IN A video message on YouTube this week, the Archbishop of Canterbury calls on the Anglican Communion to support its bishops in preparation for the Lambeth Conference of bishops in Canterbury in July.
At the heart of the Communion is relationship, he says. “We have never been a body that is bound together by firm and precise rules, and that is often, as it is at the moment, a matter of some real concern and some confusion in our life as a Communion.
“We don’t want the Lambeth Conference to be creating a lot of new rules, but we do obviously need to strengthen our relationships, and we need to put those relationships on another slightly firmer footing”.
The Conference would be proposing an Anglican Covenant, or relationship of promise, “where we have promised to one another that this is how we will conduct our life together”. The Covenant would say, among other things, how advice should be given and shared, and how decisions and “discernments” should be carried forward.
Much of the Conference’s time will be taken up with this, he says. But a Covenant would “not be worth the paper it is written on” if it did not grow out of the relationship between people as they prayed and spent time together.
He wanted the whole Communion to pray that the Conference will be “essentially a spiritual encounter”. He wants it to be a time for bishops to learn from each other, so that they can be better bishops. “It has never just been a talking shop. It has been a place where bishops come to pray together, to read the Bible together, and, quite simply, to help one another to be bishops.”
In his video, he calls on the Communion to align with its bishops by using the time before the Conference to reflect on “The Signs”, the material on St John’s Gospel introduced by the Archbishop. The bishops will be using this in their Bible studies at Canterbury.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCJ1G_3WPjw
|
back to News
previous story
|
next story 
back to top
.gif "Caris Magazine for girls aged 11 to 16 © site")