The centenary of the ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ and the ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism

Abstract

The ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ that was issued by the Lambeth Conference a hundred years ago reflected a deep sense of the ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism. Three interlinking elements were critical for this: ecclesiology of visible unity, experience as a communion of Churches, and repentance for disunity. While substantial challenges have become apparent over the past century, their combination remains a significant offering that Anglicanism can make to the global Church today.

Keywords

Anglicanism catholicity communion ecclesial repentance ecclesiology ecumenism

Introduction

The ‘Appeal to All Christian People’, issued by the bishops of the Anglican Communion who gathered for the 1920 Lambeth Conference, is a landmark in the history of both Anglicanism and the Ecumenical Movement.¹ Indeed, it marks a point where Anglicanism’s odyssey of self-understanding became firmly directed by its participation in the search for Christian unity, while global ecumenical activity was increasingly shaped by Anglican thinking and priorities. It would be difficult to resist the view, however, that the journey changed course some time ago. The centenary this year of the Lambeth Appeal (as it will be referred to subsequently) therefore presents a significant opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of the relationship between Anglicanism and the Ecumenical Movement.

Ten years before the Lambeth Appeal was written, the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh had precipitated a fresh wave of energy for seeking Christian unity for the sake of effectiveness in mission that had, crucially, drawn in Anglican leaders who were not content with respectful strategic cooperation as the primary goal.² The First World War had disrupted these efforts and cast deep shadows over the faith in social progress and confidence in Western civilization with which they had been bound up to some extent. It had also, however, given rise to a compelling sense of obligation to address the causes of conflict between nations by building relationships across national boundaries, including relationships between Churches. The decade after 1918 was profoundly formative for the modern Ecumenical Movement, culminating in the first international Life and Work Conference in 1925 and the first international Faith and Order Conference in 1927. Much was happening in 1920 well away from Lambeth Palace that contributed to this momentum, including the publication of an encyclical from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople.³

The Lambeth Appeal was shaped by these developments as much as, if not more than, it shaped them.⁴ Yet it was also driven by a conviction that Anglicans had something to offer that was both distinctive and important. The grounds on which the bishops at Lambeth made their appeal to all Christians included the belief that the Anglican Communion had a specific calling in this matter, to which it was bound to respond in obedience to Christ. The Lambeth Appeal grew from the perception that Anglicanism had an ecumenical vocation – indeed, that such a vocation was integral to its divinely given purpose in the modern world.

That consciousness of vocation is evident in the opening sentence of the text:

We, Archbishops, Bishops Metropolitan, and other Bishops of the Holy Catholic Church in full communion with the Church of England, in Conference assembled, realising the responsibility which rests upon us at this time, and sensible of the sympathy and the prayers of many, both within and without our own Communion, make this appeal to all Christian people.⁵

The ‘responsibility which rests upon us’ concerns the ‘Reunion of Christendom’ – the title of the Conference resolution in which the Lambeth Appeal was conveyed. The report to the Conference on ‘Relation to and reunion with other Churches’ underlined the point: ‘Yet the historical traditions and the spiritual sympathies of the Anglican Church seem to lay upon us a special duty, which at this present time we ought to accept as a definite call of God.’⁶ That sense of the urgency of responding to God’s call ‘at this [present] time’ recurs at various points in the text.⁷ The bishops who gathered again at Lambeth ten years later reflected: ‘In the Conference of 1920 we felt the constraint of a great impulse which we believed to be of Divine origin, and under its influence we sent out the Appeal to all Christian people.’⁸

What were the critical factors for this sense of Anglicanism’s ecumenical vocation? To what extent do they continue to be plausible supports for such a vocation a hundred years on? Three interlinking elements might be identified: ecclesiology of visible unity, experience as a communion of Churches, and repentance for disunity.

Ecclesiology of visible unity

The Lambeth Appeal pivots on the concept of ‘visible unity’, which had already been identified by the previous two Lambeth Conferences as a central commitment for Anglicans.⁹ In a crucial paragraph, it sketches out an ecumenical ecclesiology that unfolds from this phrase:

We believe that God wills fellowship. By God’s own act this fellowship was made in and through Jesus Christ, and its life is in his Spirit. We believe that it is God’s purpose to manifest this fellowship, so far as this world is concerned, in an outward, visible, and united society, holding one faith, having its own recognized officers, using God-given means of grace, and inspiring all its members to the world-wide service of the Kingdom of God. This is what we mean by the Catholic Church.¹⁰

The good news that the Church exists to celebrate and share is that ‘God wills fellowship’. To communicate this message about communion, however, the Church needs to ‘manifest’ the communion that is God’s gift through the Son and the Spirit ‘in an outward, visible, and united society’. Insofar as the Church fails to be such a society, it fails to be the Church and it obstructs the communication of the gospel. The ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism is to uphold a commitment to the visibility of unity, because of the inseparability of the visibility of the Church’s communion in Christ from its communication of Christ in the gospel.¹¹

The language of ‘visible unity’ featured in early moves towards unity between Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England and Roman Catholics; it also appeared, along with an emphasis on being ‘one visible society’, in the interim reports published during the First World War of a group commissioned by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the English Free Churches to prepare for the planned World Conference on Faith and Order.¹² Those reports also made clear, however, that there was no consensus on critical questions of church order, ministry and authority. For the Church to be ‘one visible society’, some agreement on the answers would be needed.

The Lambeth Appeal makes a careful argument for why visible unity requires the Church to be a visible society that is episcopally ordered. Reprising the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral from 1888 on what ‘the visible unity of the Church will be found to involve the wholehearted acceptance of’, it avoids the use of the phrase ‘historic episcopate’ from the earlier text, replacing it as the fourth term after Canon, Creeds and sacraments with ‘a ministry acknowledged by every part of the Church as possessing not only the inward call of the Spirit, but also the commission of Christ and the authority of the whole body’.¹³ This does not imply any retreat from the Quadrilateral’s assertion of the necessity of accepting the historic episcopate for visible unity; rather, the way in which the components of visible unity are described here sets up the question that opens the next paragraph: ‘May we not reasonably claim that the episcopate is the one means of providing such a ministry?’¹⁴ Emphasizing that they have no wish to ‘call in question … the spiritual reality of the ministries of those Communions which do not possess the episcopate’, the bishops nonetheless maintain that the episcopate ‘is now and will prove to be in the future the best instrument for maintaining the unity and continuity of the Church’.¹⁵ If the sacraments – with the Canon and Creeds framing them – are to express ‘the corporate life of the whole fellowship in and with Christ’,¹⁶ they require ‘a ministry acknowledged by every part of the Church as possessing … the authority of the whole body’. Only the episcopate sustained through the centuries of Christian history by the ‘ancient episcopal Communions in East and West’, though now to be ‘everywhere exercised in a representative and constitutional manner’,¹⁷ can serve to enable such ministry and therefore unlock the door to realizing the purpose of God for the Church as announced at the outset: ‘an outward, visible, and united society, holding one faith, having its own recognized officers, using God-given means of grace, and inspiring all its members to the world-wide service of the Kingdom of God’.¹⁸

Experience as a communion of Churches

The second element that underpinned the Anglican ecumenical vocation for the bishops of the 1920 Lambeth Conference concerned the experience of being a communion of Churches, one that had grown from its beginnings in England through mission to be a global communion. Through that growth had come a conviction that the purpose of planting Anglican Churches in any place in the world had to be to contribute to the emergence of a truly Catholic Church in every place in the world – a church that would not have a label that defined it in terms of the inter-confessional struggles of Western Christian history. The encyclical letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to accompany the dispatch of the documents from the 1920 Lambeth Conference stated that missionaries ‘do not go out to propagate their national Church, but to add another national Church to the Church Catholic’.¹⁹

It is no accident that, earlier in the letter, the section on ‘The Anglican Communion’ follows immediately after that on the ‘Reunion of Christendom’ and makes many connections to it, not least in commenting that:

The fact that the Anglican Communion has become world-wide forces upon it some of the problems which must always beset the unity of the Catholic Church itself. Perhaps, as we ourselves are dealing with these problems, the way will appear in which the future reunited Church must deal with them.²⁰

As an example of this, at least implicitly, the Archbishop then proceeds to reflect on the experience of the Lambeth Conference as a gathering that ‘does not claim to exercise any powers of control or command’ but ‘stands for the far more spiritual and more Christian principle of loyalty to the fellowship’.²¹ There is a confidence here that the experience of Anglicanism is enabling learning that can be of significant value to the whole Church on the road to visible unity.

The 1920 report on reunion referred to above contains an extensive discussion of the relationship between Anglicanism and catholicity; as the Anglican Communion ceases to be predominantly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and looks forward to ‘far greater variety in the expression of the one faith and of devotion to the one Lord’, so ‘its centre of gravity is shifting … As the years go by, its ideals must become less Anglican and more Catholic. It cannot look to any bonds of union holding it together, other than those which should hold together the Catholic Church itself.’²² According to the report, this trajectory within the experience of the Anglican Communion is equipping it to function as a laboratory for the catholicity that would correspond to the visible unity of the whole Church.

Material from other texts from the 1920 Lambeth Conference provides the context for the paragraph of the Lambeth Appeal that has perhaps been most frequently cited subsequently:

The vision which rises before us is that of a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all truth, and gathering into its fellowship all ‘who profess and call themselves Christians,’ within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common, and made serviceable to the whole Body of Christ. Within this unity Christian Communions now separated from one another would retain much that has long been distinctive in their methods of worship and service. It is through a rich diversity of life and devotion that the unity of the whole fellowship will be fulfilled.²³

As the bishops stressed towards the end of the document, ‘We do not ask that any one Communion should consent to be absorbed into another.’²⁴ Nonetheless, the ‘vision’ is clearly of a situation in which there would no longer be an Anglican Church, a Methodist Church, an Orthodox Church and so on, but simply the Catholic Church in each place united with the Catholic Church in every place, with space for ‘all the treasures of faith and order’ from all the Churches united within it – Anglican, Methodist, Orthodox and the rest – and ‘a rich diversity of life and devotion’.

Repentance for disunity

The third and final element framing the ecumenical vocation that gave rise to the Lambeth Appeal was a conviction of the need to repent for disunity. If unity is God’s gift, then disunity arises from sinful refusal to receive what is freely offered to us. It can only be overcome as we turn away from sin and seek to be faithful to Christ, open to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.

This theme is announced in the concluding sentence of the introduction:

We believe that the Holy Spirit has called us in a very solemn and special manner to associate ourselves in penitence and prayer with all those who deplore the divisions of Christian people, and are inspired by the vision and hope of a visible unity of the whole Church.²⁵

The calling of Anglicans to seek the Church’s unity is grounded here in ‘penitence and prayer’ on the one hand, and ‘vision and hope’ on the other. The two pairs are inseparable from one another, and both are grounded in the belief that the unity of the Church is God’s will, God’s act and God’s gift in Christ: that is the basis for maintaining ‘vision and hope’ in the face of continual frustrations and disappointments, and it is also the reason why we cannot expect to travel towards that goal other than by ‘penitence and prayer’, because the story of unity’s failure is the story of the continuing sinfulness of those made righteous by the cross of Christ, and it is a story in which we all have a part.

The Lambeth Appeal recognizes that the story is not a simple one, and that it involves our relationship to past generations. It is true that ‘[t]he causes of division lie deep in the past, and are by no means simple or wholly blameworthy’.²⁶ As the report on reunion expressed it more fulsomely:

The wounds of the Church of Christ are very deep and very stiff with time and controversy. They cannot be quickly healed. Rather will they have to be first more deeply probed, and the measure of the contrast between men’s doings and God’s purposes more fully understood.²⁷

Nonetheless, at root, the striving for the Church’s unity is about a struggle with sin, not simply the need to manage difference better: ‘Yet none can doubt that self-will, ambition, and lack of charity among Christians have been principal factors in the mingled process, and that these, together with blindness to the sin of disunion, are still mainly responsible for the breaches of Christendom.’²⁸ The carefully worded paragraph on this subject concludes with a powerful statement of ecclesial repentance: ‘We acknowledge this condition of broken fellowship to be contrary to God’s will, and we desire frankly to confess our share in the guilt of thus crippling the Body of Christ and hindering the activity of his Spirit.’

The repentance expressed here was ecclesial and not only personal, as the bishops spoke for the churches they represented and for the Anglican Communion that those churches together constituted.²⁹ The idea that we should each seek God’s forgiveness for our individual sins against charity that contribute to the divisions of the Church was not a new one,³⁰ but something different was happening here: the bishops spoke on behalf of the Anglican Communion and thereby invited the Anglican Communion as a whole to join the path of repentance for disunity, while also seeking to ‘associate ourselves in penitence and prayer with all those who deplore the divisions of Christian people’. The Lambeth Appeal is, at root, a call for the Church to repent for its failure to be what it is called to be in Christ Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. To set ecumenical endeavour in the context of repentance, however, is always also to set it in the context of prayerful hope for those who trust in the forgiveness of sins and deliverance from evil that were won for us by Christ on the cross.

Conclusion

Together, these three elements – ecclesiology of visible unity, experience as a communion of Churches, and repentance for disunity – shaped the acceptance of Anglicanism’s ecumenical vocation a century ago, which found eloquent and influential expression in the Lambeth Appeal. While each of them can be tracked in subsequent documents of the Lambeth Conference, the continuities are stronger for the first 50 years than for the second. From the 1970s onwards, the account of visible unity in the Lambeth Appeal becomes one position among many on the goal of the Ecumenical Movement, within as well as beyond Anglicanism, despite apparent continuities in the terminology of Lambeth Conferences, and it has been increasingly eclipsed both by other views on the destination and by voices urging a refocusing on more realistic objectives. The challenges that the Anglican Communion has faced during this period over its own internal unity, with deep disagreements over the ordination of women and approval for same-sex relationships, have eroded, if not entirely dissipated, confidence in the learning it can offer to the wider Church about how to live towards its vision of visible unity. Voices urging the need for repentance for disunity as the necessary path towards unity may be more likely to be heard in predominantly Roman Catholic contexts today than Anglican; it is not accidental that it is in the same contexts that explicit continuing commitment to visible unity is likely to be found.³¹

As the bishops of the Anglican Communion gather again this year, what consciousness might they have of being custodians for an Anglican calling to seek the unity of Christ’s Church? The three elements reviewed here weave together Anglican identity and ecumenical vocation, each one in its own way. Anglican ecclesiology of visible unity requires Anglicans to register the incompleteness of their own Communion, with continuing separations and divisions from other Churches, and to be ready to exercise leadership in addressing them. Anglican experience of nurturing a global communion of Churches faces Anglicans with the limitations of ecclesial identity tied to the contingencies of Western history, and the need to learn from and with others the full meaning of the Church’s catholicity. Anglican repentance for the sins of disunity invites Anglicans to test their ecclesial inheritance and ask where sins of envy, greed, fear and pride may have disfigured it, obstructing self-giving love for other members of Christ’s body and obscuring the gospel in the eyes of the world. Together, the three elements can remain a potent combination.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Dr Jeremy Worthen is the Secretary for Ecumenical Relations and Theology at the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity.