Even to the casual observer, Lambeth 1998 was not the garden party of yesteryears. For the first time, Anglicans in the industrialized West had to wrestle deeply with the reality that the Anglican Communion is no longer a Christian community primarily identified with Anglo-American culture. We in the West can no longer rest in the economic and political structures of colonialism or the theological and philosophical paradigms of the Enlightenment. We must admit that the Anglican Communion is moving into a post-colonial, post-modern reality, no matter how much that scares us. And scare us it does; especially those who have historically been the most privileged by the way things have been, namely: straight, white, male, Western clerics.

The changes in contemporary Anglicanism, from a white, predominantly English speaking church of the West to a church of the Southern Hemisphere, are consistent with the changing face of Christianity over the last four decades. Anglican mission scholar David Barrett has documented that in the year 1900, 83 percent of the 522 million Christians in the world lived in Europe or North America. Today only 39 percent of the world's one and a half billion Christians live in the same area. Barrett predicts that in less than three decades, in the year 2025, fully 70 percent of Christians will live in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific.

Up until the summer of 1998, however, most Anglicans in the West could pretty well ignore these radical shifts in the world Christian community and thus avoid the hard questions of identity and authority implicit in them. Our cultural, economic and political hegemony shielded us from deeply engaging the realities of our increasingly multi-cultural and plural Anglican Communion. But Lambeth 1998 signaled a turning point for Anglicanism. In debates over international debt and/or human sexuality, it became abundantly clear that the churches in the Southern Hemisphere would not stand idly by while their sisters and brothers in the U.S. and England set the agenda. Aided by some in the West who stood to gain ground in sexuality debates by siding with bishops in Africa, Asia and Latin America, it became abundantly clear to all that a profound power shift was occurring within Anglicanism. For the first time ever, the Anglican Communion had to face head-on the radical multi-cultural reality of our post-colonial, post-modern Christian community. Anthems of Titcomb and Tallis sung by boy choirs in chapels at Cambridge and Oxford can no longer hold us together. Even bishops taking tea with the Queen in the garden of Buckingham Palace during Lambeth is not what it used to be.

To understand how the demographic and cultural shifts in the Church have begun to challenge historic patterns of authority in the Anglican Communion, we must first consider two roadblocks to change--one economic and political, the other philosophical and theological--which have historically characterized the Anglican Communion.

Legacy of colonialism
The first force limiting our living into the possibilities of a multi-cultural plural community in Christ is the ongoing legacy of colonialism. For the majority of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century the Anglican Communion (as it existed) was dominated by Western Churches, chief among them the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the U.S. From the 1850s to the 1960s mission was inextricably linked to Western colonialism and imperialism, for wherever the Crown went so too did the Chapel. Looking at a map of today's Anglican Communion reveals the undeniable fact that the majority of the churches of the Anglican Communion lie in areas of the world that at one time or another were territories of either England or the U.S.

All of this began to change, however, in the 1960s. In the wake of political independence for colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the missions of the Church of England or the Episcopal Church, USA struggled to "grow up" into autonomous churches of the Anglican Communion. Although many of the countries where newly independent Anglican Churches have come into being still suffer at the hands of economic colonialism (witness the sin of international debt), the growth of the church in the Southern Hemisphere has occurred since the close of the colonial era. Whether we in the West are prepared to accept it or not, the Anglican Communion today has begun to move from a colonial to a post-colonial reality. As a result, the political and economic structures of power associated with colonial dominance have begun to lose their efficacy in the new Anglican Communion.

Limitations of 'modern' world view
The second major force hindering those historically privileged in Anglicanism from embracing a radically different world and church is the philosophical and theological confines of modernity. Whether we mark the beginning of the Anglican Communion at 1784 with the consecration of the first bishop for an autonomous Anglican Church outside of the British Isles (Samuel Seabury for the U.S.), or with the first Lambeth Conference of Bishops in 1867, the Anglican Communion as a family of churches is no more than a couple of centuries old. As such the Anglican Communion is a thoroughly modern phenomenon; with "modern" understood as the age of modernity, the last 500 years, the Age of Enlightenment. Anglicanism, up until very recently, has thus rested on the philosophical and theological constructs of Enlightenment thought that values either/or propositions, binary constructs and dualistic thinking.

The Enlightenment mind prides itself on being able to figure things out, to know limits, to be able to define what is right and what is wrong, who is in and who is out. Modern man (and I use this non-inclusive term deliberately) values clear lines of authority, knowing who is in charge, a hierarchical power structure. Plural and multiple realities are an anathema to the modern mind and thus to many who have been in control in the Anglican Communion for most of its history.

But all of this is changing as the majority of Anglicans today are located in places where the constructs of Enlightenment thought have less efficacy. I do not mean here that sisters and brothers in the South and those who are more free from the constrictions of modern thought are less educated or caught in a world of superstitions, as Jack Spong, Bishop of Newark, asserted at Lambeth 1998. Rather, the majority of Anglicans in the world today are able to live in multiple realities--both the Western Enlightenment construct as well as their own local contexts. It is important to emphasize that the maginalized in the West, especially women, people of color, and gay and lesbian individuals, have always lived multiple realities--their own particularities and that of the dominant culture. It is only those in power, namely straight, white males in the West who have the privilege of believing and acting as if there is only one reality--theirs! The movement within Anglicanism from being a church grounded in modernity and secure in the Enlightenment to a post-modern or extra-modern reality is as tumultuous as the shift from colonialism to post-colonialism.

Fear of change
These transitions in the Anglican world are terrifying, especially for those of us who historically have been the most privileged, most in control, most secure in the colonial Enlightenment world. The radical transition afoot in the Anglican Communion is frightening, for it means that we in the West will no longer have the power and control that we have so much enjoyed. As a result we are anxious, confused, lost in a sea of change.

The movement from being a colonial and modern church to that of a post-colonial and post-modern community in Christ, with its concomitant specter of loss for the historically most privileged, is vigorously countered by many who have been in charge to date in the Anglican Communion. Various attempts to maintain control, reassert power and put Humpty Dumpty back together again are dominating inter-Anglican conversations at this point in history. Two attempts to maintain old structures of power and privilege in response to the changing face of Anglicanism are particularly insidious and thoroughly un-Anglican.

The first is a rather diffuse attempt to claim "historic documents" of the church as authoritative for all time. Driven by fear of change, some want to look backward to a perceived simpler time to claim clear definitions of what it means to be an Anglican today. There are thus new attempts in various corners of Anglicanism, especially in the West, to raise the 39 Articles of Religion or even the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral to be the defining statements of what Anglicans are and are to believe. What results is a "new confessionalism" as insecure individuals and those who fear loss of power in these changing times struggle gallantly to nail down Anglican theology and beliefs. Armed with clear doctrinal definitions and limits, the same folk are then able to count who is in and who is out. Control is reasserted, ambiguity is overcome, and traditional authority is maintained.

A 'new curialization': the 'Virginia Report'
The second response to these changing times are attempts to construct a new central structure of authority for the Anglican Communion, what I call a "new curialization." There are those who believe that without well articulated lines of authority, or "instruments of unity" emanating from a strong center (such as the one our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have), the Body of Christ, the Church catholic, will fly apart in a disorganized mess. And so some set about to develop a new kind of headship, a new form of primacy, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at the center and the Primates as a kind of "college of cardinals."

The much celebrated "Virginia Report" of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission represents this trend to greater centralization of power and authority in the Anglican Communion. A close examination of the history, tenets and use of the Report shows how this seemingly balanced and affirming document in fact leads in a direction that might not best serve the increasingly multi-cultural and plural nature of the Anglican Communion. In these changing times, do we really want to imbue bishops, especially the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates, with more power and authority than they have historically enjoyed, even in the bad old times of colonialism and modernity?

The instigation of the Virginia Report lies in one of the most significant challenges to straight, white, male, Western clerical hegemony in the Anglican Communion: namely the ordination of women, particularly their ordination to the episcopate. In the wake of the Diocese of Massachusetts' election of Barbara Harris as Suffragan Bishop in 1988, the 1988 Lambeth Conference empowered the Archbishop of Canterbury to call for a Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate under the leadership of Robert Eames, Archbishop of Armagh, Ireland. The "Eames Commission," as it came to be known, met five times between 1988 and 1993. Lambeth 1988 also saw an urgent need for "further exploration of the meaning and nature of communion with particular reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, the unity and order of the Church, and the unity and community of humanity" (Lambeth 1988, Resolution 18).

In response, the Archbishop of Canterbury called together a group of theologians for a consultation on the nature of authority in the Anglican Communion, which met at Virginia Theological Seminary in 1991 and produced an initial report, "Belonging Together." Three years later, a successor group to the initial consultation, to be known as the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (IATDC), was called into being. This group met in December 1994 and January 1996, on both occasions back at Virginia Seminary. IATDC was to be composed of representatives from around the Anglican Communion. Leadership of the new commission was provided by the principals of the now retired "Eames Commission" --Archbishop Eames, once again in the position of chair, and Mark Dyer, previously the Bishop of Bethlehem, Penn., and now Professor of Theology at Virginia Seminary. It was no surprise that Virginia Seminary announced its willingness to host the group, given Dyer's participation. The Commission would reciprocate by naming their findings the "Virginia Report."

Tensions and a surprise ending
Although the IATDC was ostensibly inclusive and diverse with respect to geographic origin, gender and ordination status, reports emerged of tensions over process and theology between the commission's Anglo-American male bishops and both its women and Southern Hemisphere members.When the final consultation ended in January 1996, a consensus or "report" of the proceedings had not yet been achieved. It thus came as a surprise, even to some members of the commission, when the Virginia Report appeared in its final version with an added section on "The Worldwide Instruments of Communion: Structures and Processes."

Speculation as to the authorship of this new section has varied, but most informed observers believe that this section was drafted by Anglo-American male bishop-members of the group. If true, it is completely consistent, then, that the four instruments of unity outlined, namely the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting, have a decidedly episcopal emphasis.

Arriving in Canterbury for the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the bishops from the many corners of the Anglican Communion, were presented with the Virginia Report as a crowning statement of the common life of contemporary Anglicanism. As an observer and reporter at Lambeth, acknowledging my limited access to its meetings and conversations, there did not appear to me to be an organized opportunity for substantial discourse on the content and recommendations of the Virginia Report. As a result, little or no open disagreement with the report surfaced. Resolution III 8 of the conference welcomed and affirmed the Virginia Report and requested "the Primates to initiate and monitor a decade of study in each province on the report and in particular whether effective communion, at all levels does not require appropriate instruments, with due safeguards not only for legislation, but also for oversight [italics in the original] as well as [noting the Papal Encyclical Ut unum sint] on the issue of a universal ministry in the service of Christian unity."

The fact that the archbishops, and not the church's entire leadership, were asked to initiate a study on the need for structures to safeguard and legislate "effective communion" portrays the real intent of the Virginia Report. Behind the resolution was the presupposition that, in these changing times, the Primates' have the responsibility to advance a clear authority structure centered in the Archbishop of Canterbury .

Those who missed the subtle slide toward centralization and increased primatial authority in the Virginia Report need only consider the 1998 Lambeth Resolution III.6 on the "Instruments of The Anglican Communion." This resolution not only calls for the Primates to be the episcopal presence on the Anglican Consultative Council, but, for the first time ever in the history of Anglicanism, imbues the archbishops of the Anglican Communion with heretofore unheard-of pan-Anglican authority and power. The resolution "asks the Primates meeting, under the Presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, [to] include among its responsibilities ... intervention in cases of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within provinces and giving of guidelines on the limits of Anglican diversity." Resolution III.6 gives the Primates enhanced responsibility for pan-Anglican doctrinal and moral matters and unheard-of extra-metropolitical authority to intervene in the life of Anglican provinces locally when issues of diversity become "problematic." Such all but guaranteed that traditionalists in the U.S. would appeal to the Primates for intervention in the Episcopal Church over questions of human sexuality, as has come to pass.

Canterbury an Anglican pope?
The 11th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC 11) in Dundee, Scotland in September 1999 contrasted sharply with the Lambeth Conference's reception of the Virginia Report. This diverse body of the Anglican Communion, made up of lay people, priests and bishops from every church in the Anglican Communion, would not accept uncritically the slide to increased central authority implicit in the Virginia Report. Many ACC representatives were especially put out that the early sessions of the meeting, six hours in total, were given over to Bishop Mark Dyer's careful and deliberate presentation of the Report.

It was during Dyer's three presentations that his bias toward authority resting in the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates was revealed. Owning his Irish Roman Catholic roots in New Hampshire and South Boston, Mass. (although not many knew that this extended to his having been a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk for more than a decade), Dyer's description of the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury as the first "instrument of unity" had a distinctly papal ring. He stressed, "the incarnation of Jesus Christ at the center [of the Church] must be personified in face-to-face people. It must be embodied in that literal sense of embodiment as the Church has carried [it] out throughout its history. [For Anglicans] the Archbishop of Canterbury, as an instrument of unity, is a personal embodiment of that particular ministry for us."

ACC representatives from Edinburgh, Scotland to Sydney, Australia (seemingly unlikely bed-fellows!) were aghast at Dyer's assertion that the Archbishop of Canterbury is the "personal embodiment" of Anglicanism's continuity with Christ and saw in it strong parallels to Roman Catholic understandings of the pope as the Vicar of Christ. Their fears were not allayed when Dyer noted that the theory of subsidiarity, central in the Virginia Report, was taken directly from Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical, "On Reconstruction of the Social Order." Members of the ACC reacted strongly to the centralizing ethic being advanced, with John Moses, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, asserting, "The Virginia Report could be an instrument to increase the curialization drift of the Anglican Communion." Likewise, Glauco Soares de Lima, Primate of the Episcopal Church of Brazil, emphasized that "the report is a sign of a still colonial mind, even in the structures described."

Suspend Lambeth 2008?
Dyer's ownership and defense of the Virginia Report and its instruments of unity, in the face of the ACC's attempts to consider different types of Anglican relationships and authority, heated up when the ACC came to consider the possibility of a worldwide Anglican Congress for lay people, priests and bishops. When it became clear that the Communion could not afford to pay for both an Anglican Congress and a Lambeth Conference in the next decade, the Archbishop of Canterbury, unexpectedly enthusiastic about the proposal, suggested that perhaps the Congress should take precedence and replace Lambeth as the common gathering of the Anglican Communion. This idea was well received by many members of the ACC, especially lay people and priests, and a draft resolution affirming this was quickly set in motion.

Mark Dyer (who also served as a representative to the ACC from the Episcopal Church) rightly saw that such a resolution would be disastrous for the Virginia Report and its views on authority, for it would negate one of the four instruments of unity, namely the Lambeth Conference. Clearly agitated and chagrined by the direction of the discussion, Dyer led the successful charge to table the resolution on the Congress. By the time the issue surfaced again at the end of the ACC meeting 10 days later, the resolution had been watered down to read, "that there should be an Anglican Congress in association with the next Lambeth Conference."

Embrace Rome's 'Gift of Authority'?
The slide to increased primatial authority in the Anglican Communion found in the Virginia Report has wider ramifications beyond Anglicanism. The Introduction to the Virginia Report notes, "Resolution 8 of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission [ARCIC I], also had a direct bearing on the exercise of authority in the Church. It encouraged ARCIC to explore the basis in Scripture and Tradition of the concept of a universal primacy in conjunction with collegiality, as an instrument of unity." Is it any surprise, then, that the most recent statement of the Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II) under the dubious title "The Gift of Authority," concludes by challenging "Anglicans to be open to and desire a recovery and re-reception under certain clear conditions of the exercise of universal primacy by the Bishop of Rome?"

In addition, a quick glance of the membership of ARCIC II reveals that of the 17 members of the Commission, 15 hail from the industrialized West, with eight members coming from England alone! How can ARCIC begin to think outside of historic patterns of authority identified with straight, white, ordained men of the West when its membership includes only two women and two representatives from the Southern Hemisphere?

Perhaps Tanzanian Bishop Simon Chiwanga, Chair of the Anglican Consultative Council, said it best in his address to the ACC Dundee gathering: "In these times of profound change, many who are fearful of the future seek security and solace in what they perceive as safe and sound. ... Whether confession or curia, catechism or conference, constitution or council, the fearful are looking for easy answers."

Looking beyond Anglicanism
Easy answers based on a shared Anglo heritage, it seems clear, will no longer hold the Anglican Communion together. In these changing times we must not put our hope in either tighter doctrinal definitions or a more centralized authority structure. Instead, a new understanding of Anglican identity is needed if we are to remain in communion across the colors and cultures, nations and nationalities that Anglicanism now embodies. This new identity must look beyond the historic structures of colonialism and the Enlightenment--must, in fact, look beyond Anglicanism itself. For only in a shared commitment with sisters and brothers in Christ from all races and cultures is there hope for genuine participation in God's mission of justice, compassion and reconciliation for all creation.

Konrad Raiser, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, has been quoted recently as saying, "Anglicans have become much, much more self-conscious and interested in protecting Anglicanism than in furthering the process toward genuine unity of the church." He has further written, "The imposition of a particular form of doctrinal or canonical unity can become the cause for stifling the dynamics of Christian mission. ... Searching for unity means to be engaged in the constant process of discerning the Spirit so that those telling the stories of God's great deeds in different languages can understand and affirm the witness of the other community as being truly inspired by the Spirit. It is this mutual resonance to each other's witness in the one Spirit which is the manifestation of unity, which constantly looks beyond itself towards the fulfillment of God's promise when God will unite and sum up all things on earth and heaven in Christ."

The "mutual resonance" of a multi-cultural community dedicated to God's mission offers the only true authority for the Anglican Communion; in fact, the only true authority for all the baptized, not just bishops and archbishops.