The Anglican Church League

In his book The Chosen Ones – The Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church journalist Chris McGillion paints a somewhat unflattering picture of the inner workings of the diocese of Sydney over the 1993-2001 period. Crafted chiefly from interviews with some of the protagonists, it is a story of manoeuvrings, tactics, parties and vote-counting. Some of those interviewed seemed, like old war heroes, to relish the chance to recount the cut-and-thrust of those days – oblivious to the interviewer’s distaste, which he assumes that his implied reader will share. McGillion’s thesis is that the Sydney Anglicans who came to power in those years had a belief that they were ‘the chosen ones’ – and that this justified to them the use of nakedly political means in the godly cause to which they had been called. From McGillion’s point of view, politics is an ugly business even when it pursues apparently holy ends. His subjects did not seem to share this embarrassment. It is this clash of perspectives that makes the book an intriguing read.

The subject of ecclesiastical politics is frequently associated with Sydney Anglicans, not because they invented it, but because they have been remarkably good at it. The refined disdain for the political aspect of church life is a luxury afforded those to whom power naturally tends to accrue. Like all human institutions, churches need a decision-making process. As a body politic, it has bodily-political functions that need attending to. It is not an unspiritual thing to seek to manage these as effectively as possible, however crass it might seem to those of more sophisticated palate. Sometimes it is a messy and complicated business – a process that presents unenviable choices and imperfect solutions.

That being said, success in the process has perhaps obscured the consideration of the possibility that the process itself might be deeply flawed and could be reformed. As has been frequently pointed out, synods as they are presently constituted have far too many members to be an efficient chamber of debate and discussion and are inevitably dominated by lawyers and those of a political disposition. Sydney Anglicans have twice as many representatives in their synod than the Australian people do in their parliament! Inevitably, with such an unwieldy process the distribution of power and the mutual accountability that a democratic process is meant to ensure becomes concentrated in the hands of smaller committees. And it almost requires the development of a group whose history is inextricably linked to the history of the Sydney diocese: the Anglican Church League.

The Australian form of Anglicanism has a long history of embracing synodical government. Without the deeply embedded alliance with the Crown and the Parliament to help it, as was the case in England, the Australian church had to find a way to order its own affairs. In fact, as Tom Frame writes ‘[T]he Australian Church led the Anglican Communion in its embrace of synodical government’. The word ‘synod’ emerges from a Greek word sunodos, which means ‘assembly’ or ‘meeting’. There being no prescribed method of decision-making for churches in the New Testament, synods have varied enormously in size, task and process over the two millennia of church history. In the Church of England, synods had a rather peripheral role given that the church was governed by Royal Supremacy via parliament and the convocation of bishops. The colonials, for their part, wanted an arrangement which ensured the more direct involvement of the laity in parallel with the secular parliaments. This meant that synods have largely adopted the parliamentary processes and legal mechanisms of the British parliament. From 1872 there was a national, ‘General’ Synod and corresponding diocesan synods. Given the great distances involved in most Australian diocese, the diocesan synod became in many places the most significant opportunity for clergy and laity to share fellowship.

Sydney’s synod was first convened in 1866 by Bishop Barker (dates). The sessions were lengthy, and demanded a high level of competence from its participants. Whereas before the bishop relied somewhat informally on carefully chosen lay and clerical advisors in order to make decisions, now this gathering of high-powered laity and clergy had its own decision making function. As the historians of the Sydney diocese, Judd and Cable write: ‘by the end of Barker’s episcopate, synod had emerged in an effective form as the focus of the diocese’.

In these early years the synod needed to set the affairs of the diocese in order. The parliamentarians, lawyers and landowners that held positions on synod ensured that proper standing orders were introduced, the financial arrangements of the diocese established and a standing committee appointed. For clergy, the rise of the synod meant that they were no longer vulnerable to the whims of their bishop. There was now a system of nominations and a degree of professional security. Theological and social issues did not arise and were not debated – there was not initially a sense that there were mutually incompatible theological visions that would need to assert themselves in this forum.

Up until the 1890s, it was still however the case that the synod tended to see itself as chiefly supportive of the bishop in his management of the diocese. In 1897, the Standing Committee was granted authority to act ‘without prior reference to the full synod’. The rate of legislation increased and indicated that the exclusive power of the bishop over his diocese was certainly at an end.

The emergence of party groupings in the synod can be dated to this period. Becoming a busier legislative chamber inevitably led to divisions just because of the adversarial nature of the process, with winners and losers. In 1886 the Church of England Association, a lay organisation, was formed. The Association’s stated aim was to prevent the advance of ritualism in the church; and it proved to be successful in achieving this end. Throughout the 1890s other political groupings emerged representing the Anglo-Catholics, High Churchmen and others. It was the Protestant Church of England Union, an evangelical alliance, which emerged as the strongest group in the diocese by the turn of the century. The Union was determined to stop Anglo-Catholic practices and pressured the Archbishop to act on their behalf against the introduction of Eucharistic vestments....