Beyond Imagination: Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ (1963) and the Reinvention of Canadian Anglicanism

This essay explores Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of (MRI), an influential document issued in 1963 at the close of the Anglican Congress in Toronto. A foundational statement on mission and communion, MRI inspired both the structures and ethos of contemporary Anglicanism. However, the production of this imagined global community unwittingly contributed to the decline of Anglicanism in Canada, Drawing from Charles Taylor and Benedict Anderson, this essay will trace the reinvention of Anglicanism in Canada from the religious wing of the British Empire to a modern vision of a worldwide communion that nonetheless depended on the very structures and power relations it sought to replace. As such, the decline of Anglicanism in Canada was not the product of outside forces like secularism as much as the result of a theology that failed to engage the issues facing everyday Canadians. Introduction: MRI and the 1963 Anglican Congress Issued at the 1963 Anglican Congress, a gathering of over sixteen thousand Anglicans from seventeen churches worldwide held in Toronto from August 13 to 23, Mutual Responsibuity and Interdependence in the Body of (MRI) articulated a vision for the Anglican that explored three statements: (1) The church's mission is a response to the living God who in his love creates, reveals, judges, redeems, fulfils; (2) the in Christ expressed in our full communion is the most profound bond among us, in all our political and racial and cultural diversity; and (3) this and must find a completely level of expression and corporate obethence.1 To understand the implications of diese statements signaled nothing short of the rebirth of the Anglican Communion and the inauguration of entirely relationships as well as the death of many old things.2 Specifically, MRI called for increased financial support for mission, the establishment of diocesan networks that empowered local leadership, the development of resources for recruitment and training of lay and clergy leaders, the construction of churches in new areas of Christian responsibility, and the creation of structures for regular consultation. Underlying these programmatic initiatives was the commitment on the part of each to study the form of its own obethence to mission and the needs it has to share in the single life and witness of our church everywhere. The commitments MRI made rested on moral authority alone. The Primate of Canada, Archbishop Howard Clark, wrote in his foreword to the proceedings that the Congress provided a forum for prophecy, wisdom, insight, and concern rather than a platform for statements about doctrines, organization, or polity.3 Consequently, the purpose of MRI was to construct a vision for Anglicans Uving and working together in the world. Earlier mission strategies had been focused on establishing self-sufficient national churches that followed the reach of the British Empire and were predicated on racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic hierarchies. In contrast, the mission strategy established by MRI pointed to more fundamental relations that might transcend these asymmetries.4 Since the Anglican Congress, MRI has been considered a pivotal document that established a paradigm not only for mission, but for Anglicanism itself.5 In addition to generating significant financial support ($15 million US), the collaborative spirit of MRI inspired the development of principles promoted by the Partners in Mission Program created in 1973.6 Even more significantly, MRFs vision was cited, discussed, and enhanced by subsequent meetings of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), which was founded in 1968 to carry on MRIs commitment to inter-Anglican structures for communication.7 More recently, MRI has been cited in three reports commissioned by either the ACC or the Archbishop of Canterbury on the structures and unity of the Anglican Communion: The Virginia Report issued in 1997, The Windsor Report issued in 2004, and die Anglican Covenant, which was commissioned in 2006 to develop a set of principles for cooperation and interdependence and is undergoing final revisions. …

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