The following is an excerpt from the ‘Religion Report’ broadcast on Radio National on August 13 ,2008. You can listen to the entire radio show at Religion Report, Radio National mp3
This is an interesting example of unpacking a statement which shows a few key methods that anyone can use at anytime, for most academic disciplines.
The statement is :
“Stephen Crittenden: In the final days of the conference, there was an extraordinary attack in The Times by the Primate of Uganda in an Op.Ed. piece in which he basically said, ‘What kind of church is it that has its most senior bishop appointed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, not even elected by his peers?’ Is that kind of comment a knockout punch that there’s no answer to, or is it just wrong?
Some of the ways to respond to this statement might be, to focus immediately on answering the prompt phrase what kind of church is it ? that is in this statement. It is a church that is controlled by the government, or it is a church that is basically run by English people for English people, or it is a church that is run by one person( senior bishop) who tells everyone else what to do.
These responses that I have said lack depth because I have not unpacked the initial statement.
To unpack a statement such as this I need some background knowledge about the Anglican church
What do I mean by background knowledge?
Well, usually this would include a bit of history of an institution; an awareness of the structure of the institution; understanding of current concerns/ issues within an institution; who made the statement originally; what they may be hoping to achieve in the institution and where they stand in relation to any current issues.
When you read the following response to the statement can you see where Bruce Kaye is using this background knowledge to unpack the underlying tensions within the initial statement
“Bruce Kaye: I think it’s a very interesting contribution. I think it’s very interesting that this argument that somehow the Church-State relationship in the Church of England makes ambiguous the position of Archbishop of Canterbury as the focus of unity for Anglicanism worldwide. The fact that these criticisms are coming from people associated with the GAFCON model, here is the analysis of who made the statement it seems to me to confirm my view that the GAFCON model of networking will prove to be much more tight organisationally and more centrally administrative. And why is it important to know who said it? because that has implications for the understanding of a particular model And the notion therefore of the kind of authority that this historically whimsical arrangementThis tradition of this position being the head of the institution goes back to the origins of the institution and is therefore not specifically linked to any particular government control has of the Archbishop of Canterbury being somehow a focus of unity for worldwide Anglicanism, means that he can never be a serious political contender for anything that could be construed as imperial or coercive or anything like that. The speaker here has inserted a counter argument to suggest that this link between the British Government and the Anglican Church infact supports the opposite of what is implied in the initial statement. And in my view, that’s a good thing, because that models the character of Anglicanism. What Orombi and some others are wanting is leadership which has clearly got some kind of democratic conciliar legitimation to it, and I think once you go down that track, then you’re going to have something much more centralised, so this identifies what is currently an issue or debate within the institution over if there should be a centralised structure or not and I think what’s going on there is a little kind of attempt to find a basis for saying ‘The kind of communion we want is a more controlling or controlled model than the one that we have at the moment.’ See at the present time you’ve got a bottom-up structure, autonomous provinces, very hard to make decisions which will stop someone doing something else. This statement relies on understanding the current structure of the institution What they are looking for, and they complain that the last 10 years have seen a failure of authority in the communion, what they want is something much more controlling, the capacity to say, So here this speaker identifies what he sees as the aim behind the original statement ‘These people are heretics, they’re not part of our communion.’ Well if you’re going to do that then the kind of notion of informal authority that history brings through an office of an Archbishop of Canterbury, doesn’t sit well. It’s not appropriate to that model. And I think that’s what those attacks are about.”
Dr Bruce Kaye,
Former General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia, member of the Anglican International Theological and Doctrinal Commission.
Dr Bruce Kaye,
Former General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia, member of the Anglican International Theological and Doctrinal Commission.
3 responses so far ↓
stacey // Aug 23rd 2008 at 3:50 pm
Whats wrong with the primeminister putting in the head of the church? the church tries to control people so its good if the govt controls the church!!
Julia Hobson // Aug 29th 2008 at 10:02 am
Stacey, that is an interesting point . Before deciding whether I agree with your position , what I need to do is to put your statement through the unpacking machine.So Does the church ( and which church do we mean here? , all churches or just some?) try to control people?
If it does, what evidence do I have to support that claim? How does it do this? Why does it do? When I give answer to the ‘How ‘& the ‘Why’ questions what evidence do I have to support those answers? Then the second part of the statement ’so its good if the govt controls the church’ when it goes through the unpacking machine also generates a number of questions:Is more control the best way to go? Does the head of the church control the church anyway or is that position mainly just for show?
Once these questions have been researched and examined then we can return to your original statement, Stacey and see what we think.
Ivana // Sep 9th 2008 at 8:16 pm
I hadn’t heard about this - and I see from the date it’s rather recent, too.
‘What kind of church it is’, is perhaps not so much the focus of the original author as what sort of church he thought it should be.
I say this because the Anglican church has experienced a number of dramatic cultural changes in the last century, some of which have even threatened to split the church. The ordination of women was one of these changes, for instance, which almost caused a large migration of Anglicans to Catholicism. The issue of homosexuality was another.
When I consider the segregation that once existed amongst Anglicans and other faiths/denominations in Australia and elsewhere, and the culture of rapid change and debate that has unravelled this in the last few decades alone, I think that the Ugandan Anglicans launched their criticism more from the point of an ethnic group, hopeful that some coming change might finally allow them to play a more ‘equitable’ role in the affairs of the church, than from any concern they had for government involvement. The Queen of England as a ‘head of state’ is the head of the Anglican church, after all. Who’s going to change that?
Had their hopes been realised, and the mould been broken with the selection of an ethnic Archbishop, or even selected with the input of ethnic ministers, would he have been as disappointed, do you think?
The Primate has accused the Anglican church hierarchy of marginalising the members of the ‘global south’, to which he has also said: “For more than ten years we have been speaking and have not been heard.” He even used the ‘c’ word… colonialism.
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