Diocesan Council and the Bishop's Address

The bishop said in his address:

If the General Convention of the Episcopal Church decides, in the words of the Windsor Report, to walk apart from the rest of the communion, it is my intention not to do so. We are a communion diocese with deep and abiding ties to our Anglican brothers and sisters. I will continue to work with those people and dioceses that believe this is the way forward.

Here he declares his predetermination to disobey the decisions of the next General Convention if he does not agree with them. Arguably, through Council's agreement with the bishop, the Diocese of Texas has ceased to operate as a diocese, and is now, functionally, its own church.

The use in the Windsor Report of the phrase "to walk apart" is vague, and probably deliberately so. The Report reads: "Should the call to halt and find ways of continuing in our present communion not be heeded, then we shall have to begin to learn to walk apart. We would much rather not speculate on actions that might need to be taken if, after acceptance by the primates, our recommendations are not implemented."

It should be noted that the Windsor Report has in fact not been accepted by the primates of the Anglican Communion. In the their report of February 2005, a.k.a. the Dromatine Communiqué, the primates report their reservations about Windsor's proposal of an Anglican Covenant. The most they do is "commend this proposal as a project that should be given further consideration" between now and the next Lambeth Conference, 2008. More significantly, the primates note their serious misgivings about Windsor's proposal that the Archbishop of Canterbury be assigned a sort of primatial authority in the Communion. The primates report that they "are cautious of any development which would seem to imply the creation of an international jurisdiction which could override our proper provincial autonomy."

When the Anglican Communion Network bishops and their allies, with whom our own diocesan bishop identifies himself, imply and claim that the Primates of the Communion and the Archbishop himself have embraced the Windsor Report, they are plainly perpetuating a falsehood. The tendency of a number of them to appeal to the Archbishop of Canterbury as though he were an Anglican Pope suggests that the primates' rejection of Windsor on this point is lost on those who claim that "accepting the Windsor Report is the way ahead."

In similar fashion, when our diocesan tells the Council that "we within the Diocese of Texas will have to do more than support the Windsor Report through resolutions, we will have to live by its standards," he is redefining this diocese as the Church of the Windsor Report; or more accurately, as the Church of the Bishop's interpretation thereof. And, clearly, when he says that he is not leaving the Church, he is referring to a conceptual and ideological definition of the Church, not a constitutional one. Finally, by its strong rejection of resolutions that would have done nothing more than state the diocese's support for its extant obligations under the constitutions of the diocese and the Church, the last Council of the Diocese of Texas made clear that it intends to follow this bishop, even when this means violating its constitutional commitments to abide by the decisions of the General Convention of this Church.

It is now not a case of if but of when this bishop and his Network allies will declare that the actions taken at General Convention have somehow made clear that "the General Convention of the Episcopal Church [has decided], in the words of the Windsor Report, to walk apart from the rest of the communion." Likely, it is then that we will be more fully educated in what it means to be, as the bishop puts it, "a communion diocese."

With the decision of the Diocese of Texas and its bishop to honor no longer their constitutional commitments to the Church of which the diocese has, until now, been a constituent member, the people of the diocese need to be prepared for the consequences of this realignment of loyalties. For it is unlikely that parishes and congregations will be afforded similar liberty to accept or ignore as they please their constitutional commitments to the diocese.

One must assume, though, that the new church of Texas (or of the communion, or of the Windsor Report, or of the bishop's interpretation thereof) will hold fast its claimed right to reject its new affiliation as easily as it rejected its former one. For no sooner might the church of Texas associate itself with its new set of like-minded friends than it discovers that some aspect of that relationship is objectionable, some member of the new alliance is found to hold some disagreeable opinion. And so, standing similarly proud, though within a decidedly smaller arena, this bishop or some other self-proclaimed prophetic leader, will again issue the call to ignore the current commitment in order to pursue an increasingly rigid ideology. And a new break will happen; and a new discord will be waiting on the near horizon. It's practically inevitable, for this bishop has vowed to "continue to work with those people and dioceses that believe this is the way forward."