However, some issues within a local province have external or Communion-wide implications. In these instances, issues that might otherwise be handled autonomously so affect the larger Communion, that for the sake of communion, the larger Communion must have a voice in the matter. When this is so, the interdependence of communion comes into play, and we emphasize the communion side of the phrase.

Who has the authority to say when something is only provincial in nature and affects only the local province (in our instance, the Episcopal Church) and when something has Communion-wide implications and must involve the larger Communion (therefore including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the primates, and the bishops of the Communion, and so on)?

The answer is that it is the larger Communion that has the authority to determine when a matter is of such Communion-wide importance that the local province must submit to the request of the Communion.

A story in the early life of our denomination reveals that this is not the first time that this sort of issue has come up. Once before the Episcopal Church did, in fact, respond to pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury to conform to the expectations of the Communion. Of course, this pressure was couched in terms of a "request" to which we politely but humbly, conformed. Here's the story.

The draft version of the original America Book of Common Prayer prepared in 1785, called for some major changes from the 1662 version of the English prayer book, upon which it was modeled. Basically, the American version called for the deletion of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, the removal of the phrase concerning Christ's descent into Hell from the Apostles' Creed, as well as alterations to the baptismal service, matrimonial office, and other similar changes. How did bishops in England respond? Richard Peters of Philadelphia met with the archbishop of Canterbury and filed this report:

I find that we can have no Bishop till we let the prelates see what Church we have made. I think it would be prudent in our Church, to put off any material alterations till we have Bishops consecrated; if we make any substantial alterations they will be carped at by those who will make the Bishops uneasy, and so, to keep peace at home, they will refuse to meddle abroad [that is, to consecrate bishops of the church in America]. The Making of the First American Book of Common Prayer, Marion Hatchett, p. 65.

In effect, upon the objections of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English bishops, all of the major revisions were restored in conformity with the English prayer book (except for the continued omission of the Athanasian Creed).

Here we have the beginnings of what it means to be a transoceanic and worldwide Communion: the proposed innovations of the Americans to their Book of Common Prayer so departed from the English bishops' understanding of the faith that they could not in good faith consecrate bishops for the American expression of the Church of England. Because these proposed revisions so affected the larger Communion, the larger Communion had the right to refuse to consecrate American bishops until the American church came into conformity. To use the Windsor Report language: Autonomy submitted itself to Communion.

Note Bishop Samuel Seabury's response to some of the proposed revisions:

If we new model [revise] the government [of the Church], why not the sacraments, creeds, and doctrines of the Church? But then it would not be Christ's Church, but our Church; and it would remain so, call it by what name we please." One, Catholic, and Apostolic, Paul Marshall, p. 73.

Will we as the American expression of Anglicanism submit our Autonomy to the Communion and so continue to walk together, or will we insist upon our Autonomy at the expense of the Communion and walk further apart? The answer of those early founders of the Episcopal Church in the Eighteenth Century was that we should submit to the correction of the larger Church for the sake of walking together. I pray that such is our answer in the Twenty-first Century as well.

--–The Rev. Canon Dr. Neal O. Michell is Canon Missioner for Strategic Development in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas; this article appears as a Viewpoint Column in the August 13, 2006 issue of The Living Church