The Anglican-Methodist Covenant in Britain at 21

On November 1, 2003, Queen Elizabeth II witnessed representatives from both the Church of England and the Methodist Church in Great Britain sign a covenant. Each church had three officials serve as signatories and Archbishop Rowan Williams, who preached at the gathering, hailed it as “a reconciling moment” and “a significant step” toward healing the divisions between the two churches. As the churches prepare to mark the 21st anniversary of the Anglican-Methodist Covenant this autumn, how might we evaluate its growth and maturity? Has it reached a point that things are relatively settled, or does its life remain somewhat fluid, even precarious?

There are good stories to tell about growth in relationships and partnership in the gospel during the past two decades that have been nourished by the mutual commitments of the covenant. I hope that some of them will be told and heard as the anniversary is celebrated. But celebrations are likely to be muted.

There are two principal reasons for this. The first is widespread indifference to the covenant on the part of Anglicans in particular. In England, Anglicans are significantly more numerous than Methodists, as well as shaped by a long history of social dominance. It is perhaps inevitable that they are correspondingly less attentive to the benefits of fellowship and collaboration, and more prone to harbor the myth of ecclesial self-sufficiency. On the other hand, for Anglicans who are passionate about unity, bringing as many churches as possible together in shared practices and joint projects is likely to be a priority at the local level, with some puzzlement then ensuing about what difference a set of institutional commitments with the Methodist Church could or should make in that context.

The second reason for restraint in any anniversary celebrations is that the covenant was always intended to be a stage on the journey toward a destination that its text called “organic unity” between the two churches, with the next stage being the full interchangeability of ministries. In 2017, the faith and order bodies of the two churches published a joint report, Mission and Ministry in Covenant (for which I served as the Anglican co-secretary), that set out proposals for achieving that interchangeability. Although responses appeared initially positive at the Church of England’s General Synod in February 2018 and later the same year at the Methodist Conference, by the end of 2019 the steps of receiving and implementing the report had effectively come to a standstill, and no serious attempt since then has been made to renew the process.

Why the apparent dead end in the search for a road to the next stage on the covenant journey? Many factors could be cited, not least the lack of enthusiasm for deepening relations. The most obvious motivation, however, for active Anglican resistance to the proposals of Mission and Ministry in Covenant was widespread hostility from Catholic Anglicans to the decision of the faith and order bodies to take the “South India” rather than “North India” route to the reconciliation of ministries.

When the united Church of South India was formed in 1947, it embraced the historic episcopate in a form recognizable to Anglicans, with bishops ordained in accordance with Anglican requirements for episcopal ordination, who would thereafter preside at all ordinations to the diaconate and presbyterate. Presbyters from the non-Anglican churches also forming part of the new united church did not, however, receive episcopal ordination, leading to a period when within the new, episcopally ordered church not all ordained ministers were ordained by a bishop. This came to be described as an instance of “bearable anomaly” for Anglicans: a situation outside the historic norm, but borne together in unity with other Christians for a limited period of time, for the sake of movement toward the visible unity of the church for which Christ prayed, that the world may believe.

In the 1940s and 1950s, however, many Anglo-Catholics had no intention of bearing it and campaigned vigorously against any recognition of the Church of South India as an episcopal church in communion with Anglican churches. Later, when further proposals for united churches in South Asia began to gain momentum in the 1960s, a different model was adopted: pivoting on a “service of reconciliation,” the ordained ministers of both churches were formally welcomed into the ministry of the new church. The service included laying on of hands. This North India model was also followed in the unity efforts of the Church of England and the Methodist Church being pursued in the same period.

The North India approach sought to satisfy Anglo-Catholic insistence that in a church in communion with Anglican churches there could be no recognition of ministers who had not been ordained by a bishop in the historic episcopate. But it did so at a price. Since the beginnings of the faith and order movement over a hundred years ago, churches without what Anglicans recognize as the historic episcopate have consistently rejected episcopal ordination for existing ministers as a condition for greater unity. This had quickly become apparent, for instance, in conversations between the Church of England and the English Free Churches in the years immediately following the ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ issued by the Lambeth Conference in 1920, which petered out because of the impasse on this point, as proposals for unity in South India threatened to do a decade later. The “service of reconciliation,” then, had to define itself as not implying additional ordination, while leaving room for those who wished to do so to interpret what was happening as just that. Concern for such equivocation — laid bare when the Church of England’s lawyers had to decide on where the proposed service of reconciliation would leave participating Methodist presbyters with regard to their standing in ecclesiastical law — was one factor in the final demise of the Anglican-Methodist unity effort in 1972.

The third main chapter of Mission and Ministry in Covenant sought to lay out a coherent argument for why Anglicans, including Catholic Anglicans, could follow the South India route to reconciliation of ministries between the Church of England and the Methodist Church in Great Britain. But it failed to make much headway with self-defining Catholics in the Church of England, many of whom could only see bearing the anomaly on this path as a dilution if not betrayal of Catholic principle. Even for those not intransigently opposed to the possibility of adopting the South India approach, significant questions remained about the pathway being set out.  Ultimately, those questions will have to be addressed more effectively than was possible in 2018-19 if there is to be any possibility of recovering the core proposals of Mission and Ministry in Covenant. But that is a matter for another occasion.

In the meantime, I look forward to celebrating 21 years of the Anglican-Methodist Covenant in November, and the fellowship between our churches that is has both affirmed and fostered. There is, however, some demanding work to be done if the hope that framed it, of continuing growth toward organic unity, is to be sustained. And if it cannot, perhaps there needs to be some frank recognition of failure, and openness to both the repentance and the learning that may accompany it.