Back to the boring Anglican matters, I thought it might be worth posting excerpts from the recent ACI article “Five things that should be done now”. Read the whole thing here.

We have written often about the Anglican Consultative Council and its Standing Committee over the last year. After the chaotic session in Jamaica in May 2009 we noted that the ACC had not followed its own rules in conducting the crucial vote on the Covenant with the result that the vote to defer Section 4 probably did not effectively pass the Council. And we also noted that in the confusion in Jamaica, it is doubtful that the members sufficiently understood what they were actually voting on to make that vote even morally authoritative. ACC officials suggested that a move away from western parliamentary procedures placed great weight on decisions of the chairman, who could discern the sense of the meeting, but in fact the chairman was actually corrected twice during the crucial vote—once when he ruled the controversial “Trisk amendment” out of order and then later when he ruled that a second vote was required to pass the resolution as amended. This confusion was televised over Anglican TV (and later transcribed) so the debacle is preserved for all to see. From that moment on many Communion members lost all confidence in the ACC as a viable and representative Instrument of Communion.

In the year since the ACC meeting in Jamaica, it has become increasingly clear that the problems so evident there were not isolated events but are endemic to the operations of the Council and its Standing Committee. We have written about this repeatedly in recent months, including publicly here, here, here and here. The most recent news concerning resignations from and dubious appointments to the Standing Committee, released nearly simultaneously by the ACNS and TEC’s Episcopal News Service, once again present these issues in acute form.

The point is often made by those who would promote the ACC as the paramount body of the Communion that it is the only body with a written constitution. Indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself called attention to this constitution in his Pentecost letter when he noted that membership on both the ACC and its Standing Committee is governed by the ACC constitution. But if these bodies are governed by formal rules, it is imperative that those rules be followed. And it is becoming ever more evident that not only are the rules ignored, they are applied unevenly to benefit some provinces and disadvantage others.

As already noted, we and others have written repeatedly about the numerous constitution and bylaw provisions being flouted by TEC in an effort to keep Bishop Ian Douglas on the Standing Committee. We will not repeat those points here, but only note that during the recent Executive Council meeting, the President of TEC’s House of Deputies and Vice Chair of the Executive Council described both TEC’s clerical and episcopal seats on the ACC as “open” and noted that there were contested elections for both seats. The implications of these facts under the ACC constitution and bylaws are straightforward: (i) when the clerical seat formerly held by Douglas became “open” he automatically ceased to be a member of the Standing Committee under Article 2(f) of the ACC bylaws; and (ii) under Clause 4(c) of the ACC constitution, Douglas cannot re-join the ACC itself for six years.

Similar issues arise with the Standing Committee’s attempt to appoint the Rev. Janet Trisk of Southern Africa to replace a lay representative on the Standing Committee. The ACC constitution provides that the ACC members of the Standing Committee are to be appointed by “the Council.” Article 7 of the bylaws supplements this constitutional article by providing that in the case of vacancies between meetings “the Standing Committee itself shall have power to appoint a member of the Council of the same order as the representative who filled the vacant place.” If, as seems reasonable, the bylaw is a lawful supplement to the constitution and is not itself unlawful, the Standing Committee is clearly authorized only to appoint someone of the same order. It is not given any power to go beyond not only the constitution but even the additional authority granted in the bylaws by appointing someone such as Trisk who is not of the same order as the previous member. The attempt to appoint Trisk, therefore, was ultra vires and ineffective. And, lest anyone claim the Trisk appointment is valid under the “new” unpublished constitution, it should be emphasized that it was done last December when the old constitution was unquestionably still in effect.

The problems addressed to this point are only exacerbated by the unrepresentative nature of the ACC and its Standing Committee. This problem is structural and pervasive; it is not a function of the vagaries of the last elections or recent resignations, although they do not help the problem to be sure.

The structural problem starts with the constitutional membership schedule of the ACC. Several western and European churches, including TEC, Canada and Australia are guaranteed three members, while large African churches such as Kenya, Sudan, West Africa and Burundi get only one or two. Indeed, TEC (with weekly attendance of approximately 750,000), Canada (with 325,000) and Australia (fewer than 180,000) probably do not equal the size of the church in Kenya even when combined, yet each of these western churches has three ACC members while Kenya has only two. Wales, with 50,000 weekly churchgoers, has the same ACC representation as Kenya and Sudan (with millions of members each), and twice as many as Burundi and West Africa, which dwarf Wales in size.

The ACC is the body that elects the majority of members to the Standing Committee, in part through a method of cumulative voting (single transferrable votes) that permits the concentration of voting power to benefit a small number of candidates. These ACC procedures are reinforced by the practice of the Primates to elect their five members by a regional voting scheme that allocates three of the five seats to regions having only 20% of the Communion’s active membership and limits the largest region, Africa, with over half the Communion’s active members, to one seat.

The cumulative effect of these provisions is demonstrated by the list of the thirteen members scheduled to attend the next meeting of the Standing Committee. Three are from the UK, two from the US, and two more from Australia and New Zealand. The other six members, fewer than half of the total, are spread among the churches of the Global South, which comprises approximately eighty percent of the Communion.

It is beyond doubt at this point that this Standing Committee as currently constituted does not enjoy the confidence of a majority of the Communion. There have been five resignations in less than a year. One of those resigning, Bishop Mouneer, called on the entire committee to resign. Archbishop Orombi has also stated publicly his lack of confidence in the committee as currently composed. Archbishop Ian Ernest, Chairman of CAPA and one who has long supported the Communion’s Instruments, who attended the Lambeth conference and who was part of the Conference design team, has stated that he will no longer attend Primates’ Meetings if TEC’s Primate is present. And the Singapore communiqué of twenty Global South provinces explicitly upheld the positions of Archbishops Mouneer, Orombi and Ernest and called for the Standing Committee’s responsibilities for Covenant oversight to be transferred to the Primates. It is difficult to conceive of a more categorical rejection of this Standing Committee by a majority of the Communion.

It probably matters to most of us (to a greater or lesser degree) to retain a connection to the Anglican Communion, regardless of what is happening in the local context.

However in light of the procedural shenanigans, obfuscation, narrow representation and apparent lawlessness of some of the official bodies, it might be fair to ask – which Anglican Communion? The fabric continues to be torn, and as a result there now appears to be more than one Communion…