Anglicans & Anglicanism

Looking like members of a good club on a decorous outing, 670 bishops, priests and laymen from the 327 dioceses of the Anglican Communion gathered in Minneapolis last week for a ten-day congress, the first to be held outside the British Isles.

Gaiters mingled easily with plain black trousers and there were jokes and quips aplenty. The Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Most Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church, were asked to look animated for a portrait with their respective wives, promptly animated themselves by singing Sweet Adeline. Bishops were everywhere (207 of them were registered), and many of them came from the Asiatic and African countries where Christianity must fight perhaps its hardest battle with Communism.

Halfway House. There was tall, courtly Bishop Arabinda Nath Mukerjee, first Indian to be made primate of the Anglican Church in India, who was pleasantly surprised by the U.S. "This country is much more sane and much more concerned with religion than I had realized," he said. There was Doctor Koki Abe, a hygiene and public-health expert from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. There was Bishop Leonard Beecher of Mombasa, who travels about his vast diocese unarmed, as do his 106 priests, despite the murderous Mau Mau. ("One's Christian faith begets a trustfulness that conquers fear.")

One view that bobbed up again and again at Minneapolis was that Anglicanism will sooner or later prove to have been nothing but a halfway house on the road to a united church. Editorialized the high-church weekly, the Living Church: "Anglicanism as an 'ism' is only an episode in the life of the universal church.

Some day it may cease to be or may become merged in a broader expression of the life of the Holy Catholic Church."

The External Objective. Rising, young (40) Theologian James Peter Hickinbotham, just appointed principal of St. John's College of the University of Durham, England, put it on the line in one of the major papers read at the congress. "The Anglican Communion." he wrote, "has never said of itself, as Rome and orthodoxy each says of itself, 'We are the Catholic Church and nobody else . . .' We all need to have our partial and distorted traditions supplemented and corrected by those elements of the truth which other communions have preserved better than we have, and this can only take place within the intimate fellowship of a reunited church . . ."

Presiding Bishop Sherrill also underscored reunion. "The body of Christ is broken into many pieces," he said. "We can be grateful to God for the increased cooperation brought about in recent years . . . But [this] must not satisfy us. The goal ... is the unity of the church . .

"Nothing could be so un-Christian or so unwise as to wrap our talent in a napkin and bury it in the earth in the name of preservation. We must have a view of the wholeness of the Christian Church.

Anglicanism is not an end in itself; the church even is not an end in herself. The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is, of course, the eternal as well as the present objective."

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