Anglicans Vote No

In an age of ecumenism, it seemed a most reasonable proposition: that the Methodist Church of Great Britain, which began life as an 18th century reform movement within Anglicanism, should reunite with the Church of Eng land, which had injudiciously let the reformers go in the first place. Last week the Methodist Conference in Birmingham and the Anglican Convocations of Canterbury and York, meeting in Lon don, voted on the first stage of a two-step plan for union that the two churches had been working on for 13 years.

For approval, both parties agreed that 75% of each church's total vote must be in favor. The Methodists voted in favor of union by 77%, but the Anglicans could only muster 69% to vote aye--effectively saying no.

The first stage of the reunion plan would have required Methodist acceptance of the Anglicans' "historic episcopacy" and a "service of reconciliation" recognizing the validity of each church's ministerial orders. This would have brought the two churches into "full intercommunion," which means that Anglicans could receive the sacraments from Methodist ministers, and Methodists from Anglican priests.

Sometime later, the two church organizations would have formally united--a move that Methodists might well have rejected unless the Church of Eng land abandoned some of its privileges as the nation's "established" church.

Stumbling Block. Most Methodists were apparently able to accept a broad and unspecific definition of "historic episcopacy," which emphasized mainly the unifying virtues of church government by bishops. The stumbling block for many Anglicans was the proposed "service of reconciliation," in which the Archbishop of Canterbury and the president of the Methodist Conference would exchange a mutual "laying on of hands"; the Methodist president, during this service, would also accept episcopacy.

The ceremony was left purposely ambiguous, asking God to bestow "upon both the gifts which he has given each in our separation"--a formula that would allow conservative Anglicans to feel that the Methodists were getting Holy Orders, and Methodists to believe that they were not. But even Lord Fisher of Lambeth, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury who had proposed a formal reunion with the Methodists as far back as 1946, found the ambiguity unacceptable. The service, complained Fisher, "involves both churches in open double-dealing."

Harmful Example. The Anglican failure to muster a sufficient majority puts the entire proposal on ice--and could chill ecumenical projects elsewhere as well. Peter Day, the ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Church in the U.S., thinks the British example "is bound to have an adverse effect" on his denomination's role in the nine-church U.S. merger proposed by the Consultation on Church Union (TIME, March 28). But England's current Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Arthur Michael Ramsey, was more hopeful; he described the 69% Anglican majority as "good enough to encourage another attempt with these same proposals in the near future." The Methodist approval added considerable impetus. Said the President of Britain's Methodist Conference, the Rev. Brian O'Gorman, with a bit of pardonable oneupmanship: "The ball is in their court."

* U.S. Methodists have bishops, who are regarded simply as superintendents rather than as ordained spiritual descendants of Christ's apostles, which is the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox belief. British Methodists have never had an Episcopate.

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