Rowan Cantuar's final address to the Lambeth Conference is available here.
He says, at one point, "this is emphatically not about forcing others to conform."
I wish I believed him.
The recommendations of the Windsor Report, without any formal process of consent or reception, has effectively been transformed into an edict to which the whole Communion is expected to submit. Similarly, the preliminary observations - note the word preliminary!!! - of the Windsor Continuation Group have now been enshrined as the immutable roadmap to the future.
Rowan, with no real consultation and no real consent, is seeking to impose a centralized and curial Anglicanism that effectively guts provincial autonomy. Under this centralized, curial Anglicanism, we would never have had room to consider our approaches to divorced Christians, nor to consider the role and ministry of women in the Church. We would have been held back until and unless there was broad agreement across the Communion. But the breadth of agreement which does exist on these issues has emerged largely because people have experienced the graceful lives of divorced and remarried Christians, because people have experienced the graceful ministry of ordained women.
I wish I could trust. I want to trust.
But today, I find myself unable to trust.
3 comments:
The Status Quo won't save the communion.
Rowan, with no real consultation and no real consent, is seeking to impose a centralized and curial Anglicanism that effectively guts provincial autonomy.
Seems to me that he was simply summing up the majority view of the Indaba groups - the most extensive method of consultation that has ever happened at a Lambeth Conference.
And as for consent, I quote the following from the blog of Jonathan Gledhill, Bshop of Lichfield:
This morning a minor miracle takes place. Our Indaba group, drawn almost from every nation under heaven, agrees all but unanimously on the way ahead for the Anglican Communion. We agree to a moratorium on actively gay bishops, on same-sex blessings and incursions from other provinces until a Covenant can be drawn up...
Forty-three out of forty-five bishops agree to the moratoria and the Pastoral Forum and the other two more or less cancel each other out. There is one bishop who says that this would be too hard for his gay and lesbian people and another who says that the American church must repent before we can restore fellowship.
Sounds like pretty broad consent to me.
I'm probably even ready to set aside my own skepticism on the Covenant. And I'll leave aside the fact that this was broad consent among a narrow subset of the Church (ie, only bishops). I'll even leave aside that, after nearly two years of pretending thr Windsor Report was an authoritative statement, it is hardly surprising that people simply give in to what seems inevitable.
None of that relives me of the anxiety I feel that this leads us to a curial Anglicanism, alien to the Church to which I came.
Doubtless I'll feel better after a few days.
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