Sydney Diocese has always been an important player in the Anglican Church of Australia.
It is the oldest and largest of the 23 Australian dioceses, and until
its recent catastrophic financial losses, was the richest. It is also
the most conservative, and is strident in defence of that conservatism.
But how could Sydney Diocese be a threat to the international
Anglican Communion?
After all, Australia, with just 3.7 million
Anglicans according to the 2006 census - the same number as those
Australians who claimed no religion - should be but a small player among
the 80 million world Anglicans.
Yet in the first decade of the twenty-first century, under the
leadership of Archbishop Peter Jensen, Sydney Diocese has become a force
to be reckoned with in the Anglican Communion.
As a leader of the
alternative international Anglican movement focused in the Global
Anglican Future (GAFCON) project, his diocese became what can only be
described as a destabilizing influence.
This is just the public face of its international influence, however -
an influence that has been steadily and quietly expanding below the
radar for several decades through the leadership of key Sydney people in
a range of global ministry programs.
Previously, the diocese had attracted the interest, even fascination,
of well-informed Anglicans in different parts of the world because of
its unique reputation as an extremely conservative, hard-line monolithic
Evangelical centre.
It was not viewed with concern, however, because it seemed to inhabit
an isolated, inward-looking world of its own.
And it was still
recognizably Anglican, requiring prayer book services, liturgical robes
and the other hallmarks of traditional Anglicanism. Not any longer.
These days, it is quite rare to find Anglican church services in
Sydney that follow an authorised prayer book or lectionary of the
national church.
Just as rare are robes. In fact, it is rare to find the
services called "services" or even "worship"; they are usually now
"meetings" or "gatherings."
A radical congregationalism, coupled with a hardline conservative
neo-Calvinist Evangelicalism more akin to North American Protestantism,
has taken hold in most Sydney parishes.
Sydney diocesan leaders seriously began their public involvement with
the wider Anglican world in the lead-up to the 1998 Lambeth Conference.
At that time, they joined forces with conservative American
Episcopalians (Anglicans) to draw African and Asian conservatives into a
coalition designed to defeat what they saw as liberalizing tendencies
in the Anglican Church, particularly in North America.
Their first major victory was the controversial decision of the 1998
Lambeth Conference to oppose the ordination of homosexual people and the
blessing of gay partnerships.
That decision, and its rejection by both
the United States Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada,
has in recent years provoked the development of the alternative GAFCON
movement, in which Sydney Diocese has taken a leadership role
disproportionate to its size and status.
Peter Jensen, though not one of the Anglican Communion's 38 Primates
(national leading bishops), is honorary secretary of the GAFCON
Primates' Council, while his diocese provides the secretariat for the
GAFCON offshoot, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA).
On his webpage,
Archbishop Jensen claims he is "recognized as a key leader in the
worldwide Anglican Church" and notes that he was "one of the organizers
of the [GAFCON] conference in Jerusalem in 2008."
Plans for a second
GAFCON meeting in 2012, announced recently, included approval for an
expansion of the Sydney-based secretariat.
Sydney's role is not just secretarial. Its diocesan budget funds
provision of training programs to GAFCON-aligned national churches in
Africa and Asia sourced from the diocesan training college, Moore
Theological College, among other things.
Its international influence reaches beyond the churches assisted
through the GAFCON/FCA network, however.
Some time ago it moved into the
heartland of the Church of England through its close ties with the
conservative Evangelical movement, Reform.
Similarly, there are links with conservative movements in the Church
of Ireland, in the New Zealand church, in South Africa, and in the US
and Canada.
Sydney Diocese has also been closely involved in the
formation of the breakaway Anglican Church of North America, with a
leading lawyer from Sydney Diocese assisting in the drafting of the ACNA
constitution.
The Ministry Training Strategy program (MTS) developed in the late
1970s by Archbishop Jensen's brother Phillip - now Dean of St Andrew's
Cathedral, Sydney - when he was chaplain to the University of New South
Wales, has spread across the globe.
It boasts that it has been "developed, copied, refined and
implemented in many parts of Australia and the world."
It claims it has
reached into Britain, France, Canada, Ireland (both north and south),
Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan and South Africa.
Effectively,
over almost 20 years, it has exported a program to recruit and train
ultra-conservative Protestant ministers around the world.
MTS has been the primary recruiting ground for all Sydney clergy, a
pathway strengthened by Phillip Jensen's 2003 appointment as director of
Ministry, Training and Development, the diocese's department for the
training of clergy.
For the past 20 years, Phillip Jensen has had considerable influence
in the selection of Sydney clergy.
Through these roles and his
church-planting activities, his influence is arguably more significant
than his brother's more public role.
Together, the brothers have had a
disproportionate impact on Australian and world Anglicanism for close to
two decades.
The influence of Sydney Diocese and its leaders is felt in various
parts of the Australian church in a number of ways.
Until the diocese's
recent financial debacle, funding was directed to certain
Sydney-friendly dioceses.
There is close contact with clergy and lay
leaders in the orbit of Ridley Melbourne, one of the two theological
colleges in the Diocese of Melbourne.
To the distress of the bishops of yet other, mostly Anglo-Catholic,
dioceses Sydney has offered a process of "affiliation" to so-called
independent Evangelical churches in their territories, sometimes so
placed as to be in direct competition with a bona fide parish of the
diocese.
Although the diocese has not formally planted these churches outside
its diocesan boundaries, they have often been seeded by individual
Sydney parishes in a wave of cross-borders incursions dating from the
1990s.
Perhaps even more troubling is the close Sydney link with the
Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), now the
predominant student Christian organization across Australian
universities since the demise of the once-dominant Student Christian
Movement and the decline of diocesan-funded university chaplaincies.
AFES claims to employ more than 100 people in campus ministries in
every Australian state and territory. Linked with the International
Fellowship of Evangelical Students, it is supposedly independent of
denominational affiliation.
However, it would seem to be an outreach of
Sydney Diocese in all but name.
Its headquarters are in the same building complex as Matthias Media,
the publishing arm of Phillip Jensen's former parish, St Matthias',
Centennial Park.
The current AFES director, Richard Chin, is a graduate
of Moore College; his immediate predecessors were Sydney Anglican
clergy.
There are close links with the Phillip Jensen creation, MTS, with
both organisations sharing the same doctrinal statement.
Observers
outside the Sydney-Evangelical orbit are only now beginning to recognize
that AFES seems to have become, in many respects, a Trojan horse for
Sydney Anglican teaching around the country.
There is some evidence of increasing Sydney influence against the
ordination of women infiltrating Anglican dioceses that support women in
church leadership, most notably Melbourne Diocese, and AFES is part of
that.
AFES is also believed to be part of the spread of Sydney-style
opposition to women in church leadership in Protestant churches such as
the Churches of Christ as well.
Parishes near university campuses are,
according to anecdotal reports, particularly vulnerable to influxes of
students converted by AFES who bring their newly-acquired conservative
stance into parish life.
Tension levels, historically always simmering between the oldest
Australian diocese and the rest of the national church, have recently
increased markedly for reasons other than the Sydney church-planting and
infiltration activities.
The ordination of women to the priesthood in the early 1990s in the
vast majority of Australian dioceses, but not Sydney, caused inevitable
strains, but the consecration of women bishops in Perth and Melbourne in
2008 ramped up the tension significantly.
This is mainly because of the means by which women bishops became
possible. The previous year, the highest Anglican church court, the
Appellate Tribunal, cleared the way for women bishops through a
definitive interpretation of the church's constitution.
The constitution's basic qualifications for bishops ("canonical
fitness") applied equally to women priests as to male priests, the
Tribunal said.
Sydney Diocese strongly resisted this interpretation, and
complained bitterly when the Tribunal decision was announced. Its
leaders, it seems, are still smarting.
More serious has been Sydney Diocese's recent introduction of
diaconal presidency, and its Synod's overt support - some say,
permission - for lay presidency.
(Diaconal presidency means clergy
ordained as deacons but not as priests can preside at Holy Communion,
the central Christian worship rite; lay presidency extends that
permission to lay people as well. In longstanding church law and
tradition in the Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox churches, priests and
bishops are the only persons authorized to preside at Holy Communion.)
The decision by the 2008 Sydney Synod to claim legitimacy for
diaconal presidency - the culmination of many years of promotion of
diaconal and lay presidency by Sydney Synod - created considerable
concern among the Australian House of Bishops, as well as
internationally.
The Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his disapproval in strong
terms. This move was of such concern that it prompted a challenge to the
Appellate Tribunal, which declared diaconal and lay presidency under
the terms of the 2008 motion to be unconstitutional.
The subsequent 2010 decision by Sydney Synod to defy the Tribunal on
the matter is unprecedented, indeed provocative, and has created
consternation around the national church.
No one from Sydney Diocese has denied that the intention is to
continue allowing deacons to preside at Holy Communion despite the
Tribunal decision.
On the contrary, the heading on the report of the
debate at Sydney Synod in the diocesan newspaper was "Deacons can keep
celebrating." Anecdotal evidence suggests deacons are continuing to
preside at some Sydney Holy Communion services.
As news of this decision by Sydney Synod filters through the national
church, there is both shock and disbelief. Senior bishops and lay
leaders around the country are deeply disturbed and troubled. Some fear
it may cause problems for the Anglican Church of Australia within the
Anglican Communion.
Of greater concern is the notion that a diocese would publicly
declare that the opinion of the Appellate Tribunal is merely "advisory"
and able to be ignored. This undermines the church constitution and such
goodwill as continues to exist between the dioceses.
The Tribunal is the body that interprets the constitution; it is the
final arbiter. If it is to be ignored, then the constitution itself is
being ignored. It is a throwing down of the gauntlet that cannot be
ignored.
The Australian church is facing a real crisis that may yet prove to
be the "bridge too far."
How the national church will be able to handle
this situation and prevent possible repercussions both nationally and
internationally is as yet unclear.
For all these reasons, Sydney Diocese can be seen to pose a threat to
the stability of the Anglican Communion, to the cohesion of the
Australian Anglican Church, and also to other Anglican churches such as
those in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in Canada, and New
Zealand.
It is also potentially a danger to those third world Anglican
churches that are part of the GAFCON organization, because it claims its
involvement is in response to Gospel truth. Sydney and its friends are
the true believers.
Churches not aligned with it, taking a different view principally on
the issue of homosexuality but also on women in ordained ministry, are
portrayed as deniers of the Gospel.
These claims, from determined,
persuasive, well-resourced church leaders bearing gifts of support for,
and assistance to, emerging churches, are hard to resist.
Overall, Sydney's influence is of real concern for the future of world Anglicanism.