Lambeth Report Canterbury: Sunday, August 3rd

From www.forwardinfaith.com

FiF International News
Lambeth Conference - 16
Aug 5, 2008

"United and Independent Throughout the World"

The Archbishop of Canterbury's third plenary address

"Today there is no avoiding the question of the central message", the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his third plenary address at the end of the Lambeth Conference, 1998, "and I have the rather dangerous task of trying to discern some of what the message might be...".

What did he discern? "Our Communion longs to stay together", the Archbishop asserted "- but not only as an association of polite friends. It is seeking a deeper entry into the place where Christ stands, to find its unity there. To that end, it is struggling with the question of what mutual commitments will preserve faithful, grateful relationship and common witness. But it must remember too that the place where Christ stands is also every place where God's image is disfigured by the rebelliousness and injustice of our world - just as he once stood in the place of every rejected and lost human being in his suffering on the cross. To be with him in unity, in prayer and love, in intimacy with the Father, is at the same time to be with him among the rejected and the disfigured".

Pastoral Forum

What does this mean in practical terms? Archbp. Williams discerned "quite a strong degree of support for a Pastoral Forum to support minorities", and is asking for "a clear and detailed specification" for its task and composition "within the next two months". He discerned "a strong consensus on the need to examine how the Instruments of Communion will best work. He discerned "a recognition - though still with many questions - that a Covenant is needed". And he discerned "a strongly expressed intention to place our international development work on a firmer and more co-ordinated footing".

To deal with these matters, he said, he is asking the Windsor and Covenant groups to feed their work, and the Design Group for this Conference to feed "the agenda outlined in the Reflections document" (which he later explained was a reference to the five points on which he had identified consensus in the Conference), to the special meeting of the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council in November. And he intends to convene the Primates' Meeting "as early as possible in 2009".

"In the months ahead", Archbp. Williams stated, "it will be important to invite those absent from Lambeth to be involved in these next stages". "Much in the GAFCON documents is consonant with much of what we have sought to say and do", he added, "and we need to look for the best way of building bridges here".

Theology of Unity

Much of the Archbishop's address was devoted to an exposition of the theology of unity. Unity is more than "peaceful diversity" and "mutual forbearance" based on loyalty or warmth or tolerance, he said: it is "being summoned and drawn into the same place before the Father's throne". Christian unity is "first and above all...union with Jesus Christ; accepting his gift of grace and forgiveness, learning from him how to speak to his Father, standing where he stands by the power of the Spirit". "We are one with one another", he continued, "because we are called into union with the one Christ and stand in his unique place - stand in the Way, the Truth, and the Life".

This unity "is inseparable from truth", the Archbishop asserted. Christians had separated in the 16th century, in 1930s Germany, and in 1980s South Africa "because the concluded, painfully as well as (often) angrily, that something had been substituted for the grace of Christ - moral and ritual achievement, or racial or social pride, as if there were...a way of securing our place before God by something other than Jesus Christ".

How does this affect the present situation in the Communion? "A fellow-Christian may believe they [sic] have a profound fresh insight", the Archbishop observed, and "seek to persuade others about it". "A healthy church", he asserted, "gives space for such exchanges". But "confusion arises when what is claimed as a new discernment presents itself as carrying the Church's authority.

That is why pleas for moratoria on same-sex blessings, the consecration of homosexuals as bishops, and cross-border interventions have "found wide support across the range of views represented in the indaba groups", Archbp. Williams asserted. "The Church in its wider life can't be committed definitively by the judgment of some; but when a new thing is enshrined, in whatever way, in public order and ministry, it will look like a definitive commitment".

What is needed is what the text of Lambeth 1998's resolution I.10 actually called for, the Archbishop said: "space for study and free discussion without pressure, pastoral patience and respect, unwillingness to change what has been received in faith from Scripture and tradition". Nor can a traditional understanding and a new one be considered "two equal options", he said: "the practice and public language of the Church act always as a reminder that the onus of proof is on those who seek a new understanding".

"To say that the would-be innovator must be heard gratefully and respectfully", Archbp. Williams said, "is simply to acknowledge the debt we always owe to those who ask unfamiliar questions, because they prompt us to explore our tradition more deeply". That is why its seems "widely agreed" in this Conference "that internal pastoral and liturgical care, strengthened by arrangements like the suggested Communion Partners in the USA and the proposed Pastoral Forum", he said, "are the way we should go" with regard to interventions across provinces "if we want to avoid further ecclesial confusion". For interventions, the Archbishop said, suggest "that nothing in a province, no provision made or pastoral care offered, can be recognizably and adequately Christian" - and that seems a "grave breach of charity".

"So I hope that, if part of the message of Lambeth '08 is that we need to develop covenantal commitments, and that one aspect of this may be what you could call covenanted restraint", the Archbishop summarized, "this will be seen in the context of a unity not enforced but given in Christ".

Covenant of Faith

A covenanted future, the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested, "has the potential to make us more of a church; more of a `catholic' church in the proper sense, a church, that is, which understands its ministry and service and sacraments as united and interdependent throughout the world". To move in that direction would be both "weighty" and "prophetic": "the vision of a global Church of interdependent communities is not the vision of an ecclesiastical world empire - or even a colonial relic...", he said. This "global horizon" matters "because churches without this are always in danger of slowly surrendering to the culture around them and losing sight of their calling to challenge that culture.

In this regard, the Archbishop drew attention to "the massive courage and integrity" of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe in the face of "an oppressive regime and a culture of violence".

But that is "a powerful reminder", Archbp. Williams said, that "our global, Catholic faith affirms that the image of God is the same everywhere. "This is the Catholic faith", the Archbishop asserted, citing the examples of "the Zimbabwean woman beaten by police in her own church", "the woman raising her family in a squatter's settlement in Lima or Buenos Aires, and others: "that what is owed to them is no different from, no less than what is owed to any of the rest of us".

And thus it is "our calling", Archbp. Williams said, "to make that further step of a `covenant of faith' that will promise to our fellow human beings the generosity God has shown us; that will honour the absolute and non-negotiable dignities of all and strengthen us to resist any policy or strategy that implies that what is good and just for me is not good and just for all my human neighbors".

No 'Quick Fix'

Asked at the press conference following his address how he felt the Conference had come out, Archbp. Williams said it had "worked out very much as I'd hoped and prayed". It did not evade the questions; neither did it try to achieve a "quick fix".

The Conference was designed, the Archbishop noted, on three assumptions: that the bishops needed to speak to one another in a safe place, that the Communion needed to know the depth of their commitment to it, and that the Communion needed to know what course of action they might deem acceptable.

Moratorium

"Sacrifice has to be accepted voluntarily", the Archbishop responded to a question about whether it was right for the lives and vocations of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Anglicans to be sacrificed for the unity of the Communion. The question is what people are willing to give for the sake of the global fellowship.

Asked to clarify whether a moratorium on same-sex blessings or on authorizing public rites for such blessings was being called for, Archbp. Williams reiterated his observation that a liturgical formulary suggests that this is where the Communion stands, but said that this would not preclude a "variety of pastoral response".

The proposal gives no time certain or set of conditions for lifting the moratoriums, the Archbishop acknowledged. It is "very difficult to come to a common mind", he observed: it is likely they would be in place "unless and until a wider consensus emerges".

Responding to a concern that The Episcopal Church was the object of two of the three proposed moratoria, Archbp. Williams stated that the "current practice" of certain US dioceses "puts our relations under strain", and stands in the way of resolution.

The Archbishop added that, while some say the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of those sexually active with persons of the same sex is "simply" a matter of human rights, that is "an assumption I can't accept".

If the North American churches do not accept the need for the moratoria, the Archbishop stated, "we are no further forward...".

The Covenant Process

How long will it take to carry out the Covenant process? The text should be finalized in the next twelve months, the Archbishop responded. The decision by the Provinces whether or not to buy in on it depends on the "rhythms" of their synods, some of which meet several times a year, and others only every three years. But he would expect a "round up", he said, in 2012 or 2013.

GAFCON

Responding to a question about how he might seek to bring in the GAFCON bishops, the Archbishop said that he will begin by writing a pastoral letter. He spoke of ongoing exchanges with many who had attended GAFCON, including many who were present at Lambeth, and specifically acknowleged that he had held conversations with Archbp. Greg Venables.

The Primates

Paragraph 151 of the Reflections document, a reporter noted, seems to suggest some desire among the bishops to limit the authority of the Primates' Meeting. Archbp. Williams said that the Primates have met regularly over the years: there's nothing special about his convening it. He noted that the last Lambeth Conference had asked the Primates "to do a bit more", but it is the way of such things that when they did "it's not always well received". The real issue, he opined, is balancing the roles of the Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council.

Asked if he were calling the meeting in order to see if the Primates of Nigeria and Uganda would show up, the Archbishop said he had "no agenda" in calling the meeting.

With respect to finances, Archbp. Williams noted that Primates' Meetings are covered in the Communion's budget. While he did not have details on Lambeth's costs, he said he knows there is a "shortfall", and is looking into meeting it.

Dialogue with Rome

With regard to Rome's recent assertion that "full visible unity" with the Communion was no longer a realistic goal for ecumenical dialogue with the Communion, Archbp. Williams said that Rome had not suspended it or given up on it. The (Roman) Catholic Church is looking to see the results of Lambeth, and he had spoken with Pope Benedict XVI about a possible ARCIC III. The Archbishop affirmed his conviction that a covenanted future would make the Communion "more like a Church", "in the sense that...it represents a challenge to the tendency of local churches to get trapped in the local context".

The Archbishop of Canterbury

In reply to the reporter who asked if he would still be in office when the next Lambeth Conference convenes in 2018, the Archbishop explained that could not really be expected to answer that question. Archbp. Williams said that his ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury "is a task that was set me", and he would continue in it until he is set a different course.