Q: How do you characterize where this process is moving? Is it moving at all or is it a stalemate?
A: I think it depends on what your expectations are. There are people who want this all tied up into a neat and tidy little package as of yesterday, and there are other people who feel that the longer we take doing this the better off we’ll be, because there will just be that much more time for people to converse with one another, understand where each other is coming from, and so on, so it probably depends on who you ask. I personally don’t think this Communion is broken, and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and there are all kinds of people trying to fix this. So as a person in the American church, I think we’re doing what is best in the Anglican tradition. We have always been a church that said you figure out what is appropriate for your local context, and you figure out what God is telling you to do there and do it. So the American church did that with my election and consenting with my election, and now people are suddenly saying, oh no, we didn’t really mean that at all, and we have to, we have to bring about more order. Well, you know, this is a church that was founded resisting such a centralized bureaucracy in Rome, so how odd for people who call themselves traditionalists to be trying to take us to a place that has never been our tradition, to be some kind of centralized authority that rules on whether or not something is too far out of step or whatever. So to those of us who don’t think it’s broken, it’s taken a long time [and] that’s just fine. But my fear is that there are people who are working to bring this to a close, a point of departure, I don’t know how you describe it, but someplace that will make everybody choose.
Q: What’s at risk with this meeting?
A: The reason I’m so committed to the Anglican Communion is, especially as an American and an American Christian, there are things I need to hear from people in the developing world, like the ramifications of our racism, our colonialism, American hegemony in terms of our military prowess, of economic clout, and so on, and I think we have done some pretty terrible things in the world, and if we don’t have brothers and sisters in Christ in the developing world who can tell us what will not be comfortable to hear, but speak the truth in love, as we’re commanded to do, I don’t know who’s going to tell us those things, and so I think we need each other, and the Communion, as it has been, is this quite loose confederation of churches, each doing ministry in its own context but, through a variety of ways, talking to each other. If we lose that we’ve lost a great opportunity, so I would really lament that. I don’t think it is worth completely giving up who we are, either as the American church or giving up our 500 years of tradition as an Anglican Communion, and changing ourselves radically to preserve it.
I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.