Anglican ‘Church’?
One of the points that I am going to make in my eventually to be published article about an Anglican covenant (which came out of my M.Phil. dissertation at Cambridge) is that the term ‘Anglican Church’ is one with which we are not familiar. In fact, it is particularly important that we remember that a ‘church’ is not the same as our ‘communion’. As Anglicans around the world, we may disagree with exactly what a ‘communion’ is, but I hope that we can agree that it is not a ‘church’. The Anglican Communion is made up of churches, but it is definitely not a church itself. It is part of the ‘Church’ — that body of all faithful Christians living and dead (the great cloud of witnesses), but each national church maintains its own integrity. This is what we bring to the Christian world — an understanding of the particular relationship between our provinces — something of real value to the rest of the Christian tradition and we need to remember that.
What brought on this little comment on was this article from Reuters about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent trip to China, where he is referred to as the ‘head of the world’s Anglican church’. (I suppose there is a whole other article to be written dealing with the ‘head’ part rather than the ‘church’ part, but I’ll leave that for another time.)
