Dr Muriel Porter, of the Diocese of Melbourne, has been a member of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia since 1987 and of its Standing Committee since 1989. She does not like the Diocese of Sydney and her book explains why.
The Diocese of Sydney is militantly conservative evangelical: though it has women deacons, women are not ordained to the priesthood and the diocese espouses diaconal and lay presidency at the Eucharist. It also imposes strict standards of sexual conduct on its clergy – who ‘cannot be divorced, let alone remarried’ (p 75) – and it does not condone same-sex relationships at any price. Much of Dr Porter's book is devoted to those issues in particular. She traces the history of the diocese in considerable detail, paying particular attention to the influence of Moore Theological College and of its long-serving principal, Broughton Knox. In particular, she takes issue with what Knox describes as ‘propositional revelation’ – that the proper attitude of the Christian believer is unquestioned obedience to what has been revealed in Scripture – and characterises it as ‘religious rationalism’ taken to the extreme (p 13). More generally, she is scathing about the involvement of the current archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen, in the Global Anglican Future Conference and the GAFCON Primates' Council that resulted from it, both of which she regards – with considerable justification – as a destabilising influence on the Communion as a whole.
Perhaps of more interest for readers of this Journal, however, is the light that the book throws on the complex legal structure of the Anglican Church of Australia itself. The Church's website describes the position like this:
Although the Anglican Church of Australia is one church its structure means that political control is vested in the dioceses and the parishes rather than held centrally by the General Synod … [and that] … the General Synod has very little power to make rules. Any rule involving a matter which could affect a diocese must be adopted by the dioceses. In this sense, the national church more resembles the political landscape of colonial councils rather [than] the Federation post-1901.Footnote 2
The result of this loose federalism is that it is almost impossible for the General Synod to impose its will on an individual diocese. It is that relative powerlessness that has enabled Sydney to reject the Prayer Book for Australia of 1995 (p 77), to implement diaconal presidency (p 97) and to refuse to pay the voluntary ‘special assessment’ levied on dioceses by General Synod – the last on the grounds that the diocese cannot support all the purposes for which the special assessment fund is used and that the levy is, in any case, voluntary by definition (p 78).
The issues of diaconal and lay presidency have been particularly controversial; and on the application of 26 members of General Synod, one of whom was Dr Porter, the Primate referred the matter to the Church's Appellate Tribunal for an opinion. In August 2010 the Tribunal reported unanimously that the Canons did not provide authority for lay presidency and by six votes to one that the Ordination Service for Deacons Canon 1985 did not authorise diaconal presidency.Footnote 3 The outcome, however, was a stand-off: in 2010 Sydney's General Synod reaffirmed its resolution of 2008 that ‘lay and diaconal administration of the Lord's Supper is consistent with the teaching of Scripture, and … that the Lord's Supper in this diocese may be administered by persons other than presbyters’.Footnote 4
Some regard Sydney as one of the wayward children of the Communion alongside New Hampshire and New Westminster – though for very different reasons. On the book's back cover, Dr Judith Maltby comments that it ‘rightly shifts the spotlight away from North America to the machinations of the Sydney archdiocese’ and is ‘a counterbalance to the fashionable glib vilification of the American and Canadian churches’. Well, perhaps to some extent it does provide that counterbalance; but, even from the perspective of an outsider whose sympathies are instinctively with liberal Anglicanism, the book fails to convince simply because it is so partisan. I began reading it in the expectation that it would merely confirm my own prejudices about hard-line conservative evangelicals; I ended it with the feeling that there must be another side to the Sydney story that Dr Porter has simply chosen to ignore. If the Sydney brand of Anglicanism is so utterly dreadful, how does it manage to survive?
The reality is that worldwide Anglicanism is neither monolithic nor monochrome. From a non-Anglican perspective, many of the current problems facing the Communion seem to stem from the fact that, as recent Scottish church history demonstrates only too clearly, when church people fall out with one another over a matter of theological principle each side has a tendency to conclude that the other is a bunch of knaves or fools or both. Though they may be in a minority, the fact remains that, like it or not, there are still people in several of the provinces of the Anglican Communion – not least within the Church of England itself – who have principled objections to the ordination of women to the priesthood. Similarly, there are many Anglicans – and by no means all of them evangelicals – who regard same-sex relationships as entirely contrary to their reading of Scripture.
Coming as I do from a Society that does not have clergy at all, I cannot sensibly have any opinion on the first of these. As to the second, while I hold very firmly indeed to the Quaker view that what matters in a relationship is not the sex of the partners but its stability and faithfulness, simply to condemn out of hand those who in conscience take the opposite view to my own would be uncharitable and arrogant to an unforgiveable degree. Unfortunately, as this book demonstrates, in the world of ecclesiastical politics, charity sometimes seems to be at a premium.
