On the Annunciation of our Lady

   For that fair blessed mother-maid, 
Whose flesh redeem'd us, that she-cherubin, 
   Which unlock'd paradise, and made 
One claim for innocence, and disseizèd sin, 
              Whose womb was a strange heaven, for there 
              God clothed Himself, and grew, 
Our zealous thanks we pour.   As her deeds were 
Our helps, so are her prayers ; nor can she sue 
In vain, who hath such titles unto you. 

John Donne "A Litany"

Springfield, Canterbury and catholicity

From Tony Clavier's sermon (h/t VirtueOnline) at the consecration to the episcopate of Dan Martins on the Feast of St Joseph.  Dan is now the Bishop of Springfield.

You Dan are also being incorporated into the worldwide College of Bishops. You must constantly remind us that we are not an American sect or a Western sect, but rather, as our Constitution reminds us and the Creeds teach, part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Holding the universal and the local in tension without favoring one over the other  seems to tax our imagination, particularly when we consider the Covenant, which I support. It is not difficult for God, who is Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity ...

With the example of Joseph who cared for Mary, Mother of the Church, and Jesus, Our Lord and God, as you follow his example as Defender of the Church and it’s unity, as you are the diocese’s center of faith and unity and not an expensive but necessary confirmation and ordination machine. You belong to the Church in its Anglican expression in this diocese, in the Episcopal Church and in the worldwide Communion. You are in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, a communion which is personal and respectful. You are  linked to him by his personal invitation, a concept so much stronger and more gentle than theories of universal jurisdiction.

Cranmer and grace in a time of division

The martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer on this day in 1556 is commemorated in the Anglican calendar alongside other examples of heroic sanctity from the Reformation era - the papalists Thomas More and John Fisher, the dissenters Richard Baxter and John Bunyan, the Anglicans Charles I and William Laud.  This gives liturgical expression to the reality of grace in a time of bitter and bloody divisions.  While Christians persecuted one another, even unto death, grace prevailed and provided examples of faith, hope and love in the midst of the agonies of the Reformation era.

+Rowan's sermon given on this day in 2006 captures something of the presence of grace in the midst of human frailty and persecuting zeal:

When [Cranmer] wrote to King Henry in unhopeful defence of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, the convoluted sentences and sentiments show, not only a constitutionally timid man struggling to be brave (and all the braver for that), but a man uncomfortably capable of believing himself deceived and of seeing the world in double perspective. What both letters in effect say is: I thought I saw the truth about this person; if I was wrong, I was more deceived than I could have thought possible. How in this world can even the King of England know the truth of his servants' hearts? I see both what I always saw and the possibility that it has all been a lie. Is this a world where we can have certainty enough to kill each other?

And in his last days, this was Cranmer's curse. If there was no easy certainty enough to kill for, was there certainty enough to die for? That habit of mind which had always circled and hovered, tested words and set them to work against each other in fruitful tension, sought to embody in words the reality of penitence and self-scrutiny, condemned him, especially in the midst of isolation, confusion, threats and seductions of spirit, to a long agony, whose end came only in this church minutes before his last hurrying, stumbling walk through the rain to the stake. It is extraordinary to think of him drafting two contradictory versions of his final public confession, still not knowing what words should sum up his struggles. But at the last, it is as if he emerges from the cloud of words heaped up in balance and argument and counterpoint, knowing almost nothing except that he cannot bring himself to lie, in the face of death and judgement. What he has to say is that he has 'written many things untrue' and that he cannot face God without admitting this. He cannot find a formula that will conceal his heart from God, and he knows that his heart is, as it has long been, given to the God whom the Reformation had let him see, the God of free grace, never bound by the works or words of men and women. Just because he faces a God who can never be captured in one set of words, a God who is transcendently holy in a way that exacts from human language the most scrupulous scepticism and the most painstaking elaboration possible, he cannot pretend that words alone will save him. 'If we deny him, he also will deny us'. He must repent and show his repentance with life as well as lips; 'forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished'.

The same grace was made manifest in the lives of, for example, More and Bunyan, as 16th and 17th century Christians struggled with it was to be both the church catholic and the church ever reforming.  So we give thanks for all examples of heroic sanctity from the Reformation era, rejoicing that even when the churches conformed to the powers of this world, the peaceable kingdom was not left without witnesses.

(The illustration is a stained glass window of both Thomas Cranmer and John Fisher, Anglican and papalist, martyrs of the Reformation era.  The window is in Emmanuel College, Cambridge.)

Communion and catechesis (i)

If in the high days of Christendom it was possible for baptism to be treated as a routine popular cultural rite without losing its meaning altogether, that is not possible now. Preparation for baptism (and confirmation) calls for a serious and intentional effort, both from those preparing for baptism, and more so from those who are charged with catechetical responsibilities.

With those words, the Global South's Anglican Catechism in Outline (ACIO) - published in 2008 - urged the Communion to renew its approach to catechesis and the catechumenate.  This implications of this are spelt out by ACIO:

It also holds out a challenge for the Communion to refocus its structure and liturgical life to give prominent attention to its catechetical responsibilities.

ACIO particularly emphasised the example of the Roman rediscovery of the catechumenate in the RCIA:

The Roman Catholic Church has wisely responded to this challenge by refocusing for the whole community of the faithful their catechetical responsibility. From the promulgation of Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in 1972 to the publication of Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992, Roman Catholics took concrete and radical steps to equip parishes to be effective in the processes of Christian initiation. Their rediscovery of a patristic model for initiation led to renewed interest and reexamination of catechetical processes in their own traditions and beyond.

Mindful of the example provided by RCIA and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ACIO urged the churches of the Communion to create an "intentional structure" for catechesis:

To provide an intentional structure for the implementation of catechetical programmes. We encourage parishes, dioceses and provinces to set out a clearer structure for the training and licensing of catechists, and for the authorization of catechetical material used in formal processes. We also encourage dioceses and provinces to provide guidelines and catechetical literature to help the laity (in their church-assigned roles and personal vocation) to fulfill their catechetical responsibilities.

Combining ACIO with, for example, Common Worship's "Rites on the Way" would provide such an "intentional structure".  It would reflect the patristic concern for what ACIO describes as "the process of becoming a Christian - the imparting of the essentials of the faith", recognising that "the catechetical process must include the building up and renewal of our parish life".

Three years on, the promise of the ACIO - a profound gift from the Global South to the rest of the Communion - is yet to be fulfilled.  Lent, the traditional season for catechumens to receive the final preparations for Baptism at Easter, offers an opportunity to reconsider the gift that is the ACIO.  Over the remaining Sundays of Lent, catholicity and covenant will reflect on this gift.

ACIO appropriately concludes its preface with the ancient prayer for Catechumens from the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom:

O Lord our God, who dwells on high and regards the humble of heart; who has sent forth as the salvation of the race of men your only-begotten Son and God, our Lord Jesus Christ: Look down upon your servants the catechumens, who have bowed their necks before thee; make them worthy in due time of the laver of regeneration, the remission of sins, and the robe of incorruption. Unite them to your holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and number them with your chosen flock. That with us they may glorify your all-honorable and majestic name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Amidst dazed silence, resurrection hope

From the Anglican Communion News Service, a reflection written by Rev. Prof. Renta Nishihara, an Anglican priest and Vice President of Rikkyo University:

"Do Not be Afraid"

On March 11th, the great earthquake took place. As it took place, I was at the university. My bookshelves were falling, lights were swaying wildly. Turning on a TV, I saw a great tsunami about to swallow up some people. The city's public transport at Tokyo was paralyzed, so we opened up the university campus of Rikkyo for the public. I spent the night at the university together with about 5,000 people. The following morning, it was becoming clear that we were faced with a situation that far outstripped any words. We were experiencing that lamentation that the Psalmist felt as he faced intense hardship, so that his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, not even able to pray to God.

One woman's testimony still rings in my ears. As she was making her way to high ground, running from the great tsunami, she looked back; a number of elementary school students were crying out, running desperately. But when she looked back again, the children had vanished. One boy was going among the evacuation centers with a piece of cardboard on which he had written the name of his parent and his brothers and sisters. As we face this reality, all that is left to us is a dazed silence ...

The parishioners and clergies of the dioceses of Tohoku and Kita Kanto, along with all those who suffered this disaster, are still in extreme hardship and distress. But they are not the only ones; all of us sense a terror deeper than words. However, we are not alone. Our sisters and brothers throughout the world sense this pain together with us, feel the pain in their very bowels, and hold on to our hand and will not let us go, praying with a prayer that is a veritable shout.

In this very moment, our faith is being questioned. Didn't the risen Jesus give strength to Mary and the others as they shivered, saying "do not be afraid"? The name given by God to the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, who changed despair to eternal life, is the name "Emmanuel." That name's meaning is "Lord is with us."

Amid the rubble of the devastated areas, there was a young boy who was gritting his teeth as he walked, holding a large container full of water in both hands. He was moving through the hopelessness of that rubble, yet moving forward with hope, the hope of life itself. With him, with all those who have been afflicted in this disaster, with each and every one of us, the resurrected Lord is walking as he did on that road to Emmaus, bringing warmth to our hearts.

This year's Easter will be a very special Lord's day. It will be a precious time when we take a new step toward hope, like a small shoot growing up amidst the rubble. Amen.

St Joseph: "let us then acknowledge him to be a father"

For the Son of God He was - ever the Son of God - Creator even of themselves who spoke to Him; but the Son of Man in time; born of a Virgin without the operation of her husband, yet the Son of both parents ... To whom was He subject? Was it not to His parents? It was to both His parents that He was subject, by the same condescension by which He was the Son of Man ... You see then, brethren, that He did not say, I must needs be about My Father's service, in any such sense as that we should understand Him thereby to have said, You are not My parents. They were His parents in time, God was His Father eternally. They were the parents of the Son of Man - He, the Father of His Word, and Wisdom, and Power, by whom He made all things ... Joseph then was not the less His father, because he knew not the mother of our Lord ...

Let us then acknowledge him to be a father, as in truth he is. For most advisedly and most wisely do the Evangelists reckon through him, whether Matthew in descending from Abraham down to Christ, or Luke in ascending from Christ through Abraham up to God. The one reckons in a descending, the other in an ascending order; but both through Joseph. And why? Because he is the father. How the father? Because he is the more undeniably a father in proportion as he is more chastely so. He was thought, it is true, to be the father of our Lord Jesus Christ in another way: that is, as other parents are according to a fleshly birth, and not through the fruitfulness of a wholly spiritual love. For Luke said, Who was supposed to be the father of Jesus. Why supposed? Because men's thoughts and suppositions were directed to what is usually the case with men. The Lord then was not of the seed of Joseph, though He was supposed to be; yet nevertheless the Son of the Virgin Mary, who is also the Son of God, was born to Joseph, the fruit of his piety and love.

Augustine's reflections on the Blessed Virgin's words "your father and I" - Sermon I on the New Testament.

Praying for Japan

In a pastoral letter issued on 16th March, John Hiromichi Kato - Bishop of the diocese of Tohoku in northern Japan - told the rest of the Communion of the situation now faced by the people of his diocese and other areas more directly impacted by the tsunami:

on March 11 at 2:46 PM, there was a major earthquake followed by a tsunami and fires. Now we are facing potential disaster caused by the malfunction of nuclear power plant. On the day of earthquake it was snowing. Today it is expected to get colder. The tsunami and the fires it caused have made us miserable. We are now experiencing a lack of food supply. Over the past five days there have been as series of worrying aftershocks. Essential services are disrupted, particularly the phones with many people unable to recharge their cell phones. There is now a petrol shortage in the immediate area. We were simply not prepared for problems on this scale ... What we are experiencing in our city does not compare to what we have seen in the media, particularly those areas directly impacted by the tsunami. According to the Asahi newspaper, life for the between 400,000 to 500,000 people living in temporary shelters is getting worse.

In the face of such suffering, a priest in the diocese of Rhode Island - Jennifer Phillips - has composed a collect for Japan:

Merciful God, in your hands are the caverns of the earth and the heights of the hills: our times also are in your hands. Hear our prayers for those suffering in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan; soothe those in distress; watch over those trapped and hoping for rescue; comfort the bereaved; strengthen those who labor to help others, lift up those who cannot help themselves; and in every danger be their very present help by the power of your Holy Spirit; we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. 

(The painting is by the 19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai - 'The Great Wave', c.1830.  It portrays Japan, symbolised by Mount Fuji, nearly overwhelmed by the roaring of the seas.)

Patrick, church and the end of Empire

After the Romans had gone back to their own land, the Irish and the Picts, who knew they were not to return, immediately came back themselves and, becoming bolder than ever, captured the whole of the northern and farthest portion of the island as far as the wall, driving out the natives ... The enemy pursued and there followed a massacre more bloodthirsty than ever before.  The wretched Britons were torn in pieces by their enemies like lambs by wild beasts (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 1.12).

Thus Bede describes the experience of Britons at the end of Empire.  This was the world of Patrick.  The opening words of his Confession tell of how the end of Empire found dramatic expression in his life:

I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age ... I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people.

The events in which Patrick was caught up would shake Christian communities across the known world.  In far off Bethlehem, Jerome would weep at the news of the fall of Rome and ask in his commentary on Ezekiel:

Who could have believed that Rome, founded on triumphs over the world, could fall to ruin; and that she, the mother of nations, should also be their grave?

Following this sacking of Rome itself, Augustine would also write his De Civitate Dei, answering those "who now complain of this Christian era, and hold Christ responsible for the disasters which their city endured". 

And yet, as the Empire crumbled and at the remotest outpost of the known world, Patrick in his Letter to Coroticus tells of a growing church:

the flock of the Lord, which in Ireland was indeed growing splendidly with the greatest care; and the sons and daughters of kings were monks and virgins of Christ - I cannot count their number.

His Confessions similarly tell the story of how the church could grow in a time of instability and discord, even at the ends of the earth:

I am greatly God's debtor, because he granted me so much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets.

In a time of economic crisis, of the fall of great powers, of a culture of de-Christianisation, the Church in postmodern societies can look to Patrick - to be encouraged that the grace of the Triune God, not the culture of the cities of this world, is the founding hope of our life as ekklesia and koinonia.

Walking the way of the cross in Japan

From a statement by Archbishop of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai (The Anglican Episcopal Church in Japan) The Most Revd Nathaniel Makoto Uematsu:

What we can do right now ... is pray. Prayer has power. I hope and request that you pray for the people who are affected, for those who have died and for their families. Pray for the people involved with the rescue efforts, and in particular pray for Tohoku and Kita Kanto dioceses and their priests and parishioners during this time of Lent.

We prayed the words of the 1662 Litany in our parish yesterday, mindful of the sufferings of the people of Japan.  One feature of this Litany is to hold together, rather than separate as is the case in many contemporary versions of the Great Litany, the events of the Paschal Mystery.  And so we prayed for those who suffer as a result of earthquake, tsunami and fires, for the witness of Nippon Sei Ko Kai and all the churches in Japan, that their anguish would be caught up in the Paschal Mystery of the death and resurrection of the Incarnate Word:

By thine Agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost,

Good Lord, deliver us.

+Rowan's letter to the Primates - martyrdom and communion

+Rowan's letter to the Primates offers a profound exploration of the call to communion.  He begins by reflecting on the suffering church:

In the forefront of all our concerns at this moment is the situation of our brothers and sisters who are living with the daily threat of violent persecution or in unstable environments.  Our thoughts are specially with the leaders and people of the Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East, faced with massive instability and uncertainty, and with many disturbing signs of what may come – and we remember also our Bishop in Jerusalem, still waiting for the clarification of his right of residence.  We also think with anguish of the sufferings and anxieties of the Church in Pakistan, in the context of the brutal killings that have occurred in recent months and weeks.  The continuing attacks on Christian communities in parts of Nigeria are a matter of deep concern ...

But the suffering church is not merely victim amidst political and ideological conflicts.  It is a sacramental sign of Christ's cross and resurrection:

We look out at a landscape that is in many ways sombre.  But what is as miraculous as ever is the fidelity of believers in the middle of it all.  Christians in Pakistan or Egypt still obstinately go on loving their neighbours and their enemies and refusing to copy the ways of the world.  There is no greater proof of the power and reality of Christ’s resurrection than this.  The life of the One who was rejected and tortured to death is the same life that lives now in Christians; as St Paul says (Rom.6.9), Death has no more power over Christ – and we who share his life through baptism are delivered from the deathly power of hatred and revenge.

It is here, says +Rowan, that we see something of Anglicanism's call into deeper, more authentic communion, even in the midst of the Communion's current travails.  Being a sacramental sign of Christ's death and resurrection means being communion:

The cost of discipleship is most dramatically manifest in the sufferings that our persecuted brothers and sisters are enduring.  But it is also to be experienced in the ways in which we try to support each other in the Communion, despite all our differences.  And I would dare to say too that it is part of what God calls us to in not only ‘bearing one another’s burdens’ but bearing with one another and continually seeking ways to be reconciled – which also means seeking to see ourselves more clearly and more penitently, and asking God to show us how we must change in order for there to be unity and united witness in the Church.

+Rowan has consistently stated that contemporary Anglican debates and divisions are not first about sexuality - they are about ecclesiology.  As he stated in his Pentecost letter of 2010:

Although attitudes to human sexuality have been the presenting cause, I want to underline the fact that what has precipitated the current problem is not simply this issue but the widespread bewilderment and often hurt in different quarters that we have no way of making decisions together so that we are not compromised or undermined by what others are doing. We have not, in other words, found a way of shaping our consciences and convictions as a worldwide body.

He has consistently recalled Anglicanism to recognise that to be Church is to be communion.  This letter to the Primates further enriches his call by comparing the call to the communion - to wait upon one another - with the experience of the suffering church: in both contexts, the church is called to display "the power and reality of Christ's resurrection".  There is no greater way of narrating the call to communion: it is akin to the martyr's call to discipleship.

From the outside

The solemn, demanding strains of the Litany echoed in our parish church on Ash Wednesday evening as part of the liturgy for the beginning of Lent.  Fr Matt Gunter at Into the Expectation wonderfully captures the radically counter-cultural proclamation of the Litany:

It is a stark recitation of our failure to live into God's goodness and a pleading for deliverance. It is a reminder that Christianity is a salvation religion: it assumes that there is something dreadfully wrong with us and the world and that we require deliverance from the outside.

Preparing for new life

+Rowan's Lenten message - "to sweep and clean the room of our own minds and hearts so that the new life really may have room to come in and take over and transform us at Easter".

The day of ashes

"Therefore also now, saith the Lord, Turn ye even to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning. And rend your heart, and your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God."

For this time hath the Church made choice of this text. The time wherein, howsoever we have dispensed with it all the year beside, she should have us seriously to entend and make it our time of turning to the Lord. And that now, the first word of the text.

For she holds it not safe to leave us wholly to ourselves to take any time it skills not when, lest we take none at all ...

She hath found this same keeping of continual Sabbaths and Fasts, this keeping the memory of Christ's birth and resurrection all the year long hath done no good; hurt rather. So it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to her to order there will be a solemn set return once in the year at least. And reason; for once a year all things turn.  And that once is now at this time, for now at this time is the turning of the year. In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to the first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane and the stork, know their seasons, and make their just return at this time every year. Everything now turning that we also would make it our time to turn to God in.

Lancelot Andrewes' sermon before King James I, Ash Wednesday 1619

Rescued from our domestic universe

We need to be rescued from our domestic universes, pitched headlong into awareness of our incompleteness, our need of one another and of God.  It is the traditional role of Christian discipline, of asceticism, of Lent, to loosen our grip on the securities of everyday living, even everyday Christian living, by testing the extent to which we have been trapped by them.  It's not that the Church ever believed that such disciplines could simply grow into the freedom of the spirit; but it has recognised in the challenge of hunger, or lack of sleep, or abstinence from sex, a corrective to our tendency to forget that we can barricade the spirit of God out, even with his own good gifts.

Eamon Duffy, a sermon preached on Shrove Tuesday 1987.

"For their spiritual and ghostly comfort"

In these days before the season of penitence, a reminder from Richard Hooker of the place of private confession in Anglican spirituality:

It hath pleased Almightie God in tender commiseration over these imbecilities of men, to ordeine for their spirituall and ghostly comfort, consecrated persons, which by sentence of power and authoritie given from above, may as it were out of his verie mouth ascertaine timorous and doubtfull minds in their owne particular, ease them of all their scrupulosities, leave them settled in peace and satisfyed touching the mercie of God towards them.  To use the benefitt of his helpe for our better satisfaction in such cases, is soe naturall, that it can bee forbidden noe man: butt yet not soe necessarie, that all men should bee in case to neede it. (LEP, VI, 6.18)

"The spring comes slowly down this way"

As Lent approaches, words from CS Lewis:

To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that ... The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned.  There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.  We can.  We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those 'high mid-summer pomps' in which our Leader, the Son of Man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us.  It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.

'The Grand Miracle', a sermon preached in St Jude's London, 1945.

The Church in the city

Marking the 300th anniversary of London's St Paul's Cathedral, Harry Mount in the Daily Telegraph reminds us that "of all the arts, architecture is the most public".  He goes on to illustrate the significance of the Church's physical presence in the city of this world through the example of St Paul's:

Before the recession, billions of pounds flooded through the City of London for 20 years. All that was left behind was a dirty tide mark of unadorned lumps of steel and glass; and that uplifting forest of Wren's church spires, stacked around his 300-year-old dome.

Here is an expression of the beauty, grace and truth the Church is called to proclaim in the public square.  Or, as Sir Christopher Wren, declared:

Architecture aims at eternity.

Such should be the physical presence of the Church in the city.

Windsor, episcopate and Dar Es Salaam

What is striking about the Dar Es Salaam statement "A Testimony of Grace" is its understanding of the role of the episcopate in the current tensions experienced by the Communion.  The contrast with some of the statements around the Dublin Primates' Meeting is instructive.  Both the primates of Canada and Scotland used Dublin to suggest that the episcopate functioned in a mere representative capacity.  +Hiltz of Canada was explicit on this:

We speak on behalf of the churches that we represent.

+Chillingworth of Scotland regarded the episcopate as being the delegates "of independent churches".  "A Testimony of Grace", however, quite clearly understands the episcopate to be called to serve communion, not independence, and to exercise apostolic leadership rather than function as delegates:

What we do intend is to take our responsibilities of episcopal leadership in the life and work of the Church with seriousness, to engage in our calling to bring the local to the universal and the universal to the local, to connect brothers and sisters across Provinces. We are taking responsibility as bishops to lead our people forward in their baptismal call to deepen relationship with Jesus and with each other, in love and service. This is the work of the Holy Spirit leading the whole people of God.
This understanding of the vocation of the episcopate is much closer to the Windsor ecclesiology than the statements of +Hiltz and +Chillingworth:

It has always been maintained within Anglicanism that a bishop is more than simply the local chief pastor. Bishops represent the universal Church to the local and vice versa. This is why individual churches have developed ways of confirming the election of bishops, signifying their acceptability to the wider Church. Without such attention to general acceptability, the episcopate, instead of being in its very existence one of the bonds of unity in the Communion, quickly becomes an occasion and focus of disunity (64).

Dar Es Salaam does not undo the damage inflicated by the Dublin meeting on the Instruments of Communion, but it does reassert Windsor ecclesiology over and against the narrative of 'independent churches' and 'bishops as delegates'.  It also affirms the ongoing importance of Windsor ecclesiology to the identity of Anglicanism, offering the Communion an alternative to the present disunity and ecclesiology of autonomy. And for that we can be thankful.