A church of mere humans (I).(book)(The Chosen Ones. The Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church)(Anglican Diocese of Sydney)(Book Review)

The Chosen Ones. The Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church, by Chris McGillion; Allen & Unwin, 2005, $29.95.

CHRIS MCGILLION declares in his introduction that he is not an Anglican (though it doesn't take too many pages to discern in which branch of the Christian faith he was raised) so it is appropriate for this reviewer to declare that I am. At least I think I am. I was raised in the Anglican Church in New Zealand, the UK, and (that hotbed of liberals and louche bishops) the Episcopalian Church in the United States.

When I returned to Australia later in life I went back to church in Melbourne and it all seemed comfortably familiar. Then I came to Sydney and everything changed. I have struggled for some years to understand what is so different about Sydney's Anglican Church, and have made little progress. But The Chosen Ones is invaluable for anyone who gets as bewildered as I do at the curious image the Sydney diocese presents to the rest of the Anglican communion.

I'm not sure that salvation should be "political", though Jesus can hardly be said to have lived a quiet, retiring life. But it takes only a few pages of McGillion's book to realise that the Reformation is still in turmoil in Sydney and has been since the First Fleet. It is an invaluable reference text, but also a fairly-reasoned historical account of the extraordinary history of the Sydney diocese.

But it's not just the research (did you know that the Sydney diocese was the only one in the world to support the South African Evangelicals when they split from the official South African Anglican Church in 1870? I didn't. Nor that Australia provided a couple of bishops to the South African Evangelical rump.) McGillion is also clearly a journalist, and his leg-work has been admirable--as has his ability to get some of the contemporary principal players to confide in him or share documents.

It is hard to avoid thinking of Simon Sebag Montefiore's The Court of the Red Tsar after putting down this book. This is not to suggest that the Archbishop of Sydney and his brother the Dean of St Andrew's Cathedral are anything other than sincere and intelligent hard-working clerics certain of their convictions in a Bible-based church--and McGillion doesn't. But when reading the accounts of the various Sydney synods over the last twenty years, the tales of all the political infighting of the Stalin years in the old USSR can't help coming to mind. It is not hard to think of the Diocesan Standing Committee as a Politburo.

It is possible to question McGillion's generosity in his attempt to separate the Sydney Evangelicals from the Fundamentalists of, particularly, America. And he is silent about the Alpha ...