Beloved in God:
Some of you may be surprised to read that I am, at heart, a conservative fellow. Had I been alive during the American Revolution and serving a parish in one of the then colonies, I would probably have “fled” to Canada rather than support the efforts of the revolutionaries…such is my conservative bent. Occasionally, I still wonder about the merits of our winning that war. My mother’s credentials allowing her to belong to the DAR seem suspect to me: A Redcoat named Thomas Cross jumped ship in Boston harbor and joined the revolutionaries. Since Mom has some connection to the turncoat, she could be a member of that august organization that still thrives in some parts of this country.
The revolutionaries were fighting for freedom from top/down governance, from a system that denied most of the people a say in how they were to be governed. They won their freedom and it is that victory which we will celebrate this next weekend…the freedom to govern ourselves with a representative democracy, a republic.
America governs itself by the election of citizens who make decisions about our common life…for the commonweal. We are not a pure democracy in which every one has a say in every decision, in spite of the advent of the blogosphere.
Since the revolutionaries won the war for independence from England, the Church of England in America mutated into The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. That mutation is important because some of the same principles which went into the founding of the republic became part of The Episcopal Church. Our General Convention is made up of a House of Deputies (clergy and lay delegates representing their dioceses and the older House) and a House of Bishops. Since we gained our freedom from the English crown as a country and the English Church as the first part of the Anglican Communion, we have made decisions about our common Life in Christ in a manner that involves all orders of ministry…lay people, deacons, priests and bishops.
Some of the recent events concerning our participation in various bodies of the broader Anglican Communion seem to me to arise from our Mother Church, the Church of England, never quite getting it that we make our decisions on this side of the Atlantic very differently from how decisions are still made in the Church of England.
The continuing use of top/down governance, about which we fought and won a war to end it on these shores, runs head on into the much more democratic decision making methods of The Episcopal Church. While we are not a pure democracy as Churches go, we value the voices of all orders of ministry and find top/down proclamations as suspect today and they were in the 1770’s.
With all due respect to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he has no more power on these shores in the Church than does Her Royal Highness, Elizabeth II in the State. Thomas Cross helped put an end to such top/down governance here. I am glad he did. I hope you are, as well. Happy 4th of July!!!
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