| THERE ARE many possible processes and outcomes that might be expected from Lambeth 2008. Here is one possibility.
In response to a call from a group of participants, the leadership scraps the current agenda, with its predominantly internal focus. The sessions are all restructured around external purpose, and the global and local challenges of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. The task for the plenaries is to face the symptoms and causes of these interrelated global challenges.
This is not just another Lambeth, this is Lambeth 2008, and the decisions made across the world in the next ten years will make all the difference to the kind of unsustainable or sustainable, insecure or secure world our children will experience.
Oil is set to rise to $200 a barrel in the short-term future. There are food riots in 37 countries. The human impact is a serious spiritual issue. Supply chains and businesses of all kinds are collapsing. Increasing costs and unemployment reduce taxation income for welfare and human need, and also the surplus value in companies that have funded research and development into new forms of energy, social infrastructure, and health care.
As we move towards 550 parts per million of carbon, temperature rises could threaten flooding in the financial capitals of New York, London, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Environmental migrants numbering up to 150 million would stretch the political and social capacity of all Northern countries. Scenario planning can predict something of the infrastructure damage, but not the human impact.
This is the Lambeth Conference where Christians are called to demonstrate their global commitment to world and local needs with a business plan that will drive programmes of action, in each province, for the coming ten crucial years.
Then, in the workshops, the task is to look at the implications for the Church’s engagement in each region of the world — to identify new priorities for ministry, the use of buildings, new kinds of episcopal new kinds of episcopal leadership, and ordained and lay skills development. The Archbishop of Canterbury responds by setting up a global Anglican Executive to co-ordinate the Church’s response over the next ten years.
All Primates are called to be accountable for what their provinces contribute to these challenges, and they commit themselves to producing an annual report of successes. The Executive is responsible for converging all bilateral Anglican funds and initiatives into a new, global commitment, designed to increase effective action locally as well as globally.
The Archbishop sets this external purpose as the only strategic direction for the Church and for all future ACC, Primates’, and pro-
vincial meetings, using to the full the energy and skills previously consumed by internal disputes.
Like the leader of any global organisation, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates realise that strategic external purpose is
the best form of leadership. It transcends the consensus-unity model, where different power groups take up the “neutral” space with their own conflictual and divisive positions.
Unlike the case of some global corporation, however, such a strategic direction of travel would be sensitive to local diversity, and would enable an ethos of respect and trust across differences, giving maximum auto-nomy to each branch to find the best way deliver the strategic agenda and making operational progress within different cultures.
As with the best leadership in any sector, the Archbishop and the Primates would facilitate the leadership of others, and encourage new partnerships with global and local organisations. There would be a new gospel clarity in this strategic direction, as the leadership style of Jesus of Nazareth was put centre stage.
The Gospel record is clear: Jesus refused to engage with the internal disputes of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, which could easily have consumed the rest of his life, even if he had become high priest. He transcended the traps set for him by clever questions about what was correct, or, as GAFCON has put it, “false faith”.
He refused to interpret the Kingdom of God in ways that were exclusive, and he broke down or transcended the narrow religious and social boundaries that excluded rather than included the diversity of his times. The block that this gospel most challenged, in verse after verse, seems to be the pharisaic policing of boundaries, which was based on a self-righteousness that could quote the scriptures and the law to prove others less perfect than oneself.
In Jesus’s eyes, this was a block to the Kingdom of God. He saw through its piety and pretensions, and proclaimed a new vision of religion giving people a sense of purpose and strategic vision, which later became a catalyst for global transformation and redemption.
There is nothing new about the call for biblical orthodoxy. There is nothing new in one group claiming God’s will for its own positions. There is nothing new about excluding others because they fall short of one’s narrowly defined religious orthodoxy, or about the accumulating layers of laws and commandments set up to defend it. Nor is there anything new about spiralling into internal division for the sake of religious purity.
The point is not that there is anything new in this, but that Jesus of Nazareth looked on with horror, and devoted much of his energy to calling people to move away from this, in the direction of the real needs of the people of his time.
Perhaps somebody at Lambeth will call to mind such a Jesus, and will find a creative way of calling for different priorities for the next ten years. A quick look at past Lambeth resolutions in terms of balance between internal- and external-facing focus can be very depressing.
Somebody has to draw a line over a self-defeating culture. The solution is surely not to be found within the box and its various internal compartments — either producing new border definitions within it, or attempting to stretch the sides of the box and its internal discourses. The box has become the worst possible advocate of the gospel.
Surely the leadership challenge now is to move outside the box to the places where all of us have a larger job to do, and cannot afford any more waste of our Church’s potential and skills.
There are many possible outcomes from Lambeth, and I join those throughout the world who dream of a new direction of travel, and of a leadership calling us to move rapidly along its spiritual path.
The Revd Robin Morrison is the Bishops’ Adviser for Church and Society in the Church in Wales. This is a personal view, and does not reflect any formal policy position of the Church in Wales.
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