| THE Archbishop of Canterbury called on the bishops to face up to the Communion’s difficulties in his presidential address on Sunday.
“We must be honest about how deep some of the hurts and difficulties currently go; and we must refresh and reanimate our sense of what our Communion ought to be contributing to the whole ecumenical spectrum,” he said. He went on to speak of a vision of Anglicanism whose diversity was “limited not by centralised control, but by consent”.
The key words were “council” and “covenant”, he suggested. Existing bonds of friendship and fellowship were “valuable channels of grace, even if some want to give such bonds more formal and demanding shape”.
Dr Williams warned: “If our efforts at finding coherence for our Communion don’t result in more transforming love for the needy, in greater awareness and compassion for those whose humanity is abused or denied, then this coherence is a hollow, self-serving thing, a matter of living ‘religiously’ rather than ‘biblically’.”
He reminded the Conference: “Our endings are in God’s hands; the Word, through the Spirit, is transforming us into Christlikeness, so that we may pray trustfully and intimately to our Father. And in that process, our relations with each other are transformed, and even our relations with the material world around us. At our roots and at our end is the Word, Jesus our Lord, embodying all that God wants to do first for us and then through us.”
Despite his warning, Dr Williams was upbeat at a press conference on Monday. “If it is the end of the Anglican Communion, I don’t think anyone has told most of the people here.” Provinces had expressed “grave disquiet”, but they had not said they wanted to pull out.
In a robust defence of his handling of the row over the Bishop of New Hampshire, he said that the bishops who had consecrated Bishop Robinson had been invited to attend because they had asked the Communion’s forgiveness, and for most people “that was enough.” He said he had appealed to the objecting provinces (Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, and Rwandans) to attend, for the sake of “legitimacy”.
Others would have to make the judgement whether, as a result of their absence, the Conference could come to a “coherent attitude” about what to do next.
The Archbishop said that one basis on which to avoid a split would be a shared liturgy and rule of life. The “bones” of the Book of Common Prayer still “showed through” much Anglican worship, and had the ability to hold the communion together as one of its “structures of belief”. A rule of life would also mean they could ask themselves: “How often do you pray and how often do you take spiritual direction?”
The Archbishop also gave a nod in the direction of a future orthodoxy over sexuality. He said he was committed to the teaching on sexuality expressed at the last Lambeth Conference. Living in sin, he said would be to live together “outside a public covenant of mutual support and love made in the presence of God. . . I don’t believe that sex outside marriage is as God purposes it.”
He also rejected criticism of the Conference organisation from those who believed that the indaba groups, where bishops meet in groups of 40 and report back on their discussions, was “not a very effective way to table tough issues”. The old system had not worked, so the new one was “worth a try”.
The Covenant Continuation Group and the Windsor Continuation Group would be working at “tough issues”. Reports from each group would make up a final report that would “endeavour to speak for the whole Conference”. He wanted to “sketch a vision of unity achieved not by coercion but by consent”.
Extracts from the presidential address, |
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