Connecting Across Differences

Beloved in Christ, 

It’s been an eventful few weeks in the wider Anglican Communion. Bishop Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London, was chosen to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England and an important figurehead for the whole communion. She will be the first woman to ever hold that senior position. I had an opportunity to spend a few hours with her in January of 2024, and I found her to be unflappably grounded, with a lively and contagious faith in Jesus Christ, possessing the imaginative capacity to be a true visionary, and with the wisdom to understand what big vision costs. Her appointment is joyfully historic, and she seems to be exactly what is needed for such a big and complex role. 

Her appointment has not been universally embraced and celebrated across the communion. Last week, a group of provinces from the Global South issued a statement indicating they would no longer recognize the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and declaring themselves to be the Anglican Communion going forward. Many in our own province of the Episcopal Church will greet that news with either outrage or casual derision. My own reaction is one of deep sadness. 

For me, it matters immensely that we are part of a global fellowship of churches. Our own province is majority white, older, and declining in membership. When we are placed in the context of this global fellowship, none of those things are true. The Anglican Communion has held together, however loosely, a vast spectrum of God’s creation across the divisions of race, culture, language, theology, and the complexities of colonialism and its aftermath. For all its challenges and post-colonial messiness, the communion is a sign of God’s power to hold us together without a forced uniformity. 

The provinces walking away are doing so partly over the new archbishop’s gender, and partly over her positions on human sexuality. Our commitment to the full inclusion of all God’s children in the life and leadership of the church is, of course, absolute. But choosing to walk apart diminishes our capacity to connect across the real and serious things that divide us. Connecting across difference is of course one of the central marks of the Holy Spirit’s activity in the world. Our culture, and the wider world, are quickly sorting into enclaves of the like-minded, who regard one another across chasms of scorn. God’s work of healing the world with love is ultimately about the “great multitude, from every tribe and language and people and nation” from Revelation 7, gathered together around God’s loving heart, not competing camps committed to beating one another.  

The fractures in the Anglican Communion are and have always been a complicated cocktail of theological disagreements, post-colonial dynamics, and good old-fashioned clashes of personalities and fights over power and influence. I am deeply grateful for Bishop Mullaly’s appointment as archbishop, and I am eager to work with her and learn from her. I am also deeply grieved at the fact that some of our siblings have chosen to walk apart. I hope you will join me in praying for them, for the new archbishop, and most of all that in God’s good time, through God’s almighty power, we may all know the full healing and liberation of being carried together in God’s heavenly home. 

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya