| THE Archbishop of Canterbury, in his presidential address on Tuesday afternoon, said that the desire that opponents of women bishops should “go” from the Church of England so that it could present a united front to the world was a fantasy of purity.
Reflecting on the Lambeth Conference, Dr Williams said that it had at least established two things: the significance of a climate in which every participant was guaranteed a hearing; and a strong sense of what might be lost if the Anglican Communion fragmented further or
found itself gathering round more than one centre.
Throughout the Conference, bishops developed new relationships and commitments of mutual support, both formal and informal. For many of the Churches that lived in vulnerable settings, the Anglican Communion was not a luxury, either materially or spiritually. The walk of witness through London showed the support that could be given by other Churches, and the pressure that might be brought on government to help.
The Conference had managed to organise meetings between bishops from Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, and similar places with government ministers, “so that they could explain face to face what they were experiencing and what they needed”. A further outcome, after the recent Primates’ Meeting in Alexandria, was a commitment from the whole Communion to practical support for the Church in Zimbabwe. Dr Williams said that he and the Archbishop of York would be launching on Ash Wednesday an Archbishops’ Appeal for Zimbabwe. They hoped it would be part of a Communion-wide project for Lent, and that every diocese represented in the Synod would play its part.
But the Communion, he said, was a very imperfect thing at the moment. “It is still true that not every Primate feels able to communicate at the Lord’s table alongside every other, and this is indeed a tragedy. Yet last week all the Primates who had attended GAFCON were present [in Alexandria], every one of them took part in daily prayer and Bible study alongside the Primates of North America, and every one of them spoke in discussion.”
He said that he had come to recognise it as very typical of such meetings that when there was talk of replacing the Communion with a federation of some kind, nearly everyone said it was not something they could think about choosing.
“We may have an imperfect Communion, but we unmistakably want to find a way of holding on to what we have and ‘intensifying’ it. . . The biblical call to be involved with one another at a level deeper than that of mere affinity and good will is still loud and clear.”
Common Bible study would not be possible if the same habits of attention and devotion to scripture were not recognised in each other, whatever the diversity of interpretation. “If we recognise this much, we have to recognise that the other person or community or tradition is not simply going to go away. . . They are not just going to be defeated and silenced. For the foreseeable future, they are going to be there, recognisably doing something like we are doing.
“We can’t pretend — but we’d like to. All of us — and I do emphatically mean liberals as well as traditionalists — have a bit in us that is in love with purity, that wants to find in the other a perfect echo of ourselves, and to be able to present to the world outside a united force.”
But what can be done in a world where people didn’t go away, he asked. The Church of God was never going to be pure, and members were always going to be embarrassed by bearing the same name as people whose views they did not own or approve.
Anglicanism had always acknowledged this as a real issue, not because of an indifference to basic doctrinal integrity, a lazy belief that any formulation would do, but because of “a keen pragmatic awareness of the oddity and resilience of flesh and blood, the diversity of personal perception or reception of the common heritage, perhaps rooted in the commitment of our Church of England to be genuinely a Church for this particular place and language and culture”.
Many now felt that this was threatened from both ends of the current debates on sexuality or the role of ordained women; and he wanted to suggest, he said, some possible implications for the discussions around women in the episcopate. They all knew, he said, that if women did become bishops, those who could not accept it would not go away. Some might “go” in the sense of going to another Christian communion, but even then they would still be fellow-Christians, fellow-missioners and disciples. But many did not want to go away in that sense at all. They still wanted to be part of the same family, which meant that dreams of purity and clarity for the Church would not be realised.
Traditionalist opponents of women in the episcopate had long acknowledged that it was likely to come, and they must find ways of living with them, and those who passionately believed it to be right and good for the Church’s health had acknowledged that the opponents would not disappear. Both had had to turn their backs on the fantasy of a Church that was “pure” in their own terms.
The question before the revision committee was “what is the form of legislation best adapted to the good of the Church as a body where the others do not simply go away and become invisible?”
Those opposed to the Code of Practice currently on the table wanted a more secure continuity of pastoral care. “The questions seem to me (i) whether such a degree of continuity and cohesion is a desirable outcome; and (ii) whether it would gravely compromise or undermine the authority accorded by the Church to a woman in episcopal ministry; and (iii) if the first two questions are answered benignly, whether what is before us is adequate to secure that level of continuity and cohesion.”
|
back to Synod
previous story
|
next story 
