“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.