Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 6 July 2008

‘The bishop’s whole role as bishop makes no sense apart from his role as the one through whom all divisions are transcended. His primary function is always to make the catholicity of the Church reveal itself in a certain place’.

Those are the words of the Eastern theologian John Zizioulas, and they are a timely call to our Church.

For last weekend the Global Anglican Future Conference drew to a conclusion in Jerusalem. On its agenda was the ministry of bishops. This weekend the General Synod of the Church of England is meeting in York. On its agenda is the ministry of bishops. The GAFCON delegates debated what they describe as the ‘false Gospel’ of the North American bishops. The Synod representatives in York will debate the ordination of women as bishops in our own Church.

So what are bishops – those hapless individuals whose ministry is at the heart of such fierce debate – what are bishops actually for? Their role has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times and can barely resemble that exercised by those who first bore the title in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. We expect a contemporary English bishop to be a manager of staff, a tribunal chair, an ambassador for a brand, a master of communication, a mediator, a strategist and diplomat. We expect him to be as at ease with schoolchildren as he is with captains of industry; we expect him to pastor his clergy and to appear on radio phone-ins. We expect him to be a person of profound faith and prayer, and at the same time to be prepared to put on his Wellington boots and baptize in the village duck-pond without so much as a grimace.
Ours is not the first generation to create its own expectations of the ministry of the bishop, and it will not be the last. Yet we must recognize that much of this is culturally-conditioned and transient: a few years hence we will doubtless look for different qualities in our bishops. What will not change is their ministry’s essence: episkope, or oversight, which has two vital dimensions.

First, our bishops occupy a historic office that has its origins in the earliest days of the Christian Church. Only the bishop ordains priests and deacons. Only the bishops ordain other bishops. Through this ordered pattern of episkope the bishop links us to our ancient roots in Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem and is thus the touchstone of our ecclesial authenticity. Without the bishop we might well be a Christian church meeting in Eaton Square in 2008; because of the bishop we believe ourselves to be a local manifestation of the church, the church of Jesus Christ, the church of Peter and Thomas, the church of Gregory and Augustine, the church of Laud and Cranmer, the church of Richard Hooker and Michael Ramsey.

Secondly, the bishop oversees not only the Church’s ordered life but also the deposit of faith which is entrusted to it in every generation. He teaches and upholds the historic gospel: both the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Creeds to which, vitally for Anglicans, the pages of Scripture bear witness. This inheritance of faith and order the bishop hands on to those who come after him.

And the genius of episcopacy is that locally this inheritance always rests not with a committee or a handbook but with the bishop of the diocese. As we believe God to be one and undivided so we believe Christ to be one and undivided; as we believe his Church to be one and undivided so we Episcopal Churches have vested our life and our faith in one ordained to receive our life and our faith and to preserve and proclaim them.

It is only when we recall the responsibilities of episkope and where we place them that we can consider the debates of this week.

So what of Synod and the women bishops’ debate? The Church has already affirmed that there can be no theological objection to a Church which ordains women as priests proceeding to ordain them as bishops. The question is what provision should be made for those who cannot in conscience accept their oversight. My view is that any such provision must fall short of legislative provision. We simply cannot create a situation in which the life and faith of the Church is vested in a bishop whose Episcopal ordination can be ignored or disbelieved by some. If we do that then we destroy our catholicity; we destroy the claim we make that Christ’s Church is fully realized locally in the office and presence of the diocesan bishop.

And what of GAFCON and its Jerusalem Declaration? This first sets out some principles for which its members wish to campaign within the Communion. Some of us may find these principles disagreeable, but there is no shortage in history of groups publishing manifestoes: this parish has signed up to one or two in its lifetime. But it also sets out a methodology for action in pursuit of its principles. It has created a Primates Council which will presume to classify some churches or congregations as doctrinally sound and ideologically acceptable, and some as not, and it reserves to itself the right to intervene in the life of provinces and dioceses on behalf of those churches or congregations of which it approves.

This I find scandalous, as scandalous as continuing with an episcopate which is the preserve of men only or in which legislation is passed enabling some bishops to be regarded as less than bishops by some of the faithful. Subvert a local bishop’s oversight; introduce bishops from elsewhere to pronounce on the authenticity of his actions and to recruit an opposing following, and again we destroy our catholicity. We are no longer one church, under the oversight of one bishop.

The great irony in all this is that Jesus Christ chose to entrust his legacy to a group of twelve men who were, on the face of it, not up to the task. To this unreliable bunch he trusted everything: yet we are utterly unable to trust one another. We must have laws to protect our consciences because we cannot trust our fellow believers to do so; we must bring bishops from across the globe to care for us because we cannot trust our diocesans to do so. In our inability to trust I believe we betray Christ and hand him over to his enemies all over again.

‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn’.

Children calling to one another in the market place. Christ’s words echo down the centuries, and are spoken to us as surely and as sharply as they were to his first hearers. Amen.



Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-end.