I was one of six children brought up in country Victoria in the 1960s in the unremitting poverty of my father’s Anglican clergyman’s stipend.
It was, however, mitigated by two things. The first was that along with the stipend came the occupancy of the Anglican Rectory and its substantial grounds – substantial enough for us to run a small subsistence farm with chooks, a cow, a goat and a large vegetable garden. We may have eaten a lot of sausages and Spam, but at least the dairy and vegies were healthy.
The second was the right to be educated free at a church school – as it happened on some sort of reciprocal arrangement with the Presbyterians.
So whatever internal crises of faith my father ever had – whether towards atheism or to Rome – he had the wit to realise that they would have remain just that – internal. Outwardly, he had to profess Anglicanism upon pain of losing the roof over his head, the garden that fed his kids and the school that educated them.
Admittedly things looked up when my mother went back to teaching, nonetheless the continued enjoyment of the fruits of Anglican property were dependent upon my father’s adherence to the Anglican faith. Caesar and God were at one.
There would not be and could not be a split from the faith.
I guess that Archbishop Peter Jensen, head of the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney, is in perhaps a similar position.
Amid the recent theological jousting among Anglicans we have heard much about women priests and bishops. We have heard much about homosexual priests, bishops and church members. But we have heard little about property.
In England, the Anglican Church obtained vast amounts of Roman Catholic property by Royal fiat when the church was (at least notionally) founded by Henry VIII in 1534. The new Church of England was Catholicism with everything except the Pope and celibacy for priests. The Anglicans got all the great cathedrals – Westminster, Durham, Wells, Norwich, Canterbury and others – and schools and buildings in cities, towns and country. When the British Empire expanded the church went with it and was granted tracts of land, money and tax-free status over much of the world.
In that respect the Church of England was in a much superior position to nearly all other churches formed at the Reformation. It had the backing of the state. It saw itself not as a new church but the continuation of the catholic and apostolic church that had been in England for centuries – minus the Pope. It saw the people who continued to take the authority of the Pope as the renegades.
So the Church of England had the advantage of both keeping the property and its new doctrine. This was Reformation lite – all the panoply and property of Catholicism less the pope and celibacy.
Jensen in a way is like the first major protestant, Martin Luther. Jensen wants to weed out what he sees as heresies in the church to which he belongs – a protest at the bad and a call for reform, hence Protest-antism and the Reform-ation. Luther, at least intitially, was not for schism or split. Neither is Jensen.
The question is when or whether Jensen will say, “Here I stand” and whether he will do as Luther did in 1521 and refuse to submit to the authority of the Church of Rome (or in Jensen’s case, the Church of Lambeth).
My guess is never – because of property. The Lutheran Church, like the Calvanists, Baptists, Methodists, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and others took no property from the former churches of their adherents. They had to start from scratch – unlike the Anglicans.
With the land grants and tax-free status bestowed by the state, the Sydney diocese is now worth about $4 billion. Accurate figures for churches’ wealth are hard to come by because they are private clubs, rather than public corporations with public reporting requirements.
And therein lies the rub. Private clubs can have whatever rules they like, provided they are not contrary to the law of the land.
But trouble begins when club members fall out over rules. Where does the property go?
The Anglican Church is a bit like a football league. One club might accept female goal umpires but insist that the bloke in the middle remain – well – a bloke. If that club leaves the league, how much money can it take with it? What if some other members of the club want to accept female central umpires and stay with the league?
It will be tricky to sort out. A lot of Anglican assets are vested in trusts in various dioceses. These are governed by legislation in the various states and territories. Moreover, the trust assets are not necessarily controlled by the bishop or archbishop, who is only one of several trustees.
The only certainty is that if a split comes, it will be lawyers at 20 paces, and Christian charity will drown in a sea of avarice – witness the litigation last century over the assets of the Presbyterian Church when it split between those joining the Uniting Church and those continuing.
Witness, too, what is happening in the US. The US Episcopal (Anglican) Church has sued to get church property back from the rebel Diocese of San Joaquin in California. Forty-two of its 48 parishes voted to leave the national church over the national body’s approval of same-sex blessings, ordination of a gay bishop, the role of women in the church, and how to interpret the Bible on these questions. The continuing parishes selected a new bishop. The breakaway parishes joined an Anglican archdiocese in Argentina. The continuing parishes say the cathedral and other property belongs to them. Not so, say the breakaways.
Messy stuff.
Small wonder, then, Jensen says last month’s Jerusalem Declaration is not a “split’.
It is merely the continuation of 400 years of Anglican identity confusion: is the Anglican Church Catholicism without the Pope and celibacy, or is it the church of Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer (all burned at the stake by Queen Mary) — a reformed church of the Bible and a personal god.
Anglicans take differing views. But as far as the law is concerned you can take whatever path you want to salvation and form whatever private club – say the Jerusalem Declared Anglican Church – you want. The only question is how much of the property, if any, can you take with you.
The resolution of that question will result in an even more unseemly brawl than the theological one we are now witnessing.