpose of all that was the reconsecrating of the people.

God had a plan to bring his wayward children home, and his plan was to have a people that would live towards him in such a way and live towards each other in such a way that all the other peoples of the earth would look to that people, his people, and say, “surely your God is the true God; tell us about him that we might also know him and love him and serve him.” And when they wandered away from the way of life that they were given, God gave them a system, this sacrificial system, the tabernacle and then the temple in Jerusalem, that involved blood sacrifice. And the purpose of the blood sacrifice, the purpose of the pouring out the lives of these animals on the altar was that the people should be cleansed and reconsecrated, made new, made again into God’s holy and righteous people. They were called to be that; they had wandered away from that; they needed to be gathered into that; they needed to be reconsecrated, set apart again, and they needed to be made clean. That was what they were trying to do. And the writer to the Hebrews tells us that the blood of the goats and the bulls availeth nothing. It was all a kind of education, it was all a kind of pointing forward to the priest who is to come. Now this is the first thing that I think we can say about this, then maybe we’ll do a little bit to get rid of some of the misunderstanding anyway.

When it is being said that the ordained priest in the church is indeed a priest who offers sacrifice, it is not being said that the priest does something above, beyond, apart from the one sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In the Christian church anything that is done is done by Jesus Christ. If there is teaching, he is the one who teaches. If there is forgiveness which is on offer, he is the one who is offering the forgiveness. If there is healing, it is his touch that is the healing touch. If enemies are reconciled, he is the one who reconciles. If peace is given, it is his peace. So, whether it is lay ministry or ordained ministry or any other kind of ministry, there is nothing that is done in the church that Jesus doesn’t do;  by the power of the Spirit in his body, he does those things. He continues to do those things which he did when he walked among us. So, there is no question of the priest adding in any way, the ordained priest adding in any way, to the one perfect and sufficient sacrifice of the Saviour, that the Saviour offers. That’s not what is happening in this.

We have been waiting; the people of God have been waiting for the priest to come who can really reconcile us to the Father, who can really make us clean. This old song, you know, “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” What is this? It’s this life of his that is poured out in praise and adoration towards the Father and towards us in love and service. This pouring out of this life, it is this sacrifice that renews us and consecrates us and makes us clean. Titus says it this way–you know, we hear this every Christmas–to make for himself, to consecrate for himself a holy people zealous of good works. The purpose of the priest is to do that work, is to reconcile and return God’s lost children to the Father and to consecrate them as a holy people zealous for good works. The whole Old Testament system was pointing towards that until he who is the priest, really the one and only priest, until he should come. He is the Light of the world. He is the bread of life. He is living water. He is the Good Shepherd. He is the priest, and he is also that Lamb of God that was slain. As Charles Wesley says, “priest and victim in the Eucharistic feast.” So, when we are saying that the ordained priest offers sacrifice, we’re not saying that something is being offered in addition to what Jesus did and we’re not really saying that something is being offered other than what Jesus is doing.

But, the personal God is not content that the sacrifice of his Son–that what he has done by the pouring out of his life to bring men and women back to their Father, to make them again clean and holy, and to give them a witness in the world which shall cause the rest of God’s alienated children to come home–the personal God is not content that that should be a story that’s in a book somewhere. The personal God wants that sacrifice to become real; he wants it to become personal; he wants it to become something that people can see, and they can touch, that is put in front of people in such a way that they can respond to it, that their hearts can be broken and made warm and that they can be reconciled to their Father and give their lives anew to God in Christ and receive the power of the Holy Spirit and be witnesses in his Name to the ends of the earth. And so, God calls, the Lord calls in his church. You know, he comes to his church with the marks of the crucifixion upon him, this crucified and risen one, and he breathes into his church, he breathes into them. He says, “My peace I give you; as the Father sent me, so I send you.” And so, what the Lord wants is he wants in this time and in this place, this person to come and give himself so that the sacrifice of his Son might be re-presented in front of his people in such a way as it is real for them and provokes their response. That’s what the ordained priesthood is all about.

And it is the way of the Bible: God always calls the many through the one. We should be very surprised if all of a sudden the system were changed in the New Testament. People not only need to hear about what God has done, but they need to have someone take them by the hand and put their hand in the hand of the master. That is what the ordained priesthood is all about. And so, in certain times, in certain places, amongst a certain set of God’s people, God calls this person and that person. You know there is this old word, the parson–have you heard that?–it just means the person. This is the person that God has called; this one that he might call many through this one. This is his plan, and that the sacrifice of his Son might be re-presented. So, I think it is quite entirely accurate to say that the ordained priesthood is a priesthood that offers sacrifice, but when we’re saying that we’re not saying anything that our evangelical brothers should take offense at because we’re saying that Jesus Christ is the only priest. And he is the one who does everything that is to be done, and we are but instruments in his hands.

Now when the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is presented, re-presented–it is going to be re-presented for us in a moment at the Eucharist–when the sacrifice is re-presented for us, it evokes the challenge of response for us: we’ve got to respond. And this is another strange thing, you know, we can’t do anything of our own, we can’t do anything for our own salvation, but whatever we do, the faith we have, the good works that we do, all of our response to God is not us but Christ who worketh in us; it’s the gift of the Holy Spirit. And yet, we have to give ourselves to this. And the ordained priest has a particular shape to the way in which the ordained priest must respond to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ with his own sacrifice. And so, I just want to talk about three elements of that response.

First of all, the ordained priest re-presents. Austin Farrar, the great Anglican theologian, says that the  clergy are “walking sacraments.” So, the ordained priest re-presents as a walking sacrament, the one perfect and sufficient sacrifice of the Lord. And then, he responds with his own sacrifice, and it has a shape. And the first element of the shape of that sacrifice is that it is a sacrifice of poverty of spirit. Now, I think, in a way all Christians are called to this, but the ordained have it in a particularly intense way. They cannot get away from it; they are tied to it. This is what is happening to today: this man is tying himself by irrevocable promises to this thing–he can never get away from it after this. He can be a good priest, he can be a bad priest, he can be a failed priest, but he can never get away from it. It’s an awesome thing. And poverty of spirit is a sacrifice that is demanded of the priest. When you enter into the ordained ministry, you become very, very aware, as St. Paul says, that we have this treasure in earthen vessels, and that nothing that you are and that nothing you can do amounts to anything. And that the call is to be nobody and nothing and to come and die.

We had a had a rather wealthy man who came to the school–we’re very interested in wealthy men coming to the school, or wealthy women too for that matter; we encourage this in every way–we were really hoping that he might help us with our work. He was saying to me, “Do the brightest and the best and the most accomplished come to your school?” And I didn’t know how to answer; I really didn’t know how to answer. John is certainly one of the most academically gifted people we’ve ever had at the school. We get incredible people at the school. I’ve had a retired state department official; I’ve had a professor of finance; I’ve had people that could do anything in any graduate school in the country. And I’ve had people who have found school very, very difficult. And they were all called by God. And they all were giving themselves away to Jesus Christ. And I didn’t know how to explain to this man that this ministry is really not about accomplishment. If you do anything, it is not you who do it. And the most essential part of what you are called to do is nothing that is possible in the flesh; it’s not humanly possible.

This is a call to be a failure; this is a call to know your own unworthiness, to plumb the depths of it. This is a call to plumb the depths of your own inadequacy. This is a call to be nobody and nothing. And the flesh chafes against this; the flesh–you know the Bible says the flesh it means humanly–humanly we chafe against this: we want to be somebody and something. So, you know, being human, every once in a while, a priest will kind of wake up and say, “Today, I am going to be somebody and something.” And, of course, everybody sees that you’re a complete and utter contradiction because Jesus Christ did not grasp equality with God but humbled himself. And they see that you are a complete contradiction, and Christ is glorified, even by contradiction. You are his witness, and you re-present his sacrifice; willingly or unwillingly, you cannot get away from it. So this is a sacrifice, this poverty of spirit, this one aspect of the sacrifice.

Another aspect of the sacrifice is it is a sacrifice of intercession. Jesus Christ was an interceder–he intercedes for us yet. We’re approaching the feast of the Ascension. One of the things we may lose track of in the church because we don’t celebrate the Ascension enough is we may lose track of the heavenly session where he yet intercedes for us. And one of the things that happens to the ordained is that they see more than they can ever possibly do anything about. Now at the seminary we try to teach people to be good counselors; we try to teach them about how grief works, and to be a good companion to people as they are going through grief; we try to teach them how to be crisis counselors and to have a kind of minimum competency. But, it will never be enough. It’s not possible that it will ever be enough. A priest will see every day, day in and day out, so many things that the priest can do nothing about other than to hold up Christ and to pray and to intercede. And after you’ve been doing it for a while, you see the train wreck coming. You know, you see what’s going on in this family now, and you know what’s going to happen with the teenagers down the road. You see what’s going on with this couple now, and you know what’s going to happen in five or six years. You see how the parents are treating their children, and you know they are going to die alone and unhappy. So many things you see, you can’t do a thing about it. But, what is the priest in the Old Testament? He stands before the people with God on his heart, and he stands before God with the people in his heart. To be ordained is to be tied to intercession in a way that is irrevocable and unavoidable, and to see things over and over again, day in and day out. It is a persistent formation that brings you again and again to the place of intercession. And this is a sacrifice; there is a sacrifice here, a sacrifice of intercession.

And finally, there is this dimension to the priesthood, and I’m not sure what to call this. Maybe call this a sacrifice of surrender. There was a particular form of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ: he put himself completely and totally in his Father’s hands in that night in the garden in Gethsemane. He put himself completely and totally in his Father’s hands, and the way that he did that was to put himself completely and totally in the hands of his people. What is the passion of Jesus Christ? The passion of Jesus Christ is that he came to his own and his own knew him not; he was despised and rejected. There is a vulnerability of the priest to the people that is irrevocable and that is very awesome and very frightening. The priest is at the mercy of the people. You will be loved–there will be people who love you–but you’re not going to be able to do it for one hour: tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow you will have your first service, there will be somebody who will be unhappy, there will be somebody who will be angry. And the psychologist says we shouldn’t pay too much attention to that; we should pay attention to the positive, take in more the positive. Well yes, there could be a psychological unhealth that is here, but look, this is the passion of the Good Shepherd who came to his own and his own knew him not and who persevered towards us with love, though we despised and rejected him and drove him out of our lives and onto the cross.

The priesthood demands a kind of complete surrender of our lives into the hands of the people we serve. We are at their mercy, as the Lord put himself at our mercy. Now, one of the things that happens at the seminary about January of the last year of seminary, students begin to intuit this, and it’s the cause of a lot of cold feet. A lot of people start thinking that, “gee, a couple more years of graduate education appears very attractive at this point” or “maybe I could go into a kind of chaplaincy work” or “maybe I could work in the world and work in the church part time.” Is there just something that I can do to make this something that the human heart can bear? And the answer is no. The answer is no. There is no escape, once these promises have been made, once these prayers have been said, once the bishop lays on hands–no, there is no going back. So there is a sacrifice that is required, a sacrifice of poverty of spirit; there is a sacrifice of intercession, there is a sacrifice of surrender.

So, John–I think you’re supposed to stand up now–this is my charge to you. Be a man who offers sacrifice, who presents before the people the one full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice of the Master, and present it before them in such a way as it is real to them and that it breaks their hearts and makes them new. Give yourself whole-heartedly to the sacrifices of poverty of spirit and of intercession and of surrender. And carry about in your body the marks of the suffering and death of Christ, that his risen life might also appear in you. And be his faithful witness until the day you die. Amen.

  ©  Leander Harding, 2009.

The grinding down of the family is not merely the result of opting for a contractarian model but of inviting the state to take control of marriage in the name of individual freedom. Freedom, of course, is just what is being lost, as the neo-liberal state evolves its tyrannical power by hollowing out a place for itself inside the husk of human-rights discourse. The advent of same-sex marriage makes bastards of us all, and as a nation of bastards we are all wards of the state.

How so? The change in definition uncouples marriage from procreation. From now on, then, no one will be born a bastard and everyone will be born a bastard. From now on, the connection between biological parenthood and legal parenthood will be supported by no institution. The claims of blood will not have the same standing at law that they once did. Natural relationships will not be primary at law; legal constructs will take their place. . . Everyone, for legal purposes, will be first of all a ward of the state, and the state will become our primary community, as Rousseau intended it to.

Douglas Farrow in Nation of Bastards: Essays on the end of marriage

The Good Shephered Chapel Sermon Here

Trinity School for Ministry will be hosting “Ancient Wisdom – Anglican Futures: An Emerging Conversation,” a 2 ½ day, international conference dealing with Anglicanism’s place in the “Great Tradition” of Christianity.  From June 4^th through 6^th, the conference is set up so that each session will have keynote speakers (”teachers”), who are in turn questioned by “missioners” who are doing grass-roots Anglican ministry in a variety of contexts.  The “teachers” include both Anglicans (”insiders”) and “outsiders” (non-Anglicans, observing the Anglican tradition).  These outsiders include representatives from a wide variety of traditions, from the Assemblies of God to Orthodox Christianity.  Sessions include “Worshiping in the Great Tradition,” “Community in the Great Tradition,” and “Mission in the Great Tradition.”

Teachers include David Neff (Christianity Today), Jason Clark (Emergent UK), Holly Rankin Zaher (Student Ministry, St. George’s, Nashville), D.H. Williams (Baylor), Tony Clark (Friends University), Edith Humphrey (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), Simon Chan (Trinity College, Singapore), George Sumner (Wycliffe College, Toronto), Stephen Long (Marquette), Andrew Walkers (Kings College, London), and Samuel Wells (Dean of the Chapel, Duke University).

The conference cost is $100 ($50/students) and registration can be submitted online at: http://www.tsm.edu/News_and_Events/Ancient_Wisdom_-_Anglican_Futures/Online_Registration_Form.html .  For more information, call Trinity’s office of extension ministries at 1-800-874-8754 ext. 218 or e-mail teem@tsm.edu.

George Carey At The Communion Partners Conference In Houston, April 16, 2009

The retired Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey was the after dinner speaker tonight at the ACI/Communion Partners Conference at St. Martin’s in Houston. His topic was “Holding Fast and Holding On, The Instruments of Communion.” Below is a reconstruction of the speech from my notes and according to my best recollection.

Lord Carey traced out the historical development of the instruments of communion, The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Lambeth Conference, The Anglican Consultative Conference and The Primates Meeting. Each of these he explained was developed in response to developing crises in the church and out of the desire for a more interdependent communion life. The trajectory of the development of the instruments of communion over the last forty years has been toward interdependence. In his speech Dr. Carey quoted his predecessor, Archbishop Runcie, to the effect that the communion will either develop along the path of interdependence or fall into dissolution. Only since 2003, Dr. Carey said, has the trajectory toward interdependence been questioned. He asserted with vigor that, “provincial autonomy is not a goal of the church, unity and mission are.”

Lord Carey thought that the authority of all the instruments of communion had been harmed by the current crisis. He noted that power of the Archbishop of Canterbury is that he invites, he presides and he recognizes. The fact that over 300 bishops declined the Dr. Williams invitation to the last Lambeth Conference was a serious blow the office of Archbishop.

Quoting his own son, the journalist Andrew Carey, Lord Carey identified the problem in the Anglican Communion as a “deficit of authority.” He thought the objections to an increased role for the Primates and the Lambeth Conference based on the lack of representation of clergy and laity in those councils an expression of a desire for a kind of church order other than that which Anglicans have received. Lord Carey said that he had no hesitation about empowering the Primates to have an increased role.

In closing he urged holding fast and holding on and commended the work of groups such as the Communion Partners. Lord Carey had two questions to leave with the audience. To the Instruments of Communion he posed the question of discipline. Can there really be no consequences other than of the mildest sort for those churches which act unilaterally as The Episcopal Church did in 2003 against the advice of all the Instruments of Communion? To the House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church Lord Carey posed the question, Can the orthodox have a future? Citing the example of Mark Lawrence’s consents the former Archbishop wondered aloud if it would not become impossible to elect conservatives to the episcopacy. Finally George Carey urged those in the audience not to give up hope but to work diligently for the raising up of a new generation of leadership.