Nicholas Taylor on Lay Presidency

Opposition to Sydney’s proposal for lay presidency has been extremely strong from other parts of the Anglican world – even from churches who are allied with Sydney in the GAFCON movement. This proposal seems to be a step too far for many Anglicans.

An Anglican priest working in South Africa, Nicholas H. Taylor has written a substantial and sophisticated response to the proposal for lay presidency titled Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. It has to be said that the depth and seriousness of Taylor’s book rather outweigh the short polemical pieces and committee papers that have been offered by those advocating lay administration. He offers an extensive and nuanced discussion of the nature of authority in Anglicanism and on the whole gives a careful exposition of the case for lay administration before countering it with his own.

Two features of his argument mar it, however. The first is that he attempts to say what ‘Anglican’ is, but can only do so by making his own, more Catholic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper paradigmatic for all Anglican practice. The problem comes when you romanticise the Anglican compromise as a wonderful synthesis, instead of acknowledging that the ambiguity in the formularies made possible, within the same ecclesiastical structure, the presence of two mutually exclusive views of the Eucharist; and that the fragility of this compromise meant that it resolved nothing, and was always going to fall apart at some point. Taylor is unable to acknowledge the legitimate and continuous presence of the alternative reading of the sacraments in the Anglican tradition, and fails to argue against it on its own terms. What he discovers is only that the Anglican evangelical view of the sacraments is not the same as the Anglo-Catholic one. We knew this already.

Second, though Taylor is for the most part a model of scholarly dispassion, when he comes to engaging with the diocese of Sydney he is unable to contain himself and slips in to a polemic which verges on nastiness. He calls Sydney ‘an ultra-Protestant fringe of Anglicanism’ whose ‘interpretations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer may alike be tendentious, and account of the historically somewhat liminal place this diocese has taken in the Anglican Communion, and even in the Anglican Church of Australia.’ The word ‘liminal’ – a word Taylor repeats - is the strange one here. Does he mean by it ‘barely perceptible’, or ‘a transitory state’? In any case, it is clear that Taylor wants to portray these, the most serious advocates for the position he wants to counter, as extremists and eccentrics barely worth taking seriously. He adds to this impression by pointing out to his readers the connection that Sydney Diocese has maintained over a number of decades with ‘the schismatic ecclesial group known as the Church of England in South Africa, which maintained close ties with the apartheid regime’. This is a largely irrelevant statement designed only to taint Sydney Anglicans with racism in the mind of his readers and so utterly prejudice the outcome of his discussion. The complex history of the ‘other’ Anglicans in South Africa is by no means without its regretful aspects (for which its bishop, Frank Retief, made a public declaration of apology and repentance in the 1990s); yet the phrase ‘close ties’ would be more than an exaggeration. The argument for Sydney’s ‘liminality’ means that he overlooks the long and vigorous history of evangelicals within the Church of England in almost every place that the Church of England has gone. It is a historically myopic view.

Taylor points out that while in many instances the argument for lay administration is driven by the practical problem of the lack of ordained clergy – most often in rural districts – in Sydney there is no such shortage compared to other dioceses. This observation is correct, although there are a greater number of people in congregations in Sydney Anglican churches, too. It is certainly difficult for a complete outsider to the diocese in question to offer his view on the practical needs of the ministry. He does not take into account the way in which the development of new congregations has put pressure on the current system of ordination. Nevertheless, he is correct to understand Sydney’s push for lay administration as theologically driven and not just pragmatic.

It is just that he cannot accept the theological views of Sydney as having a valid place within Anglicanism. Taylor characterises the diocese of Sydney in this way:
The agenda of the diocese of Sydney, under its current Archbishop, is to resume and bring to its completion the process of reformation disrupted by the deaths of Edward VI and Cranmer. Reform is to be continued along a theological trajectory in continuity with Cranmer.
On what evidence Taylor bases this suspicion I would like to know. He offers none. This kind of comment merely reveals the prejudice against with which his project unfortunately began. He takes Archbishop Peter Jensen to task for depending heavily on Cranmer’s views as normative for Anglicanism in his argument for lay administration. This would be to vastly overstate the claims that Jensen makes for Cranmer in his short piece on the subject. And yet, it would seem to strange to argue that, as the primary author of the Anglican formularies, Cranmer’s views are of very limited importance to the discussion. Taylor is right to point to the fact that Cranmer argues strongly for administration of the sacrament only by those duly authorised by lawful authority – but then, this is not really in dispute.

Taylor then tries to mount the perverse argument that the argument for lay presidency is actually designed to uphold hierarchical and patriarchal patterns within the diocese of Sydney:
It is not envisaged that delegation to lay people of functions such as preaching and administering holy communion in Sunday worship would involve any participation in the pastoral oversight exercised by the Archbishop and clergy of the diocese of Sydney. Power would remain vested in an exclusive male cadre, formed principally and definitively at Moore Theological College in the very particular and narrow theological tradition which Sydney represents.
The issue of lay presidency, he argues, must be linked to Sydney’s resistance to women’s ordination. If lay people – females among them – can be admitted to the business administering communion as well as communion, then what is it that not ordaining them excludes them from? Taylor deduces that it must be all about conserving the power of the clique, or the ‘cadre’, as he calls it. What ordination represents, in Taylor’s reading of the Sydney mentality, is not preaching or presiding but power. This is a kind of postmodern power-critique of the predictable kind, but it relies on speculation about the motives of others to which Taylor is certainly not privy. How is Taylor able to see what it is really about from his study on the other side of the Indian Ocean? Is he such a successful psychologist?

In fact, push for lay administration in Sydney began quite separately to and at around about the same time as the call of women’s ordination began in the wider Anglican Communion. Certainly, the proponents of lay administration have wanted to show that their understanding of ordination was not a specifically sacramental one, and that their objection to women’s ordination was not on the basis of the Anglo-Catholic reasoning about sacerdotal ministry. If anything, however, lay administration would open up leadership opportunities for lay men and women and for female deacons in Sydney, which is a diocese with a long history of active lay leadership by both genders and which employs more women in ministry than any other. Taylor’s comments about the ‘particular and narrow theological tradition’ represented by Sydney reveal only his (deliberate?) ignorance of the ongoing presence of evangelicals within Anglicanism around the globe. If it is only in Sydney that they have been able to influence an entire diocese in the way they have, it is because of the political hegemony of the liberal catholic party elsewhere. Most dioceses in the world would represent a ‘very particular and narrow theological tradition’ – namely, the liberal catholic one – under whose powerful rule it is oftentimes very difficult for evangelicals to live. It is a bit rich, quite frankly, to be lectured on power politics from the point of view of the most successful political grouping in the Anglican Communion.

Taylor makes a great deal of an almost throw away comment by Archbishop Peter Jensen. In advocating for liturgical change, Jensen described the current forms of liturgy as ‘almost irrelevant’ in the context of contemporary mission. By this he did not mean, as Taylor takes him to mean, that the gathering together of the people of God around the word and sacrament was irrelevant – only that the forms in which we have continued to practice our meeting have become inaccessible and impenetrable to the secularised world. Yet Taylor riffs on this phrase, claiming that

As a theology of the laity, it denigrates the people of God to whom the ‘almost irrelevant’ ministry of word and sacrament is entrusted, while clergy are engaged in the ministry which really matters.

This is just plain misreading – and it is certainly not the intention of those who argue for lay administration. What Taylor completely ignores is the vigorous support for lay administration from lay people themselves within the diocese of Sydney. Far from being a plot by the men at head office to shore up their own power, the envisaged change is meant to complete the ‘lay revolution’ begun in the late 1960s by admitting lay people to the ministry of the table as well as the ministry of the pulpit.

The pity is that Taylor’s book is an otherwise very accomplished and judicious work carried out with appropriate scholarly dispassion. At the end of his extended review of the subject, he argues that the issue of who presides at the Lord’s Supper is a second order issue, and that it is permissible in certain emergency situations. From Taylor’s point of view, the most suitable solution to the shortage of clergy is the ordination of local Christian leadership as ‘the most satisfactory alternative to authorized lay presidency at the eucharist’. I fail to see what the difference between lay administration and local ordination is, especially if you do not share a more catholic view of ordination. It is nowhere envisaged that lay administration would mean unauthorised administration – there would have to be a system of due authorisation of lay ministers, just as there is for lay preachers. And the authorisation would hold for the services in the local parish and not elsewhere. Is the difference between lay administration and local ordination only then a matter of what you call it? It would seem so – unless you have a quasi-mystical view of the effects of ordination. Local ordination is no less a novelty than lay administration. So why is this alternative preferable and the Sydney suggestion anathema?