Posted at The Christian Challenge via TitusOneNine:
The Hollow Men:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
……………
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men (1925)
Special Report/Analysis By George Conger
“MORALITY, LIKE ART, means drawing a line someplace,” Oscar Wilde once observed. Anglican bishops historically wield the pen, drawing the line between error and truth, between right and wrong doctrine.
Yet at some point in the mid-20th century, the bishops of the church began to abdicate this responsibility - even before the American Church reformed its ordinal in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, removing the injunction to bishops that they “banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word.”
Where once the church celebrated Anglican comprehensiveness, it now celebrated diversity. Confessionalism morphed into conversation, as those charged with guarding the faith suffered a loss of nerve. The church, like the universities, the arts, literature and other repositories of high culture in the West, was trampled underfoot by the long march of the left through the institutions.
THE 2008 LAMBETH CONFERENCE of Anglican bishops in Canterbury July 16-August 3 was a milestone in this march of relativism. While nothing extraordinary happened - no fist fights or beatific visions - a number of prelates came away from Lambeth realizing the Anglican Communion no longer worked. Its structures were not a place for holy men, but for hollow men: bishops who knew in their hollow hearts they were stuffed with straw, trapped in a purposeless whirl of apathy and spiritual torpor called “dialogue.” The Anglican Communion had finally broken, coming to an end “not with a bang but a whimper.”
While past Lambeth Conferences have endeavored to speak clearly on matters of common concern as a guide to the global church, Lambeth 2008 was designed to, and did, decline to draw the line between the irreconcilable claims of the left and right. Gene Robinson’s cry that “God is doing a new thing,” and that the affirmation of his election as Bishop of New Hampshire showed that “God has once again brought an Easter out of Good Friday,” was left to stand alongside the claims of traditionalists like Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker, who argued that the standard the church must use in moving forward with change was the rule of Vincent of Lerins: a once-for-all received faith, witnessed everywhere and by all. Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.
While the liberal juggernaut has ground through The Episcopal Church (TEC) over the past generation, carrying prayer book revision and women’s ordination with it across the 38-province Anglican Communion, Vincent’s 5th century rule had been consistently applied to questions of sexual ethics. At the 13th Lambeth Conference in 1998, bishops of the Communion affirmed by a 7 to 1 margin the church’s traditional teaching on human sexuality, as informed by Scripture and the church’s unbroken teaching of 2,000 years.
The onus lies with those who seek change to convince the church of the need for it, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, explained after Lambeth ‘98. Listening to proponents of change acknowledges their honorable motives, he told the clergy of the Diocese of Central Florida in 2003, but entering into a conversation with them does not validate their arguments.
“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” George Orwell once wrote of Gandhi, and the same standard applies in the development of doctrine, Lord Carey argued. However, the 14th Lambeth Conference under the presidency of Archbishop Rowan Williams said goodbye to all that.
AT LAMBETH ‘08, Dr. Williams lost the confidence of his fellow archbishops, and left the Communion millions in debt, and on the same trajectory as before the Conference began. Left and right have rejected his pleas for restraint, vitiating the renewed call in Canterbury for moratoria on gay bishops and blessings and cross-border episcopal actions, pending putative rescue by an Anglican Covenant at some uncertain date. New layers of bureaucracy suggested at Lambeth (e.g. a “Pastoral Forum” and “Faith and Order Commission”) remain to be developed at a time when many saw stronger measures to restore order as overdue. Meanwhile, Roman Catholic and Orthodox representatives announced the effective end of talks aimed at corporate reunion and the recognition of Anglican orders.
Philosophically, the Lambeth Conference witnessed the retirement of the historic Anglican guides of Scripture, Tradition and reason in divining truth. Scripture was subordinated to experience and culture, reason rejected in favor of political power, and Tradition debased into equal parts antiquarianism and haberdashery.
“English politeness,” the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, said in June at the conservative Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), was one of the defining marks of Anglicanism. But while the tone at this Lambeth was also polite - the bishops did not hurl anathemas at one another or pronounce sentences of excommunication - the Conference saw the same end as if they had denounced each other as heretics. Not all bishops of the Anglican Communion were able to worship around a common altar and share the sacraments, causing one African bishop to ask, “When we can’t share Holy Communion, how can we be an Anglican Communion?”
While Rowan Williams succeeded in preserving its façade during the three-week assembly, his efforts could not prevent Anglicanism’s ecclesial foundations from crumbling away. The form will continue, but the substance of “official” Anglicanism, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, has turned to dust and “nothing beside remains.”
Who Is Rowan Williams?
As has been noted previously in these pages, the international councils of the 80 million-member Anglican Communion are, politically speaking, weak. Its councils - the Lambeth Conference (the once-a-decade meeting of Anglican bishops first held in 1867); the Primates’ Meeting (the gathering of leaders of the Communion’s 38 provinces); and the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC—the representative body of lay, clergy and episcopal delegates appointed by the provinces that meets every three years) - have no juridical or legislative powers. Said to wield moral authority, they can speak, but cannot compel or bind any of the Communion’s churches.
Coupled with this weakness, however, is a centralization of authority in the person of one man - the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglicanism’s fourth “instrument of communion.” While Dr. Williams has maintained that he has little power, as Cantuar he has an unchecked authority to summon the Primates’ Meetings, preside over the ACC, and issue the invitations and set the agenda for the Lambeth Conferences. In the modern era these international gatherings have taken on the character of the incumbent of St. Augustine’s Throne.
In a panel discussion hosted by the BBC on August 3, Ruth Gledhill, religion correspondent of The Times, observed that Lambeth ‘88 was “on the fence,” displaying a tentative, hesitant character very much like that of Archbishop Robert Runcie. Lambeth ‘98, which overwhelmingly adopted orthodox sexuality resolution 1.10, was driven by a “muscular Evangelical Christianity” that mirrored the mindset of Archbishop George Carey. Lambeth ‘08 had been Dr. Williams’ “show” and resembled nothing so much as a “graduate seminar”- with the Archbishop the professor surrounded by his student/bishops. The aims, agenda and ends of the Lambeth Conferences flowed from the ideals brought to the gathering by the Archbishops of Canterbury.
SINCE HIS ENTHRONEMENT in 2003, Dr. Williams has left his mark on Anglicanism. A skilled theologian and ecclesiastical politician, he began his career as a theological tutor, passing on to lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge University. From there, he progressed at age 36 to Oxford to become the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. Elected Bishop of Monmouth in the Church of Wales in 1992, he became Archbishop of Wales in 2000, and made it to the top of the greasy pole in 2003, when he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury – without ever having held a parochial cure.
Dr. Williams is a consistent thinker. Since his enthronement he has not deviated from the intellectual and theological principles that have guided his academic writings. Paramount among these is the belief that truth is unknowable. Certainty lies only with those who lack critical self-awareness: “For the fundamentalist, the will of God is clearly ascertainable for all situations, either through the plain words of scripture (as received in a particular but unacknowledged convention of reading) or with the aid of supernatural direct prompting: Christian revelation is there to offer clear and important information – how to be right,” he asserted in his 1994 book Open to Judgment (OTJ, p. 221).
When God does illumine us, “when God’s light breaks on my darkness,” he stated, “the first thing I know is that I don’t know – and never did” (OTJ, p. 120).
This denial of certainty is what the reign of Christ over us means: “Christ’s is the kingship of a riddler, the one who makes us strangers to what we think we know” (OTJ, p.131).
For Dr. Williams, theology does not reveal God; it reveals that there is no revelation, no single knowable truth. He who claims possession of the truth, and uses it to exclude others from the fellowship of the church, shows by his very actions that the truth is not in him.
In practical terms, this means the church should not be quick to draw lines. “Heresy is possible,” Dr. Williams concedes, “but before we throw the word around, we need to remember that orthodoxy is common life before it’s common doctrine” (OTJ, p. 264). Hence the mission of the church is to stay together, united by this common life while it seeks the (centuries) long pursuit of common doctrine.
Since his appointment in 2003, Dr. Williams has surrounded himself with a small circle of advisers and aides who have been tasked with putting the Archbishop’s theories into action. The first international “crisis” of his tenure saw the introduction of a model of operations that has been used ever since, finding its fulfillment in Lambeth 2008.
The Memo
After the Episcopal General Convention confirmed the election of divorced, actively homosexual cleric Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, Dr. Williams called an emergency Primates’ Meeting for October 15-16, 2003, at Lambeth Palace in London. The meeting was also called in reaction to the implementation that year of same-sex blessings in the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster.
WEEKS EARLIER, at a meeting of the International Anglican Doctrinal and Theological Commission [IADTC] at Virginia Theological Seminary on September 8, 2003, a copy of an internal briefing document on the Primates’ Meeting, prepared by Dr. Williams’ advisors, was inadvertently leaked to the Very Rev. Paul Zahl, IADTC member and then dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I was given by mistake two classified documents,” Dean Zahl told The Church of England Newspaper in 2003. “One was a proposed schedule for the Primates’ Meeting; a blow by blow…for the entire meeting…And the other was a very carefully typed one-and-one-half page memo which was a very strongly worded recommendation as to how to deal with ‘the conservative Americans’ and the ‘conservatives’.”
The agenda for the Primates’ Meeting had been “carefully scripted,” he said. The “schedule had four or possibly five discussion points, but in each case a ‘conservative’ was to be linked with a ‘liberal’ to give equal time.” Every “no” was to be paired with a “yes,” Zahl said.
The meeting was designed not to achieve any sort of consensus or “executive decision,” but “was a typical sort of Anglican ‘process’ situation where you take the fangs out of any position by always making it into a ‘conversation’,” Dean Zahl said.
The second document, a memorandum to Dr. Williams, argued that “the conservatives and the Americans will try to get their way by making a lot of fuss, but we must resist at all costs listening to that.”
The strategy memo saw “four potential outcomes.” The first was “some kind of parallel jurisdiction” in North America, which the memo said “would be disastrous.”
The remaining three outcomes were variations upon the theme of study, dialogue and delay: “none of them [sought] discipline or Godly admonition,” and all proposed “staving off any kind of decision,” Dean Zahl said.
A spokesman for the ACC staff, which hosted the meeting, later confirmed the authenticity of the documents - which were retrieved from Dean Zahl - but declined to name their author or speak to their content.
WHEN THE PRIMATES CONVENED in London a little over a month later, leaders seeking harsher penalties for The Episcopal Church (TEC) were persuaded instead to join in a stern warning that proceeding with Robinson’s consecration would have devastating consequences for the Communion, and a call for a panel to suggest ways to restore order in what became the 2004 Windsor Report. Within a couple of weeks, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold - who had agreed to the London communiqué – consecrated Robinson anyway.
But the strategy of delay and dialogue first recommended to Dr. Williams for the October 2003 Primates’ Meeting has been consistently and effectively applied to all subsequent international Anglican gatherings, with the Archbishop acting at key points to steer the course of events away from the possible discipline of North American rebels. The same strategy was applied at Lambeth 2008.
How Did We Get Here:
The Run-Up To Lambeth ‘08
In 2004, Dr. Williams began preparations for the 2008 gathering, chartering a Lambeth Conference Design Group (LCDG) to prepare the program and agenda. From the time that ACC-13 met in Nottingham in June 2005, Williams began signaling an end to the approach of past conferences, which pivoted more on resolutions and reports. He instead favored a seminar/personal encounter model that he claimed would not “avoid the big issues,” but focus mainly on allowing bishops to “meet Jesus afresh,” rebuild trust relationships, and be “empowered and equipped” for mission.
Responses to the change in structure for Lambeth were slow in coming, but at length some conservative Global South leaders publicly rejected the idea that the Conference would not directly confront and seek to resolve the real issues buffeting the Communion, particularly given the huge expense of the meeting. “A Lambeth Conference that will not be able to guide the church in a way that [it] will embrace” and “comply with” is “not worth attending,” Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola said in January 2007.
THE ISSUE among conservative Anglican leaders would not be just the Lambeth program, however, but its participants.
A September 2006 report, Road to Lambeth, commissioned by the primates of the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa (CAPA), urged African bishops not to “attend any Lambeth Conference to which the violators of the [1998] Lambeth Resolution [on human sexuality] are also invited as participants or observers.”
The Church of Uganda moved first. In December 2006, it endorsed the call to boycott Lambeth if Bishop Robinson and the bishops who consecrated him were present.
Of the 43 bishops who laid hands on Gene Robinson in 2003, 17 potentially could be invited to Lambeth: Bishops Joe Burnett of Nebraska; Chilton Knudsen, Maine; Martin Barahona, El Salvador; Michael Ingham, New Westminster, Canada; Bruce Stavert, Quebec, Canada; John Chane, Washington, D.C.; George Counsell, New Jersey; James Jelinek, Minnesota; Thomas C. Ely, Vermont; M. Thomas Shaw, Massachusetts; Andrew Smith, Connecticut; Orris G. Walker Jr., Long Island; Wilfredo Ramos-Orench, Central Ecuador; Suffragan Bishops Roy Cederholm and Gayle Harris of Massachusetts, James Curry of Connecticut, and Catherine Roskam of New York.
The 2004 Windsor Report had urged Dr. Williams not to give these bishops a role in Communion councils; it stated in paragraph 134 that “those who took part as consecrators of Gene Robinson should be invited to consider in all conscience whether they should withdraw themselves from representative functions in the Anglican Communion. We urge this in order to create the space necessary to enable the healing of the Communion.” However, little was done to enforce this recommendation.
Speaking in regard to Lambeth in January 2007, Archbishop Akinola said his province would wait and see whether TEC honored the Windsor Report requests by instituting a ban on the further blessing of same-sex unions (which it had not done at General Convention 2006) and by expressing its “regret” for breaching Anglican “bonds of affection” in the Robinson affair. (General Convention voiced regret for the “strain” on relations, and – only under pressure late in the meeting – agreed to withhold consent for further practicing homosexual bishops).
ON MAY 22, 2007, Williams was about to leave for a three-month sabbatical, and still awaited were key Canadian and TEC meetings in June and September, respectively, that were slated to respond to the primates’ latest round of requests that the provinces come into line on sexuality teaching. But it was on that day that Dr. Williams made his move, issuing invitations to Lambeth to some 880 bishops, including to Robinson’s consecrators and all North American bishops who had permitted same-sex blessings except Robinson.
Only nine invitations were held back: those to Bishop Robinson; the Bishop of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga (who faced travel restrictions to Europe due to his collaboration with Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe); Recife Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti, a conservative who realigned with the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone after being deposed by leaders of the (TEC-planted) Brazilian province; and faithful U.S. bishops consecrated by overseas provinces to minister to Anglicans who had left TEC over theological differences, namely, Bishop Charles Murphy of the Rwandan-backed Anglican Mission in the Americas, and Bishop Martyn Minns of the Nigerian-supported Convocation of Anglicans in North America, and their four suffragans.
Speaking to reporters in London May 22, ACC General Secretary, Canon Kenneth Kearon, said Gene Robinson was excluded due to the “widespread objections in many parts of the Communion to his consecration and…ministry,” while the faithful foreign-backed American bishops would not be invited because their consecrations were “irregular” and Lambeth does not “recognize their ministry.”
In a letter accompanying the Conference invitations, Dr. Williams said he hoped Lambeth would be “a place where we can try and get more clarity about the limits of our diversity and the means of deepening our Communion, so we can speak together with conviction and clarity to the world.” However, it would not be “a formal synod or council of the bishops of the Communion,” he said.
The Archbishop contended that there was no taint in participating in the Conference alongside the Robinson consecrators. Attendance did not commit a bishop to accept “the position of others as necessarily a legitimate expression of Anglican doctrine and discipline,” he said.
(Later, at Lambeth, he defended his decision to invite the Robinson consecrators by claiming that some of them had “expressed sorrow and asked for forgiveness,” and that TEC through its House of Bishops had “asked for forgiveness”; if so, such comments have not been publicized. He also said that “just over 50 percent” of primates thought the HOB responded adequately to inquiries regarding its homosexuality policies in September 2007, though late last year he said the HOB had “not satisfied many in the Communion” on the matter of same-sex blessings.)
After the Lambeth invitations went out, first the Rwandan province (in June 2007) and then Nigeria (in January 2008) said their bishops would not attend the Conference if their U.S. bishops were not invited, and if the 17 Robinson consecrators were present.
Archbishop Akinola instead announced a Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem in June. Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya and Australia’s largest diocese, Sydney, announced decisions to send bishops to GAFCON over Lambeth. GAFCON would not be a rival to Lambeth, Akinola explained, but would address the issues Lambeth sought to avoid. Some 1,200 persons from around the world, including nearly 300 bishops representing most of the world’s active Anglicans, participated in GAFCON. They launched an international movement there to reclaim the Communion for the historic faith, based on a statement and theological accord that would stand in stark contrast to what came out of Canterbury in early August.
AS LAMBETH GOT UNDERWAY on the University of Kent campus, then, a quarter of the Communion’s active bishops were absent for reasons of conscience, a reality lamented in Canterbury.
A total of 617 bishops were registered from the Communion’s 722 dioceses, 5 missionary districts, and 2 ecclesial jurisdictions (Macao and the Falklands/British Antarctic Territories).
The largest bloc of prelates in attendance came from The Episcopal Church, which sent 127 bishops, followed by the Church of England, with 113 bishops. Rounding out the top five in numbers of bishops present were Australia, 39; Canada, 37; and Southern Africa, 27, with these five provinces sending over 55 percent of all bishops present.
Of the prelates identified as absent, 214 bishops from 10 provinces made an affirmative decision not to accept Dr. Williams’ invitation, backing the Road to Lambeth boycott: Australia, 7; Southern Cone, 1 (Frank Lyons-Bolivia); Episcopal Church, 1 (James Adams-Western Kansas); Church of England, 3 (Michael Nazir-Ali-Rochester, Wallace Benn-Lewes, Pete Broadbent-Willesden); Uganda, 30; Nigeria, 137; Kenya, 25; Rwanda, 8; South East Asia, 1; and Jerusalem and the Middle East, 1.
From Africa’s 324 dioceses, 200 diocesan bishops (61 percent) were identified as having declined Williams’ invitation.
The Pakistani-born Bishop Nazir-Ali said his “difficulty” in attending Lambeth arose from “Eucharistic fellowship with and teaching the common faith alongside those who have ordained a person to be bishop whose style of life is contrary” to biblical and church teaching. It would be “difficult to be around a common table” in fellowship “with people who have gone against the common” mind and received teachings of the church, he said. His fellow C of E bishop, Wallace Benn, cited similar reasons for his absence.
While Canon Kearon claimed that at least 680 bishops participated in Lambeth, this total included Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, retired Anglican bishops and other episcopally ordained guests. The exact number of serving Anglican bishops that were present remains unknown; however, no more than 602 Anglican bishops appeared in the group photo taken at the Conference midpoint. (For more on this, see “Lambeth, Numbers, And Legitimacy” in the “Focus” section.)
A Controlled Conference
As the bishops and their spouses (who participated in a parallel conference in the university’s sports hall) arrived on the Kent University campus – a somewhat decaying 1960s-era complex designed by a prison architect – other differences between Lambeth ‘08 and past Conferences quickly became apparent.
Security, scheduling and secrecy were new themes. Whereas at past Lambeth Conferences most of the bishops’ deliberations were open to public scrutiny, at the 2008 assembly all but a handful of events were off limits to the public, including the media. Chain link fences some eight feet high had been placed around the key venues, and guards posted at intervals across the campus to control access.
The guards – armed Kent police, uniformed university security guards, and yellow-sashed conference stewards - were a constant, and at times, obtrusive presence. To enter the press car park, a reporter had to pass through two chained fences, showing his press and parking passes, as well as passes for anyone else in the car.
Initially, Conference officials declined to provide reporters with a list of bishops present.
“The names of the bishops attending Lambeth would not be revealed as this was secret,” reported The Church of England Newspaper. “The reason for the secrecy was a secret, though explanations of privacy…and security concerns were offered.”
After pressure from reporters, officials finally issued a list only of those bishops at the Conference who gave permission to have their names released. (Only later was sufficient data available to arrive at the earlier-cited registration totals.)
Moreover, as almost all Lambeth sessions were closed to the media for the first time, little firsthand observation of the proceedings was possible.
“A request by The Times to attend the (bishops’) session on media training, entitled ‘Never say no to the press,’ was met with a ‘no’ from Conference organizers,” CEN wryly observed.
IN PAST CONFERENCES, study materials were prepared and released months ahead of time, and bishops were assigned to committees that would work on specific issues. Bishops were encouraged to contact one another before the start of the Conference to review the study materials and begin work.
At this Conference, a Lambeth Reader was distributed to the bishops with their registration packets, but no public copies of the document were made available. Nor was advance word given to the bishops of the names of their fellow group members. The secrecy extended to senior bishops of the Church of England, who were not briefed on the Conference until three weeks before its start.
The Lambeth Reader’s tone struck a discordant note with some, singling out the boycotting bishops for opprobrium. They were charged with shirking their “collegial responsibility” at a time of conflict, and weakening the Body of Christ.
However, the Lambeth Reader was left unread by most bishops, as it soon became apparent its papers had no bearing on the life and work of the meeting – and no time was programmed into the Conference for reading or reflection.
As at past Lambeth gatherings, an exhibition hall/marketplace for vendors was set aside. At the ‘98 Conference these were mostly clerical tailors, booksellers and purveyors of ecclesiastical accoutrements, but this time the bulk of vendors were representatives of special interest groups - with members of the homosexual lobby predominating. A coalition of “LGBT” (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) groups also published a daily newspaper, Lambeth Witness, which was made available all over the campus. Bishop Robinson was permitted in the marketplace, but it seemed over time that the restricted setting drew the media-savvy prelate to the friendlier climes of London.
IN HIS WELCOMING ADDRESS – closed to the press - Dr. Williams told the bishops and their spouses that the 14th Lambeth Conference would not seek to settle the conflict within the Communion, but would focus on building relationships. These friendships would not overcome the divisions, but “it is certain that without the building of relationships the challenges will never be resolved,” he said according to bishops present.
DR. WILLIAMS then outlined the structure of the meeting. The first three days would consist of a retreat, during which he would deliver five lectures to the bishops at Canterbury Cathedral, interspersed with periods of meditation and reflection. Members of the public could then attend the opening Eucharist on the first Sunday, and the bishops would begin work on the following Monday. Their day would be divided into sessions beginning at 7:30 with worship and Bible study and going most nights until the late evening. The schedule also would include a day trip to London to participate in a march in support of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) before dining at Lambeth Palace and heading for Buckingham Palace for the customary tea party with the Queen.
The bishops were split into Bible study groups of 8 brought together based on geographical and gender considerations. Using materials prepared by Prof. Gerald West of the University of Kwa-Zulu, Natal (South Africa), the bishops were asked to work through portions of John’s Gospel and discuss questions prepared by Dr. West.
The Bible study groups would then re-form after a tea break into indaba groups of approximately 40 bishops and guests each; 75 ecumenical guests ranging from the Salvation Army to an eight-man team from the Roman Catholic Church were included in all Conference deliberations. Indaba, a Zulu word, the bishops were told, was a consensus-building process by which African villagers would discuss issues in an egalitarian town-hall fashion.
In the afternoons and early evenings, before and after the closed worship services, the bishops would attend plenary sessions or self-select sessions. The latter sessions, closed to outsiders, would address issues of parochial concern, from climate change to Catholicism, with several sessions scheduled simultaneously each business day.
A few open plenary sessions were scheduled in the evenings in a marquee - a blue tent that could accommodate roughly 1,000 people - while the day closed with evening prayer. Conspicuously absent from the Lambeth ‘08 script was free time for bishops to caucus by province or region, entertain, or get away from the grim environs of the University of Kent.
The Retreat
During the cathedral retreat, the talks given by Dr. Williams on the theme of “God’s Mission and a Bishop’s Discipleship” appeared to have been well received by a cross-section of bishops. Lexington (KY) Bishop Stacy Sauls said the central argument of the talks had been that “our episcopal ministry is a revealing of Jesus” and that bishops were a “symbol of unity” for the church.
But they carried Dr. Williams’ ideas about revelation and truth. Those on the left and right who had “written off” their theological opponents were in danger of losing the charism of episcopacy, for no single party or person was in sole possession of the truth, the Archbishop reportedly argued. Anglican bishops must stay together in fellowship, he said.
Be prepared to find “the imperative of Jesus in everyone and anyone in the Communion,” Dr. Williams asserted, for it is not “huge numbers or massive resources that guarantee truth.”
Truth is found in paying “unsparing attention to Christ in one another,” and through a “common discipline and shape of prayer” articulated in the post-BCP Anglican world through a common faithfulness and inner prayer life.
The Opening Week
The spirit of pan-Anglican bonhomie fostered by the closed three-day retreat did not survive the opening Eucharist on Sunday, July 20, as, like those absent from the meeting, some bishops present were unable receive communion with their colleagues.
In a break with past Lambeth Conferences, the bishops did not process into Canterbury Cathedral grouped together by province, but in an undifferentiated mass, with only the primates a distinctive body amongst the bishops. LCDG member, the Rev Ian Douglas, professor of World Mission at Episcopal Divinity School, stated that the change stemmed from a desire to further the fellowship gained during the retreat and avoid the “triumphalistic” processions of former years. It had nothing to do with the boycott, he said, rejecting assertions that a mob of bishops would disguise the absence of a significant number of their brethren.
PREACHING at the invitation of Dr. Williams, the Bishop of Colombo, Duleep de Chickera, called for the bishops to be agents of social and political change, and for the Communion to “resuscitate the challenge of unity in diversity.”
“In Christ we are all equal,” the Ceylonese bishop said; there is “space for all” within the Communion regardless of “color, race, gender or sexual orientation.”
The Communion must exercise its “prophetic voice” and be the “voice of the voiceless,” calling into “accountability those who abuse power,” the prelate stated.
The bishops wore choir dress, and only Dr. Williams and his suffragans and chaplains wore Eucharistic vestments, avoiding potential controversy by making clear to traditionalists that none of the women bishops was concelebrating the Eucharist.
While the rood screen prevented a clear view of the bishops during the service, and the television cameras turned away to film the choir while the host was distributed, three primates and eight bishops confirmed to The Christian Challenge that they had abstained from receiving the host due to the presence of the Robinson consecrators. However, each asked not to be named, as their actions were not political statements, but matters dictated by conscience.
Following the service, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told reporters that the “glorious” gathering was symbolic of the “inclusive” nature of Anglicanism. Presiding Bishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone - one of the minority of GAFCON-aligned bishops that opted to attend Lambeth - said the service highlighted everything that was wrong with the Communion: a social justice sermon that lauded works and social regeneration, but ignored personal regeneration and broken Eucharistic fellowship.
THE BISHOPS then returned to the university campus for Dr. Williams’ presidential address, given in closed session. The Archbishop acknowledged that the Communion was “in the middle of one of the most severe challenges,” but said the “options before us are not irreparable schism or forced assimilation.” The way forward was through an Anglican Covenant - the pact proposed by the Windsor Report to help ensure unity in basic beliefs and mutual accountability among historically autonomous Anglican provinces. This would allow “an Anglicanism whose diversity is limited not by centralized control but by consent – consent based on a serious common assessment of the implications of local change.”
Fears that the indaba process would be used to stifle dissent and avoid action were misplaced, he maintained. “Quite a few people have said that the new ways we’re suggesting of doing our business are an attempt to avoid tough decisions and have the effect of replacing substance with process. To such people, I’d simply say, ‘How effective have the old methods really been?’”
“We need renewal, and this is the moment for it,” Dr. Williams said, charging the bishops to use the indaba method to “help shape fresh, more honest and more constructive ways of being a conference – and being a communion.”
FOR EVERY indaba session, the bishops were given a theme, aim, and focus question. Session 5, on July 25, for example, opened with the theme of “Serving together—the bishop and other churches.” For this, the bishops were asked to “explore specifically what contributions bishops can make to developing ‘joint action for mission’ working ecumenically.” Then each bishop was given up to two minutes to respond to the question, “Working specifically with other churches, how can you as a bishop, further the mission we share together in your work?”
South African Archbishop Thabo Makgoba - one of Lambeth’s organizers - conceded that the division of the bishops into groups of 40 to discuss specific issues in the space of two hours did not appear to allow enough time for a full airing of views. “Mathematically, it won’t make a lot of sense,” he said. But he maintained that, “The whole conference is an indaba. Indaba starts with the walk from your room.”
Central Pennsylvania Bishop Nathan Baxter lauded the small group encounters, saying that “bishops listening together” had set a respectful tone for the gathering and fostered personal relationships.
By contrast, another American bishop wrote his diocese during the Conference that the indaba process was “asinine.” He said: “Many of the Africans are saying, ‘This isn’t indaba at all! First of all, we are not a village, and we don’t know each other. And secondly, we are not attempting to solve a problem; we are talking in small groups about minor issues of little consequence’.”
Even the Archbishop of York, the Ugandan-born Dr. John Sentamu, asked, “If indaba is such a great idea, why is Africa in such a mess?”
While most bishops said they enjoyed the fellowship of the smaller 8-member Bible studies, there was unease in some quarters with the agenda being promoted through the study materials. “We’re being manipulated” into saying that “all will be well if we only keep talking,” said Archbishop Venables.
“I hoped we would be able to talk about the very serious things. We tried to but were unable to,” he said. The indaba sessions had “helped, but there wasn’t enough trust” among the bishops to make it work. The “level of conflict, fear, mistrust, [and] frustration hasn’t allowed it.”
Matters were not helped when it emerged that the American Church had given its bishops a sheet of “talking points” to use in the group sessions to try to promote liberal attitudes toward gay clergy.
The Conference Begins To Unravel
While the Eucharist boycott hinted that all was not well, the first open clash in the Conference came on July 22, when the Episcopal Church of the Sudan released a statement calling for TEC to repent and immediately cease its advocacy of gay bishops and blessings.
Rebuffed in his attempt to release the statement through the Conference press office, Dr. Daniel Deng, Archbishop of Juba and Primate of the Sudan, walked into the press room that afternoon and gave an impromptu briefing, calling for Gene Robinson to step aside to save the Communion.
THREE ROMAN CATHOLIC cardinals also rained on Dr. Williams’ parade, offering progressively harsher assessments of the state of Anglicanism and its relations with Rome.
One of the three, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, urged Anglicans to put their house in order, and decide what they believe.
Citing the disputes over women’s ordination, he said that, “if Anglicans themselves disagree over this development, and find yourselves unable fully to recognize each other’s ministry, how could we?”
Dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics now appeared pointless due to the ecclesiological anarchy spreading across the Communion. “If we are to make progress through dialogue, we must be able to reach a solemn and binding agreement with our dialogue partners. And we want to see a deepening, not a lessening, of communion in their own ecclesial life,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said.
Another of the Catholic delegation, Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, urged Anglicans on July 31 to embark on a new “Oxford Movement” to revitalize the church, and warned that the apparent laxity over gay clergy and moves by the Church of England to introduce women bishops had effectively ended the quest for Roman recognition of the validity of Anglican orders.
Kasper hinted as well that the Vatican might begin direct talks with GAFCON and other conservative Anglican movements. While “troubled and saddened” by the potential fragmentation of the Anglican Communion, he said, Rome had a duty to ask, should Anglicanism come apart, “who will our dialogue partner be? Should we, and how can we, appropriately and honestly engage in conversations also with those who share Catholic perspectives on the points currently in dispute, and who disagree with some developments within the Anglican Communion or particular Anglican provinces? What do you expect in this situation from the Church of Rome, which in the words of Ignatius of Antioch is to preside over the Church in love?”
The Moscow Patriarchate was blunt in its critique. The introduction of women and homosexual bishops would exclude “even the theoretical possibility of the Orthodox churches acknowledging the apostolic succession” of Anglican bishops, Bishop Hilarion of Vienna told Dr. Williams on July 28.
YET ANOTHER PUNCH came on August 1, when Ugandan Archbishop Henry Orombi wrote a letter to The Times (at the newspaper’s invitation), saying that Dr. Williams’ decision to invite to Lambeth the bishops who consecrated Robinson or have sanctioned same-sex blessings was a “further betrayal” that had convinced the “stunned” Ugandan bishops to skip the Conference.
While there are four “instruments” of unity in the Communion, “de facto, there is only one - the Archbishop of Canterbury.” These instruments had “utterly failed” the church, Orombi charged.
Noting that even the Pope is elected by his peers, he said that, “The spiritual leadership of a global communion of independent and autonomous provinces should not be reduced to one man appointed by a secular government.” This, he said, was “a remnant of British colonialism, and it is not serving us well.”
FOLLOWING UPON Orombi’s comments was a call by two senior English bishops, Michael Scott-Joynt of Winchester and Michael Langrish of Exeter, for Williams to negotiate an “orderly separation” of liberals and conservatives while it might still be possible to remain in “some kind of fellowship.”
The anxiety over the direction of the Communion was also reflected in several late night meetings of the conservative Global South primates at Lambeth (most of them not aligned with GAFCON). United in their identification of the problem, the primates were divided as to how to respond, with Dr. Mouneer Anis of Jerusalem and the Middle East and Archbishop John Chew of Southeast Asia counseling forbearance towards Dr. Williams and his policy of delay, while Archbishop Venables and the African primates (believed to have included the archbishops of Sudan, Tanzania and West Africa) urged action.
Their hopes of forging a united front at Lambeth failed, however. While one meeting of the Global South bishops and their supporters from the West took place, and some regional groupings of conservative bishops issued their own statements, they were unable as a body to gather any momentum to promote an alternative to the Conference agenda.
Many bishops spoke of their frustration with the meeting’s secrecy, often asking the media to let them know what was happening at Lambeth, as they did not know. The tight schedule also hindered pre-planned action, as the only time to meet came late at night.
The “Bombshell”
It was only in its last week that Lambeth turned to more pivotal issues.
Hearings were held on the process toward adopting the Anglican Covenant, now in its second draft by the Covenant Design Group, led by West Indies Archbishop Drexel Gomez. Still apparent during Lambeth was that some liberals chafe at the idea of any theological constraints or discipline, while some conservatives worry that the covenant as it stands will not deliver in either respect. Another issue is that the covenant is not an immediate remedy for the Communion. Estimates in Canterbury were that it might be a decade before most provinces have adopted the covenant, though Archbishop Gomez more recently asserted a time frame of three to five years. But for Dr. Williams, a key advantage of the covenant process is that it will shift the onus of deciding who is in or out of the Communion away from his office and onto the provinces, which must choose whether or not to adopt the pact.
More diverting were proposals during Lambeth’s last week from the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG), a panel tasked by Dr. Williams with addressing outstanding questions arising from the Windsor Report, which recommended ways to repair relationships damaged by unilateral pro-gay actions in the North American provinces. Chaired by the retired primate of Jerusalem and the Middle East, Bishop Clive Handford, the WCG took up the question of what was necessary to hold things together in the period leading up to the covenant’s establishment.
Rumored in advance to contain a “bombshell,” the suggestions from the WCG instead included mainly a reassertion of the Windsor-requested moratoria, and a “Pastoral Forum” that many thought resembled the failed Panel of Reference; it would try to respond quickly to conflict situations in the Communion, and encourage compliance with the moratoria. Among a few new twists, though, was the WCG’s suggestion that the Pastoral Forum gather together and hold “in trust” all of the now-foreign-supported parishes and dioceses that have fled their liberal North American provinces - pending reunion of the refugees with those same provinces.
In the case of the covenant and WCG proposals, the Lambeth bishops were only briefed on the work of the committees. While the prelates could offer comments and suggestions, they were not given the authority to develop the relevant documents.
The Culmination
The committee work and the Lambeth group sessions all fed into a final document composed as the meeting was underway.
On August 3, the conference released a closing statement that noted the broad desire for, but difficulty of upholding, a “season of gracious restraint” marked by abstentions from the consecration and blessing of partnered homosexuals, and foreign incursions into the jurisdictions of the North American provinces.
Written as a “Reflections” paper, the 42-page statement was produced by a committee led by Archbishop Roger Herft of Perth. The paper is described as a “narrative” of the meeting, and attempts to summarize the bishops’ discussions on the various issues addressed; it is not a consensus statement of Lambeth’s vision for the Communion or its position on disputed matters. The bishops were asked, not whether they agreed with the document, but “whether they could see their voices” amidst the various reflections it contains.
In addition to the sexuality issue, the Reflections document spoke to concerns over the environment, war, violence to women and children, disease, and hunger, with the bishops particularly endorsing the MDGs. The paper called for a laundry list of social, economic and political reforms - from peace in Korea to an end to the Mugabe regime.
IN THE CLOSING press conference, Dr. Williams said Lambeth had proven that the bishops could speak to each other respectfully and prayerfully, and had a “strong commitment to remain unified.” And the MDG walk showed that, even in “its current rather wobbly state,” the Communion was capable of being a witness for change in the world, he said.
In his final presidential address, Archbishop Williams pledged to seek within two months a “clear and detailed” plan for the new Pastoral Forum. While that committee did its work and the covenant process advanced, he emphasized the need to avoid provocations. He maintained that there was “wide agreement” on the moratoria, but upset some liberals in specifically warning that the Communion would continue in “grave peril” if the North American provinces did not desist from their pro-gay practices.
“The pieces are on the board” for the resolution of the Anglican conflict, he asserted. “And in the months ahead it will be important to invite those absent from Lambeth to be involved in these next stages.” Notably, after refusing calls to convene a Primates’ Meeting before Lambeth, the Archbishop said he would bring the primates together in early 2009.
Dr. Williams also acknowledged that unlike the ’98 Conference, which ended with a one million-pound surplus, the 2008 Conference had run into debt. According to an internal Conference document distributed to registered bishops, the budget for the meeting was 4.4 million pounds, and 1.2 million for the Spouses’ Conference, excluding the costs of travel to Canterbury. On August 11, the Board of Governors of the Church Commissioners of the Church of England extended an emergency loan of 600,000 pounds to help cover the estimated 1.2 million-pound shortfall. Inevitably, the small but wealthy Episcopal Church was asked for assistance as well.
Was It Worth It?
Defined in his terms, the Lambeth Conference was a success for Dr. Williams. Between July 16 and August 3 the Anglican Communion did not break apart. The strategy of setting left against right in pursuit of dialogue for the sake of delay, as articulated in the revelatory 2003 memo, proved effective.
Many bishops agreed, writing with relief that the Communion was safe and that this time around, the Pastoral Forum, the Windsor Continuation Group, and the Anglican Covenant would make all the difference.
Others – on both the left and the right - questioned the Archbishop’s criteria for success.
“The miracle hasn’t happened,” Archbishop Venables said on his last day at Lambeth. While it was not announced during Lambeth, a “division [remains] over what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be a church,” he said. “So far we have held it together by appealing to diversity,” but that was not enough, as the point had been reached where conscience dictated that the church take a stand.
The idea of a moratorium was “attractive,” but it was clear that the “North Americans will not stop doing what they are doing, and they have said so,” he noted. “And I’m not going to stop now” in supporting North American faithful, said the prelate, who has taken one former TEC diocese under his wing, with possibly three more to follow this fall. “There is no safe place for them.”
“Liberalism is now totalitarianism,” he maintained. “There is no place for those who don’t agree.”
Lambeth 2008 did not “get to the root of the process problem. We talk but nothing is decided,” he said. There are “no ground rules to define the Anglican Church,” and we now have “no way of avoiding the division.”
When Venables met later in August with fellow members of the Primates’ Council of GAFCON – now called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans - the leaders, while not rejecting the Windsor or covenant processes outright, said it was clear that some in the Communion would keep sanctioning sinful practices, and that Lambeth offered nothing new to address the situation; hence, the FCA’s efforts to reform and renew the Communion would go forward.
WRITING IN his diocesan newspaper upon his return to Washington, leading liberal Bishop John Chane was not sanguine about the Communion’s future prospects, either, and defended his decision not to honor the moratoria.
In his attempts to be non-partial, Dr. Williams had favored the right, Bishop Chane charged. “There was far too much recognition of those who chose not to participate in this Lambeth Conference and far too little recognition of those bishops who chose to come,” he contended. Moreover, homosexuals continued to be a scapegoat for the Communion’s troubles. “Blaming the least among us continues to divert our attention away from the issues that threaten the very existence of humankind and the environmental health of our planet,” he wrote.
“I for one will not ask for any more sacrifices to be made by persons in our church who have been made outcasts because of their sexual orientation,” Chane said. “The Anglican Communion must face the hard truth that when we scapegoat and victimize one group of people in the church, all of us become victims of our own prejudice and sinfulness.”
Chane was publicly joined in his “no retreat” posture by Los Angeles Bishop Jon Bruno, California Bishop Marc Andrus, New Jersey Bishop Mark Beckwith, and Massachusetts Bishop M. Thomas Shaw. Also indicating the unlikelihood of a rollback was Archbishop Fred Hiltz of the Anglican Church of Canada, where one diocese already performs same-sex blessings, and four others want to implement them.
For her part, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori contended in a post-Lambeth webcast that TEC for some time has been observing the “season of gracious restraint,” and that only the General Convention could do anything about these issues.
But she added that, “We were very clear (that), for an overwhelming majority of the bishops of this church…the well being and adequate and appropriate pastoral care of gay and lesbian members of [TEC] is a significant mission issue for us,” and that individual bishops “have always made their own decisions within the canonical responsibilities of their dioceses.”
THAT THERE will be no real change in business as usual, Lambeth notwithstanding, was further made clear on September 18, when Bishop Jefferts Schori presided over a House of Bishops’ meeting that voted to depose conservative Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan.
Acting only five days after being formally notified that the matter would be considered at the HOB meeting in Salt Lake City, U.S. prelates agreed that Duncan had “abandoned the communion” of TEC by holding that his diocese may realign with another part of the Anglican Communion – to which TEC still claims to belong. The Pittsburgh diocese was not due to vote on realignment until October 4.
The move to defrock this leading U.S. defender of the historic faith effectively ended the “season of gracious restraint,” and repudiated Dr. Williams’ authority. As well, it had, at this writing, sparked an international backlash that had half a dozen senior Church of England bishops siding with Duncan, and former Southern Cone Primate Colin Bazley spearheading a call for Williams to suspend TEC from the Communion and support a new North American province.
DR. WILLIAMS’ one opportunity, perhaps until 2018, to convince the bishops that the Communion was more than an antiquarian institution, that it stood for something more than nostalgia, was lost in a swirl of debt, dissension and busy work. While no formal statements on human sexuality were overturned or issued, the move towards making all points of view valid - of countenancing the equivalency of sociology, experience, and psychology with Scripture, Tradition and reason - marked the end of an era.
While the via negativa, the unknowability of God, may have triumphed in a graduate seminar, as a model for leading the church it does not suffice. Dr. Williams’ belief in the absence of a single truth - or the potential for truth to be found in conflict - coupled with the Communion’s weak political structures, has brought the Communion to this point.
END
THE REV. GEORGE CONGER is chief correspondent for The Church of England Newspaper, and over the past ten years has written widely for a variety of newspapers, magazines and journals on the Anglican Communion and religious and political affairs. Educated at Duke, Yale and Oxford Universities, he is an honorary canon of St. Matthews Cathedral in Dallas, and chaplain to Treasure Coast Hospice in Fort Pierce, Florida.
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