A lecture delivered at the Oak Hill School of Theology, 2009. Read it all here

When I lived and ministered in England I used to tell folk who asked my identity that I was an Anglican standing for Anglicanism in the Church of England. In those days I collaborated in certain matters with the late, great, Martin Lloyd-Jones and he, I will tell you, put me under pretty heavy pressure to stop being an Anglican. I would tell him that I should continue an Anglican, certainly until the Church of England denied the authority of the Bible and the terms of the gospel in an explicit way, or of course until the Church of England threw me out.

Well, since I have emigrated to Canada all of that has happened. In the diocese of New Westminster in Western Canada the authority of the Bible and the terms of the gospel have been explicitly denied by the bishop, basing his action on what I shall call a decision of the Senate, which the Senate aimed on making. And as for being thrown out, well, I have been thrown out. Last year the bishop circularised the episcopate of the Anglican Church of Canada to say that I had abandoned the ministry, a ministry of word and sacrament to which I was ordained. Of course that was poppycock: a bishop can revoke your licence, but he cannot negate your ministry. Those who are ordained, are ordained as ministers of word and sacrament in the Church of God – and the diocese of New Westminster, is not the whole of the Church of God, whatever the bishop might think. Suffice to say that I have been re-licensed, and when I recount these things I think of the well known words of Mark Twain, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

I’m quoting this short section since it has relevance to an earlier post.

For when we become Christians we are not alone and must never think of ourselves as being alone. We are saved individually, one by one, that s true. But we are not saved for a life of solitary and still self-centred individualism. None of us is the only pebble on God’s beach. On the contrary, we have been brought into a new solidarity: that of being, first, adopted children in the Father’s family and then, with that, linked units in God’s new creation, through union with the risen Christ by the Holy Spirit. So we are children in the family and limbs in the body. And this new creation, the new humanity is the reality that is called the Church.

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So to the final question and a very brief answer, is an Anglican realignment Schismatic? That word ‘realignment’ is pointing to something that is actually happening in North America. as perhaps you know. We who have been thrown out of the diocese of New Westminster, we clergy that is and other clergy who have felt that the moral drift at this point in the Anglican Church of Canada, north of the border, and the Episcopal Church south of the border, has become intolerable, we have realigned, along with five American dioceses, under the protection and jurisdiction of the Archbishop of the Southern Cone. Yes, the Church looks less like a single body than it did before it happened. But the problem was the doctrine embraced by certain dioceses, which made it imperative, so our conscience told us to withdraw from those dioceses. And that is where we are today.

Realignment is the name of the game, and further realignment is in process, because a new North American diocese, ACNA, the Anglican Community in North America, is in process of being formed and will be up and running by the end of the year, with all those of us who currently are under the protection of Archbishop Greg Venables of the Southern Cone becoming members of it.

Is this Schism? Short answer, no it is not Schism, if you take the word Schism in its New Testament sense, as no less a theologian than the great Puritan John Owen begged the universal Church to do.

h/t AM