While the Anglican Communion has come of age, what holds it together is not structures, but rather fellowship and a shared cultural history. There is almost nothing that can force the “enlightened” North Americans, who see gay emancipation as a matter of historical justice, to coexist with developing-world evangelicals, for whom homosexuality is an abomination deplored by Scripture. As long as former colonials were taking their cue from the Church of England, the absence of structures was not fatal. But at the last Lambeth Conference, in 1998, concerned about the Church of England’s growing acceptance of homosexuality and what they saw as a betrayal of Scripture, a lobby of bishops from the developing world moved to “save the church” from the forces of secularism. They pushed through Resolution 1:10, which declared that homosexual practice was “incompatible with Scripture.”
This was precisely the kind of unambiguous statement of doctrinal clarity that Anglicanism has been at pains to avoid. Not only was it unacceptable to large numbers of Anglicans in the North; it could not be imposed, because Lambeth resolutions are not binding until they are accepted by member churches.
Resolution 1:10 emboldened the evangelicals to take a stand against the blessing of same-sex unions, authorized by a Canadian diocese in 2002, and against the acceptance of a noncelibate priest, Gene Robinson, as a bishop a year later by the Episcopal Church, in the United States. As Africans and Americans declared themselves out of communion with each other, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, struggled to establish firmer boundaries within the Anglican Church but without giving himself “papal powers,” as he put it to a journalist in Rome a few years ago. The 2004 Windsor Report of the Lambeth Commission on Communion was an impressive attempt to introduce a more Catholic ecclesiology through covenants and a jus commune, but it was largely ignored.
Hopelessly optimistic, I fear.