Analysis: Will the Lambeth Conference bring peace to the Anglican world?

From Religious Intelligence:

Monday, 18th August 2008. 2:39pm

By Paul Richardson

Chou En Lai excited ridicule for saying it was still too soon to judge the results of the French Revolution but such caution is the wisest response to this year’s Lambeth Conference. This hasn’t stopped two bishops telling The Sunday Telegraph we need an ‘orderly separation’ of liberals and traditionalists or The Times declaring that Anglicans have ‘reaffirmed their mutual bonds’ or Theo Hobson moaning to readers of The Guardian that Rowan Williams has stamped his authority on the Anglican Communion and turned his back on liberalism, but the wide spectrum of comment being offered tells us the dust has still to settle.


Analysis: Will the Lambeth Conference bring peace to the Anglican world?

Actually it is hard to see how there could be an ‘orderly separation’ between traditionalists and liberals because in many cases the fault-lines do not lie between provinces but within them. In America attempts are to be made in September to depose traditionalist bishops while court battles rage over church property. There is nothing orderly about this.

It is also hard to see how Anglicans can be said to have ‘reaffirmed their mutual bonds’ when bishops at Gafcon committed themselves to setting up a ‘province of North America’ as an alternative to the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

Rowan Williams is pinning his hope on the Covenant and on a ‘Pastoral Forum’ made up of members representative of the breadth of the Communion and able to travel and offer, in the words of the Windsor Continuation Group, ‘pastoral advice and guidelines in conflicted, confused and fragile situations’. There is no guarantee that either the Covenant or the Pastoral Forum will prove acceptable to the Communion. There are questions about whether Parliament would give its approval to the Church of England entering the Covenant if this were seen as narrowing the broad national and popular base of the church.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury told the final Lambeth press conference, winning support for the Covenant among the 44 national and regional churches of the Communion could take up to 2013. That date coincides with the call by some bishops at Lambeth for another gathering in five years’ time. If Williams intends to see the matter through to some kind of resolution, he may be residing in Lambeth Palace for some years to come. Fortunately he is only 58.

In the meantime it remains essential to keep the moratoria on the ordination of gay and lesbian priests and the blessing of same-sex unions in place. It is difficult to see this happening if traditionalist bishops from elsewhere in the Communion continue to take parishes and dioceses in the US under their wing or ordain bishops for North America. The diocese of Fort Worth is set to follow the example of San Joaquin and enter the Province of the Southern Cone (fully represented at Lambeth). The pressures on American bishops to respond to outside interference by disregarding the moratoria will be enormous, especially in those places such as California seeking to legalise same-sex marriage.

There can be little doubt that Lambeth was a personal triumph for Rowan Williams. If many of the bishops wondered where the conference was leading and found their indaba groups frustrating, there was general agreement that the archbishop was right to point to the concrete benefits and importance of remaining in Communion.

In his final, powerful address he remind the bishops that ‘the global horizon of the Church matters because churches without this are always in danger of slowly surrendering to the culture around them and losing sight of their calling to challenge that culture’.

He went to confess that ‘the Church of England was, for a long time, so involved in the structures of power in this nation that it had little to say that was properly critical’ and to argue that it was the determination of Zimbabwean Anglicans to stay united with the rest of the Anglican family that helped give them the resolution to repudiate elements in their church that are ready to work with Mugabe.

Reference to Zimbabwe reminds us of underlying factors in the current division in Anglicanism that are rarely openly discussed. Zimbabwean Anglicans do want to remain united to the Anglican Communion even though vast majority hold conservative views on both homosexuality and the ordination of women. But they trace their history back to high church missionary societies such as UMCA and SPG. Churches represented at Gafcon came overwhelmingly from the evangelical parts of the Communion evangelised by CMS. There were bishops there from Ghana and one or two other high church African provinces as well as US traditionalists but these bishops also came to Lambeth.

Even if the Communion overcomes the immediate causes of division it will be important to address the underlying factors. Part of the problem is that, while bright young Catholic students, whether they be Thomists, liberation theologians, or Augustinians, all flock to Rome to study, Anglicans study in different parts of the Communion and, for the most part, read different texts.

St Augustine’s College, Canterbury, tried to bring Anglicans together. It is time to think of a replacement where Anglicans from different theological traditions can come together to learn from each other.