The Anglican Church is dividing, according to recent media statements. This view comes in response to a refreshing and frank essay from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, 'Challenge and Hope for the Anglican Communion', taking up the evident stresses within it. His 'reflection for the Bishops, Clergy and Faithful of the Anglican Communion' follows the recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the USA, which formulated a careful if less than fulsome response to The Windsor Report.
What is meant by 'The Anglican Church', however? It is often assumed that it is some well-organised, centrally run global institution. 'Division' in such a body would thus mean parallel institutions, living as rivals with overlapping episcopal jurisdictions.
Much of the media debate, however, fails to acknowledge that we are talking about (and for Anglicans such as myself, living in) an Anglican Communion. As Williams writes, 'institutionally speaking, the Communion is an association of local churches, not a single organisation with a controlling bureaucracy and a universal system of law'. It is a 'communion' of churches seeking to live in the 'communion' of the triune God (as every Christian tradition seeks to do).
Humanly speaking, that the Church of England spread to become this now-global communion is something of an historical accident. Alongside this truth, Anglicans view this development as an act of divine providence, offering to the world a tradition both 'catholic' and 'reformed', open to embracing, within the tradition of the Scriptures, the ambiguities of history and the particularities of context as revelatory data.
The struggle over Anglican identity has engaged theological reflection on the importance of 'communion', koinonia, to what it means to be 'church'. In this way of looking at things, every person baptised -plunged by the Spirit into Christ's dying and living to be the child of the one heavenly Father -is thereby drawn into the love-life of the Holy Trinity, whose being is 'in communion'. That is where the 1998 Virginia and 2004 Windsor Reports not only begin, but find their life.
In what sense is it then possible to speak of 'division' in communion? As Archbishop Rowan acknowledges in his essay, those who see the full recognition of Christian gays and lesbians as the last straw, and those who view it as the breaking down of the next barrier to 'inclusion', may both conclude that God's gift of communion is shattered by the other.