Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism

The Sydney Experiment

Muriel Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351896504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Sydney Anglicans, always ultra-conservative in terms of liturgy, theology and personal morality, have increasingly modelled themselves on sixteenth century English Puritanism. Over the past few decades, they have added radical congregationalism to the mix. They have altered church services, challenged church order, and relentlessly opposed all attempts to ordain women as priests, let alone bishops. Muriel Porter unpacks how Australia's largest and, until recently, richest diocese developed its ideological fervour, and explores the impact it is having both in Australia and the Anglican Communion.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Sydney Diocese is the largest and, until recently, the richest Anglican diocese in Australia. Beginning with the first white settlement in 1788 and created as a separate diocese in 1847, it currently has more than 715 active licensed clergy¹ and 267 parishes. In 2006, the year of the last national census and National Church Life Survey, Sydney had a weekly attendance of 56,996² in a city where 738,000³ call themselves Anglican. Recent figures, based on parish returns which are not always reliable, suggest there are more than 76,000 ‘regular members’ of Sydney parishes.⁴ If this is correct, Sydney has up to three times the attendance rate of the second largest Australian diocese, Melbourne. It also has a third more clergy than Melbourne. So conservative in doctrine and ethos that it is sometimes described as fundamentalist, Sydney Diocese promotes its stance in the Australian national church with a missionary zeal and determination that other dioceses find hard to counter. So on the Australian Anglican scene, on any measure, Sydney Diocese must be regarded as highly significant.

But in the context of the worldwide Anglican Communion, this would normally count for little. Australia, with a population of about 22.5 million, is not a first-world power. It is a minor player on the global stage and is a long way from the northern hemisphere’s centres of influence. The Anglican Church of Australia, with 3.7 million adherents (19 per cent of the population), the same number as those Australians who claimed no religion at the last census in 2006, is not even any longer the main Christian denomination in Australia. It was overtaken by the Catholic Church in 1986 and the gap between the two churches has widened since. The 2006 census recorded the Catholic Church with 5.1 million adherents, or 26 per cent of the population. So it is hard to imagine that any Australian diocese would be worthy of international notice.

Yet in the first decade of the twenty-first century, under the leadership of Archbishop Peter Jensen, Sydney Diocese has become a force to be reckoned with in the Anglican Communion. As a leader of the alternative international Anglican movement focused in the Global Anglican Future (GAFCON) project, it has become what can only be described as a destabilizing influence. This is just the public face of its international influence, however, an influence that has been steadily and quietly expanding below the radar for several decades through the leadership of key Sydney people in a range of global ministry programmes.

Previously, the diocese had attracted the interest, even fascination, of well-informed Anglicans in different parts of the world because of its unique reputation as an extremely conservative, hard-line monolithic Evangelical centre. It was not viewed with concern, however, because it seemed to inhabit an isolated, inward-looking world of its own. Not any longer. Sydney diocesan leaders seriously began their public involvement with the wider Anglican world in the lead-up to the 1998 Lambeth Conference, as will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4. At that time, they joined forces with conservative American Episcopalians (Anglicans) to draw African and Asian conservatives into a coalition designed to defeat what they saw as liberalizing tendencies in the Anglican Church, particularly in North America. Their first major victory was the controversial decision of the 1998 Lambeth Conference to oppose the ordination of homosexual people and the blessing of gay partnerships. That decision, and its rejection by both the US Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, has in recent years provoked the development of the alternative GAFCON movement, in which Sydney has taken a leadership role disproportionate to its size and status. Peter Jensen, though not one of the Anglican Communion’s 38 Primates (national leading bishops), is honorary secretary of the GAFCON Primates’ Council, while his diocese provides the secretariat for the GAFCON offshoot, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA). On his webpage, Archbishop Jensen claims he is ‘recognized as a key leader in the worldwide Anglican Church’ and notes that he ‘was one of the organizers of the Anglican Future conference in Jerusalem in 2008’.⁵ Plans for a second GAFCON meeting in 2012, announced recently, included approval for an expansion of the secretariat.⁶

Sydney’s role is not just secretarial. Its diocesan budget funds provision of training programmes to GAFCON-aligned national churches in Africa and Asia sourced from the diocesan training college, Moore Theological College, among other things. Until the diocesan finances were hit by the 2008 global financial crisis, the total provision for the diocese’s work outside Australia was of the order of $A345,000 a year. In the 2010 budget, that figure had been halved to $154,000, of which $40,000 was directed to GAFCON specifically. The further reduction in the diocese’s income, announced at the 2010 Synod as the result of poor financial management, will no doubt reduce that figure even further.

Though the total amount allocated for work outside Australia has reduced, Sydney Diocese has had until very recently a level of discretionary spending that other Australian dioceses could only dream of. And this from a diocese that has for some years now refused to meet funding requests from the national church, and lately, issued veiled threats about its obligatory diocesan financial contribution. Sydney Diocese has for the past 15 years stopped giving any financial support to the Anglican Communion through the Anglican Consultative Council, the body through which funding is provided for the Lambeth Conference and the regular meetings of the Primates of the 38 autonomous national churches that make up the Anglican Communion.⁷

Its international influence reaches beyond the churches assisted through the GAFCON/FCA network. For some time it has moved into the heartland of the Church of England through its close ties with the conservative Evangelical movement, Reform. Similarly, there are links with conservative movements in the Church of Ireland, in the New Zealand church, in South Africa, and in the United States and Canada. A former Sydney priest, David Short – son of a retired Sydney assistant bishop – is a leader among dissident Canadian Anglicans. He has received strong overt support from his old diocese, and some look to him as a possible successor to Jensen. Sydney Diocese has also been closely involved in the formation of the breakaway Anglican Church of North America, with a leading lawyer from Sydney Diocese assisting in the drafting of the ACNA constitution.

The Ministry Training Strategy programme (MTS)⁸ developed in the late 1970s by Archbishop Jensen’s brother Phillip – now Dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney – when he was chaplain to the University of New South Wales, has spread across the globe. It boasts that it has been ‘developed, copied, refined and implemented in many parts of Australia and the world’. It claims it has reached into Britain, France, Canada, Ireland (both north and south), Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan and South Africa.⁹ Effectively, over almost 20 years, it has exported a programme to recruit and train ultra-conservative Protestant ministers around the world.

MTS claims to be non-denominational, but the reality is that its current director, Ben Pfahlert, and its previous director, Colin Marshall, both studied at Moore College. Marshall, who retired from MTS in 2007, worked with Phillip Jensen at the University of New South Wales in developing the original programme. Its Anglican genesis and close continuing Anglican ties make the non-denominational claim technical rather than substantial. Certainly MTS has been the primary recruiting ground for all Sydney clergy, a pathway strengthened by Phillip Jensen’s 2003 appointment as director of Ministry, Training and Development, the diocese’s department for the training of clergy. For the past 20 years, Phillip Jensen has had considerable influence in the selection of Sydney clergy. Through these roles and his church-planting activities, his role is arguably more significant than his brother’s more public role. Together, the brothers have had a disproportionate influence on Australian and world Anglicanism for close to two decades.

The influence of Sydney Diocese and its leaders is felt in various parts of the Australian church in a number of ways. Until the diocese’s recent financial debacle, funding was directed to certain Sydney-friendly dioceses. There is close contact with clergy and lay leaders in the orbit of Ridley Melbourne, one of the two theological colleges in the Diocese of Melbourne. To the distress of the bishops of yet other, mostly Anglo-Catholic, dioceses Sydney has offered a process of ‘affiliation’ to so-called independent Evangelical churches in their territories, sometimes so placed as to be in direct competition with a bona fide parish of the diocese. Although the diocese has not formally ‘planted’ these churches outside its diocesan boundaries, they have often been seeded by individual Sydney parishes in a wave of cross-border incursions dating from the 1990s. Five of the seven affiliates are headed by clergy ordained in Sydney, while a sixth was ordained in the Sydney satellite diocese of Armidale in rural New South Wales. There are also independent church plants in other parts of Australia, not so far formally affiliated with Sydney Diocese, that nevertheless have close links to Sydney Diocese, again with their ‘senior pastors’ mostly drawn from the ranks of men trained and ordained in Sydney. The websites of these churches, all of whom claim no denominational affiliation, nevertheless present remarkably similar conservative doctrinal positions, consistent with the position of Sydney Diocese. Naturally, these church plants have caused tension with the dioceses and bishops concerned, who are disturbed by this ‘missionary’ spread into their territory.

Phillip Jensen has actively promoted church planting in other dioceses in 2001, he devoted a major public address to the topic of church planting. Arguing that the Bible did not mandate that the world must be divided into parishes and dioceses, Jensen claimed that ‘restricting our ministries to one side of a road or a river or some other such artificial barrier and boundary can only make sense when we have confidence that the people on the other side of the boundary are being offered the same gospel’. When the gospel was being denied to people on the other side of the boundary, ‘our obligation as Evangelicals to all people will not allow us to remain silent’, he said.¹⁰ Behind this church-planting project lies the outrageous claim that the dioceses into which Sydney Anglicans have infiltrated are not preaching the gospel. This is deeply offensive, and hardly conducive to good relationships within the Anglican Church of Australia.

Perhaps even more troubling is the close Sydney link with the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), now the predominant student Christian organization across Australian universities since the demise of the once-dominant Student Christian movement and the decline of diocesan-funded university chaplaincies. AFES claims to employ more than 100 people in campus ministries in every Australian state and territory. Linked with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, it is supposedly independent of denominational affiliation. However, it would seem to be an outreach of Sydney Diocese in all but name.

Its headquarters are in the same building complex as Matthias Media, the publishing arm of Phillip Jensen’s former parish, St Matthias’, Centennial Park. The current AFES director, Richard Chin, is a graduate of Moore College; his immediate predecessors were Sydney Anglican clergy. Online teaching resources that AFES provides are almost entirely the work of a range of Moore College graduates, with numbers of resources provided by Phillip Jensen. There are close links with the Phillip Jensen creation, MTS, with both organizations sharing the same doctrinal statement. AFES also runs conferences for what it describes as ‘outside organizations’, predominantly ‘Equip’ conferences, according to its website. These conferences, including conferences designed to train women in subordinate ministries, have speakers drawn from both Moore College and St Matthias’, Centennial Park. Not that Equip seems to be truly ‘outside’ AFES; they share the same postal address. This Anglican link is not surprising, given that the first president of AFES’s predecessor, the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, was the then Archbishop of Sydney, Howard Mowll. However, observers outside the Sydney-Evangelical orbit are only now beginning to recognize that AFES seems to have become, in many respects, a Trojan horse for Sydney Anglican teaching around the country.

There is some evidence of increasing Sydney influence on the question of the ordination of women infiltrating dioceses which support women in church leadership, most notably Melbourne Diocese, and AFES is part of that.¹¹ AFES has also been named recently as a key factor in the spread of Sydney-style opposition to women in church leadership in other parts of the country, and not only in the Anglican Church but in Protestant churches such as the Churches of Christ. Parishes near university campuses are, according to anecdotal reports, particularly vulnerable to influxes of students converted by AFES who bring their newly-acquired conservative stance into parish life.

Tension levels, historically always simmering between the oldest Australian diocese and the rest of the national church, have recently increased markedly for reasons other than the Sydney church-planting and infiltration activities, as we shall discuss in Chapter 5. The ordination of women to the priesthood in the early 1990s in the vast majority of Australian dioceses, but not Sydney, caused inevitable strains, but the consecration of women bishops in Perth and Melbourne in 2008 ramped up the tension significantly. This is mainly because of the means by which women bishops became possible. The previous year, the highest Anglican church court, the Appellate Tribunal, cleared the way for women bishops through an interpretation of the church’s constitution. The constitution’s basic qualifications for bishops (‘canonical fitness’) applied equally to women priests as to male priests, the Tribunal said. Sydney Diocese strongly resisted this interpretation, and complained bitterly when the Tribunal decision was announced. Its leaders, it seems, are still smarting.

More serious has been Sydney Diocese’s recent introduction of diaconal presidency, and its Synod’s overt support – some say, permission – for lay presidency.¹² The decision by the 2008 Sydney Synod to claim legitimacy for diaconal presidency – the culmination of many years of promotion of diaconal and lay presidency by the Synod – created considerable concern among the Australian House of Bishops, as well as internationally. The Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his disapproval in strong terms. This move was of such concern that it prompted a challenge to the Appellate Tribunal, which declared diaconal and lay presidency under the terms of the 2008 motion to be unconstitutional. The 2010 decision by Sydney Synod to defy the Tribunal on the matter is unprecedented, indeed provocative, and has created consternation around the national church. No one from Sydney Diocese has denied that the intention is to continue allowing deacons to preside at Holy Communion despite the Tribunal decision. On the contrary, the heading on the report of the debate at Sydney Synod in the diocesan newspaper was ‘Deacons can keep celebrating’.¹³

As news of this decision by Sydney Synod filters through the national church, there is both shock and disbelief. Senior bishops and lay leaders around the country are deeply disturbed and troubled. Some fear it may cause problems for the Anglican Chu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anglicanism in Sydney Today
• 3 Sydney Anglicans: How It Came to This
• 4 Tensions: Sydney and the Anglican Communion
• 5 Tensions: Sydney and the Australian Church
• 6 Women: Equal but Different
• 7 Current Challenges
• Conclusion: The End of the Experiment?
• Select Bibliography
• Index