Page 12 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 66

division, which all Churches experience. If a member of any particular Church
tells you that there are no internal tensions or divisions within their Church,
then they are being less than candid. I am reminded of a story of the late
Archbishop Anthony Bloom, who may have been a Spiritual Father to people
here this evening. He was approached by a prominent Evangelical, who was
considering joining the Russian Orthodox Church. The Archbishop said to
him, “Do not look for the perfect Church. Because if you find it and join it, you
will spoil it.” There is an inescapable reality, which we also see in the story of
the early Church in the New Testament, that churches can and do differ within
themselves from time to time. These are, at bottom, theological questions –
“How do we deal with disagreement, when it occurs?” and, even more
importantly, “In the story of our Faith, what is the role of conflict and
controversy in developing new patterns of Christian life, which later on receive
general consensus by reception?” I think, for example, of the role of the
Anglican Church in ending the Transatlantic Slave Trade, now universally
accepted as having been a great evil. Growth of the Church through this model
of dispersed authority, and at times through conflict and disagreement,
characterised the development of the Church throughout the period of the
Ecumenical Councils, through to the more recent development of a
multiplicity of autocephalous Patriarchates and autonomous Provinces, which
is distinctive to contemporary Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

Autocephaly & Nationalism

The principle of self-governance, or autocephaly, lies at the heart of both
Orthodox and Anglican identity. For Anglicans, as national churches developed
with a separate structure and jurisdiction from the parent Church of England,
it led to the conscious development of the term Anglican Communion. The
term Anglican Communion was used only relatively recently, and was
developed with specific reference to Orthodoxy, so that Orthodox Churches
might recognise the hallmarks of the Church as they knew it. In fact, it was
first used in the city of Constantinople in 1847 by the American Bishop
Horatio Southgate (then resident in that city) in an attempt to make the
Anglican tradition intelligible to an Orthodox readership – the term was
8
translated into Greek, Arabic, and Armenian. It describes a fellowship of
Churches held together by bonds of affection and not jurisdiction, but also

8 See W. H. Taylor, Narratives of Identity, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013, introduction.

10