Church Civics: TEC vs. ACNA Polity #3
The Presiding Bishop vs. the Archbishop
Last time in this series on Episcopal Church vs. Anglican Church in North America polity we talked about bishops — the different kinds, who can serve as one, and how they’re made and assigned to a diocese. We discussed how bishops are elected by the diocese and confirmed by the House of Bishops and nationwide standing committees in TEC, while ACNA makes regular provision for the College of Bishops to be more involved in the diocesan selection process, always solely confirming a diocese’s choice of bishop and sometimes even choosing that bishop themselves.
This time we’ll be talking about two specific bishops — those who are popularly seen as the heads and spokespeople of the two respective churches. In TEC, this bishop’s title is the Presiding Bishop. In ACNA, it’s the Archbishop. But is there more to it than a difference in name? (Yes.) What do the holders of these offices do, and how are they distinct from one another? (Many ways!)
This summer, not only are TEC’s General Convention and ACNA’s Provincial Council + Provincial Assembly both holding their regular major legislative meetings, but both churches are also set to name new head bishops, as the terms of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Archbishop Foley Beach respectively are more or less simultaneously expiring. It’s therefore my hope that this post is timely to help onlookers (especially cross-fence ones) better understand the roles to which these two churches will be naming new leaders.
Getting metropolitical
Let’s zoom out for a moment and touch on an important topic to various kinds of episcopal (little-e) polity: that of authority. It’s generally well understood that bishops possess canonical authority over the priests and deacons they license to minister in their diocese, and that priests and deacons owe canonical obedience to their bishop, since they are ministering on the bishop’s behalf. But whose authority is a bishop under? To whom does a bishop diocesan personally owe obedience?
Different episcopal churches have different answers. Some churches form groups of dioceses, placing a bishop over each group to oversee the bishops therein. Others do not group their dioceses for this purpose, but place one bishop over all the dioceses together, with this bishop directly overseeing all the bishops of the church. A bishop to whom other bishops owe obedience is called a metropolitan. Such a bishop possesses metropolitical authority.
To envision how metropolitans work, let’s look at the Church of England, which is divided into two (sub)provinces, Canterbury and York:
Or even at the Roman Catholic Church, where the Pope acts as a metropolitan over all the dioceses:
Still other episcopal churches do not have any metropolitan or individual bishops exercising metropolitical authority at all. In these churches, bishops diocesan do not owe canonical obedience to any individual bishop.
TEC has no metropolitan
In the Episcopal Church, there is no metropolitan. Priests and deacons owe canonical obedience to their bishop diocesan, but no bishop owes obedience to another individual bishop by virtue of the latter bishop’s spiritual office. Bishops are on equal footing, and their behavior is subject to the national Constitution & Canons from above and the diocesan canons from below.
This does not mean that there is no time when a bishop may be subject to another in the course of some canonical process, including in the House of Bishops as the Presiding Bishop is, well, presiding, and in the course of disciplinary proceedings where other bishops may become involved. But these instances are the product of General Convention’s authority to create such processes — they do not flow from any preexisting or natural authority relation between hierarchies of bishops. All bishops are ultimately accountable to the General Convention and the convention of their diocese, these being composed of representatives of the church’s clergy and laity governing the church together at two regional levels.
Does ACNA have a metropolitan?
So what’s the difference between TEC’s Presiding Bishop and ACNA’s Archbishop? Is their scope of authority the same? TEC’s Presiding Bishop is not a metropolitan — is ACNA’s Archbishop one? ACNA’s C&C doesn’t come right out and say “the Archbishop is a metropolitan,” so let’s look at some of the key duties and powers of these positions to try to find out.
Parliamentary duties
TEC’s Presiding Bishop is called the “Chief Pastor and Primate of the Church” and leads the development of the general “policy and strategy” of the church as authorized by General Convention. The Presiding Bishop represents the Episcopal Church and its bishops in larger meetings and is the presiding officer at meetings of the House of Bishops. He or she may call a Joint Session of the General Convention — where both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies are present — and may preside at such a session. He or she may recommend legislation to either House, and has the right to address the House of Deputies, but does not preside there (that job belongs to the President of the House of Deputies).1
ACNA’s Constitution assigns three powers to the Archbishop:
The power to convene meetings of all three of the Provincial Assembly, Provincial Council, and College of Bishops;
The power to represent ACNA in larger meetings;
The power to execute a wide variety of “other duties and responsibilities as may be provided by canon.”2 We’ll see more of these other duties shortly.
Executive duties
TEC’s Presiding Bishop chairs the Executive Council, an elected executive body that implements the agenda of the General Convention between its meetings.3 There he or she also represents the House of Bishops, just as the President of the House of Deputies, who also sits on the Executive Council, represents that House in that body. The Executive Council is, on paper, accountable to the General Convention who elect it.4
ACNA’s Archbishop chairs its Executive Committee, a much smaller body than its similarly-named Episcopal counterpart. The Executive Committee does not have an explicit mandate to execute on the will of ACNA’s legislative apparatus; what’s more, it is the Executive Committee that sets the Provincial Council’s agenda, not the other way around!5
Pastoral duties
So far we have seen the differences in mainly administrative duties of TEC’s Presiding Bishop vs. ACNA’s Archbishop. TEC’s Presiding Bishop has lots of personal gravity and influence, but despite his or her prominent place in the church’s executive arm, he or she heads up only the House of Bishops in the legislature, while ACNA’s Archbishop heads up all components of the legislature and chairs the executive committee that drives its agenda.
While this gives a helpful start for understanding the different shapes of the two offices, the clearest exhibition of the TEC’s Presiding Bishop not being a metropolitan, and the clearest answer to whether ACNA’s Archbishop is a metropolitan, comes upon consideration of the pastoral duties assigned to each office.
In the Episcopal Church, the Presiding Bishop is pastorally responsible for ensuring episcopal services if a diocese suddenly finds itself lacking a bishop, and must visit every diocese of the church during his or her term to preach, celebrate the Eucharist, and touch base with the bishop(s), clergy, and lay leaders of each diocese.6 This indicates a pastoral duty of the office to something like “the whole Episcopal Church.” Indeed, when elected, the Presiding Bishop must resign from his or her jurisdiction in order to take up the work full-time — the implication is that it is too much work to be a good bishop diocesan and a good Presiding Bishop at the same time!7
But despite the pastoral relationship, nowhere in TEC’s Constitution & Canons is it stated or implied that all bishops owe a general obedience to the Presiding Bishop. They may owe obedience to a canonical process in which the Presiding Bishop is involved, but that is not the same thing — they would owe the same obedience to a process in which a diocesan convention or a vestry is involved, yet these people do not command a bishop’s obedience in the same sense that an individual bishop diocesan commands a priest’s obedience.
On the other hand, ACNA’s canons spell out explicitly that bishops owe obedience to the Archbishop:
Any person who has received authority to be a Presbyter or Deacon in any Diocese of this Church owes canonical obedience in all things lawful and honest to the Bishop of the Diocese, and the Bishop of each Diocese owes canonical obedience in all things lawful and honest to the Archbishop of this Church.
ACNA C&C, Title III Canon 1 Section 2
Not only does TEC’s C&C have no such provision, but at their consecration, TEC bishops do not vow to obey the Presiding Bishop — while ACNA bishops do vow to obey the Archbishop:
And I do promise, here in the presence of Almighty God and of the Church, that I will pay true and canonical obedience in all things lawful and honest to the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, and his successors; so help me God.
Taken simply, this rather clearly suggests that ACNA’s Archbishop is a metropolitan — he has metropolitical authority over the church’s bishops, which looks something like this.
Making this kind of obedience inherent to the office of the Archbishop allows for certain canonical moves in ACNA that are not found in TEC. Here are a few of interest.
In ACNA, the Archbishop may individually override the prohibition on those who have divorced and remarried entering into Holy Orders in any diocese “upon a showing of good cause”.8 TEC does not recognize an intervention like this into a diocesan affair like ordination as inherently possible for the office of the Presiding Bishop, nor does it grant him or her that power for practical reasons. Decisions regarding whom to ordain are made at the diocesan level, subject to general canonical regulation by the General Convention. The bishop diocesan’s power to ordain is not considered to flow out of the Presiding Bishop’s individual authority, so it would not make sense to suppose the Presiding Bishop could make allowances for special cases in ordination law.
In ACNA, if there is serious conflict between a bishop and his diocese, the bishop or the majority of the standing committee may petition the Archbishop to intervene. It is the Archbishop who not only mediates, but who issues a “final judgment” whether to dissolve the episcopal relationship or not, after receiving advice from the Executive Committee. This judgment is simply “report[ed]” to the College of Bishops.9 In the equivalent situation in TEC, the Presiding Bishop mediates after being notified, but if mediation fails, a special committee — of one priest and one lay person appointed by the President of the House of Deputies, and one bishop appointed by the Presiding Bishop — is assembled, who must hear the parties if they request it. This committee renders a resolution of the matter to the House of Bishops; if two-thirds of them agree, the relationship will be upheld or dissolved accordingly.10 In TEC, the authority to terminate a bishop’s jurisdiction — that bishop then obeying and stepping down — does not naturally rest with the Presiding Bishop alone, while it is located precisely in the Archbishop in ACNA.
In TEC’s disciplinary process for clergy, the bishop diocesan may “place restrictions upon the exercise of the ministry” of a priest or deacon as a precautionary measure, if he or she determines that the priest or deacon may have committed a canonical offense.11 The bishop may modify these restrictions at will,12 but the priest or deacon retains the right to request a review of the restrictions by petitioning a diocesan panel of laity and clergy to determine whether the restrictions are warranted, after hearing from the parties. This panel’s decision on whether to uphold, modify, or dissolve the restrictions may override the bishop’s previous decision.13 In other words, recourse for an inhibited priest or deacon must be sought within the diocese but outside the bishop, within the parameters described by the General Convention — the Presiding Bishop is entirely uninvolved (unless the conflict escalates into one against the bishop diocesan him- or herself). In the equivalent situation in ACNA, an inhibited priest or deacon must appeal directly to the Archbishop, who alone (himself or via his chosen designate) has the power to overrule the bishop diocesan’s inhibition.14
There is much more to talk about, particularly with regard to the discipline of bishops themselves, but we’ll save that for a future installment. For now, it’s enough to highlight these handful of ways that the authority of ACNA’s Archbishop personally extends on paper directly into the episcopal ministry of the dioceses, while TEC’s Presiding Bishop, if involved at all, is usually one of several figures in a more dispersed body of clergy and laity that regulates what bishops do. His or her office is one of a leader, and a pastor, and an administrator, but not a metropolitan — while ACNA’s Archbishop sees the consequences of metropolitical authority flowing through his office rather more freely.
I’ll stop here for now, and pick up next time with the very important question that both TEC and ACNA people are asking themselves this summer: who can be the Presiding Bishop/Archbishop? How do they get chosen? And how long do we have to deal with them, anyway?
TEC C&C Title I Canon 2 Sec 4.
ACNA C&C Article IX.
TEC C&C Title 1 Canon 4 Sec 1a. “There shall be an Executive Council of the General Convention… whose duty it shall be to oversee the execution of the program and policies adopted by the General Convention.”
TEC C&C Title I Canon 4 Sec 2. “The Presiding Bishop shall, ex officio, be the Chair and chief executive officer of the Executive Council, and as such, shall have ultimate responsibility for the oversight of the work of the Executive Council in the implementation of the ministry and mission of the Church as may be committed to the Executive Council by the General Convention.”
ACNA C&C Title I Canon 1 Section 4. “The Council shall have an Executive Committee which shall be the Board of Directors of the Anglican Church in North America, a non-profit corporation. The Executive Committee shall set the agenda for meetings of the Provincial Council. Any ten members of the Council may have an item of business placed on the agenda for consideration.”
TEC C&C Title I Canon 2 Sec 4a.
TEC C&C Title I Canon 2 Sec 3.
ACNA C&C Title III Canon 2 Section 6.
ACNA C&C Title III Canon 8 Section 8.
TEC C&C Title III Canon 11 Sec 13.
TEC C&C Title IV Canon 7 Sec 3.
TEC C&C Title IV Canon 7 Sec 6.
TEC C&C Title IV Canon 7 Sec 10-13.
ACNA C&C Title IV Canon 9 Section 1.3.
I'm thinking that many TEC members don't realize that there's no TEC archbishop, and likewise many ACNA members may not realize that they have one. Good info to know.