Walking Together? The Future Shape of the Anglican Communion

This article was written in the aftermath of the Windsor Report and the meeting of the Primates in Northern Ireland, and it asks a question that has since become only more urgent: what kind of body is the Anglican Communion, and can it survive as one?

Andrew Goddard begins from the observation that the crisis of those years was never only about sexuality. Beneath the dispute lay a disagreement about communion itself. Some provinces acted on the basis of autonomy, with no sense that another province had a claim on their decisions. Others held that autonomy exists only within communion, and is bounded by shared faith and mutual accountability.

The article traces how the Communion's instruments, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates, the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Council, have begun to change under the pressure of the crisis. Goddard judges that some of these changes are durable and even healthy, and that the Primates in particular have taken on a role they had long been invited to accept but had avoided.

He is equally clear about what remains unresolved. The proposed covenant, then in its earliest form, is described as the most significant long term development, because it would give the Communion a written account of the commitments its members owe one another. Whether provinces would be willing to accept such limits was, and remains, an open question.

The argument in brief

Goddard's conclusion is neither optimistic nor despairing. He argues that the Communion has been given a clearer sense of its own identity through the crisis, and that this clarity is a genuine gift even when it was dearly bought. The test is whether the churches will choose interdependence freely, or whether they will keep the language of communion while acting as though it made no claim on them.

The full text of the article is held in the printed journal. Enquiries about access can be made to the editor.