“Assemble yourselves and come together, draw near, you survivors of the nations!”. So speaks Isaiah in Isaiah 45: 20. Isaiah is speaking of the return of the Israelites from Babylonian exile following the remarkable decree issued by Cyrus. But, of course, the Israelites didn’t find it easy to assemble and draw together. Some had found prosperity in exile and preferred to stay. Others returned but found life uncongenial. Always there was dissent and fracturing. That is the way of the children of God. Unity is required of us and yet unity is spectacularly hard to achieve.
The reason why it is required of us is explained by Christ. Just before he was betrayed, Jesus prayed for his disciples and their successors in these terms: ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17: 20-23)
So unity is required of us as a sign to the world – as a way of conveying the Gospel to the people. And it is modelled by the unity of the Father and the Son. Yet we struggle with it.
This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury has convened a conference of primates of the Anglican Communion to discuss a way out of the deep rift caused largely by incompatible attitudes held in the liberal American church as compared with the conservative African churches. It seems that one possible solution is that the diverse churches of the Anglican Communion may cease to have communion with each other, but will instead each retain a bilateral communion with Canterbury. But even this outcome may be difficult to achieve if some primates are unwilling to meet with some others.
Plainly other schisms have been deeper and more significant. In 1054 the Patriarch of Constantinople was excommunicated by legates of the Pope and the churches of the East and the West separated. The process of separation between the Church of Rome and the Church in England began with the Reformation Parliament in 1529 and was completed by the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy in 1559. In comparison with these tragic divisions, the reorganisation of the Anglican Communion seems relatively modest.
If the Anglican Communion is to change its character, one might ask what that character is? What indeed is Anglicanism? It’s a word first coined in the mid 1800s to describe the commonality of the Church of England and the Episcopal Churches of Scotland and America and which received an institutional recognition by the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. But is there really an ‘ism’ here? If the ‘ism’ is thought to imply a distinct set of doctrines or beliefs, then really there is no ‘ism’ here at all. The essential doctrine of the Church of England is that it has no essential doctrine different from that of the universal church of which it is a local part. The opening words of the Declaration of Assent to which all ordained persons must subscribe sets that out very clearly:

The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation.

As Bishop Stephen Neill said, “There are no special Anglican doctrines, there is no particular Anglican theology. The Church of England is the Catholic Church in England.
If this is so, and assuming it is so of the other churches within the Anglican Communion, a reorganisation of the kind which Archbishop Welby seems to be considering can truly be seen as an organisational matter and not one going to the heart of faith.
That said, at best is a sideways move and not a step forward in unity. So how, one may ask, is unity within the one Holy and Catholic church to be achieved? Perhaps the answer to that is to be found in the words of John Owen, puritan minister and one time chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, who put it this way:

“I do verily believe that when God shall accomplish [unity], it will be the effect of love, and not the cause of love. It will proceed from love, before it brings forth love.”

I don’t suppose that John Owen was an easily lovable man, but surely in these words lies the truth of the matter.

There is no question about it – the humanitarian crisis as people flee from war and poverty – is testing our sense of shared values. As far as I can tell, no-one knows how to solve this problem. Absolutely no-one, whether in politics, in the UN, in the NGOs, in the universities or in the church. Of course, if we can bring peace to areas from which people escape war and if we can improve the economic conditions in places from which people flee poverty there is a long-term solution.
Peace and social justice are what we pray for week by week and we must pray with confidence that the world will come to change. But no-one has a plan for dealing with these root causes of mass migration in a time frame which helps the 60 million people currently displaced and on the move. So human beings are stumped. We are also divided. Take any two people, each seeking a reasonable response in good faith, and they’ll disagree profoundly.
This, it seems to me, is an area of public discourse in which the church has a key voice. And our leaders haven’t remained silent.
“The response has to start with compassion and the human being”
Said the Archbishop of Canterbury on Friday.
“Just the dignity of the human being, which has been Christian teaching, the foundation of our value system, forever.”
Understandably, in a TV interview the Archbishop doesn’t go into detail of the scriptural basis for this foundational idea. But as St Paul said to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3: 28. We were, after all, all created in the image of God. Every single one of us. (1 John 3: 17).
So the dignity of the human being is the teaching of the Bible. But could a sceptic reasonably say that this is just words – that it offers no practical solution to these terrible problems?
In trying to puzzle out how we should act in an impossible situation, I believe Archbishop Welby’s insight (The response has to start with compassion and the human being) does offer a distinctive and practical way of breaking into the problem. It’s distinctive because this is a problem which could be broken into at a variety of points. For instance, you could start your thinking about this with the subject of security. Or you could start with the idea of the preservation of the wealth of those lucky enough to have it. Or you could start with the subject of the integrity of national borders. These starting points can all be heard in public discourse at the moment, and they all lead to different solutions. If your starting point is the importance of national borders, then you naturally start by putting up razor wire. What our Archbishop says is that we must start working out the solution by treating the dignity of the human being as the first consideration.
Our sceptic might question whether Christians are entitled to claim that something based on the Christian scriptures is foundational in a world populated by many who are not Christians? Well, I don’t believe that we need to be defensive about that, or even that we necessarily need to justify it. But actually, there is very broad consensus across the world, cutting across all religions, that human dignity is foundational. The opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are these stirring and crucially relevant words in this context: “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
If the European and other world leaders who are obviously and understandably stumped by this unique and terrible crisis can do as the Archbishop says and start at this point, I believe that we can move towards practical solutions. But start at some different point, and history will judge us very harshly. For “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of [us] are one in Christ Jesus.”