No votes, no resolutions — a typical Anglican fudge?
The Lambeth Conference, the once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops from around the globe, has come up with what it hopes will be the perfect solution for avoiding any mud-slinging.
No news could be said to be good news for the beleaguered church right now and the organisers of the Anglican summit in the English cathedral city of Canterbury may well have the Zulus to thank for that.
Anglicanism has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons as conservatives and liberals lock horns in an increasingly bitter war of words over the ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. Up to a quarter of the bishops have stayed away from Lambeth in protest, a move that has shaken the Anglican Communion but, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Willliams says, will not lead to a schism.
Lambeth organisers have come up with a solution to keep the angry rhetoric to a minimum, hoping that their gathering will be given much more anodyne coverage.
The bishops are being split up into “Indaba” groups of about 40. Indaba is a Zulu word for “a gathering for purposeful discussion.”
But the organisers, explaining the concept, warned that even after two weeks of the bishops putting their heads together on every subject from evangelism to transforming society, “Indaba is not shaped for producing a communique, an encycical letter or a text.”
“Indaba is open-ended conversation,” they explained. Open-ended, but not open to the media — we can’t attend the sessions and report on how they actually work.
Bishop Gene Robinson reflects on ever present threats
Sitting in the sun-kissed grounds of a London church, U.S.Bishop Gene Robinson reflected in sombre mood on what it meant to be the first openly gay bishop in the 450-year history of the Anglican church.
Robinson, a divorced father of two, has received death threats and wore a bulletproof vest at his consecration back in 2003. Two uniformed police officers stood guard last month as he entered into a civil partnership with his longtime partner. He was heckled when preaching in London over the weekend.
“I take the threats very seriously, I have to,” he said. “But I am not interested in being a martyr, I just want to be a bishop.”
Robinson’s visit to Britain concides with the Lambeth Conference, the ten-yearly meeting of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion, but he has not been invited to attend. So he has several speaking engagements outside of the conference, including a sermon at Saint Mary’s Church in the Putney section of London on Sunday where he urged Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to show firmer leadership and get conservative foes to tone down homophobic taunts.
In an interview with Reuters, there was no hiding the disappointment in his voice when talking about Williams’ decision not to invite him. And he repeated that he felt it was high time Williams took a stand against Conservative opponents who taunted him with homophobic mockery.
“There is no place in the Christian Church for someone to say Satan has entered the church with my consecration or that gay people are lower than dogs,” the 61-year-old bishop said.
“You cannot say those kind of things about gays and lesbians people and then be shocked when there is violence against them,” he said.
Er, in the first paragraph of my preceding post, that should have been “aspersions,” not “dispersions”. Though come to think of it, Mrs. Boyle & I are certainly on different wavelengths, and this thread is undeniably diffuse, lol.
“I’ll be at Lambeth telling my story…” — Gene Robinson
Bishop Gene Robinson hasn’t been invited to the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference, which opens next week, but he’s sure to be in the news all the same. The openly gay Episcopal bishop, whose consecration in 2003 sparked a near-schism by traditionalist Anglicans from the Global South, plans to preach in churches, attend receptions and appear at a film premiere in Britain before, during and after Lambeth (details below). He also plans to blog at a site called Canterbury Tales from the Fringe. Extensive coverage seems guaranteed.
The absence of the Communion’s most critical conservatives should heighten Robinson’s media presence. Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who led the rival GAFCON conference in Jerusalem last month, is boycotting the ten-yearly Lambeth Conference, as are four other traditionalist primates. So it seems unlikely that reporters there will hear headline-grabbing sound bites like accusations of apostasy against Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (as Akinola made at GAFCON) or charges that gay hit men might be ready to whack their critics (as Uganda’s Archbishop Henry Orombi said in a recent sermon).
Mike Conlon has blogged here about the effort to lower the Lambeth Conference’s profile, which could indirectly raise Robinson’s. The 1998 session was dominated by a divisive debate about homosexuality and voting on a resolution “rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture.” That makes headlines. This time around, the organisers seem to have taken the wind out of the critics’ sails by drawing up an agenda with no voting rounds on it. “Everything they’ve suggested says there won’t be any voting of any kind at any point,” said Jim Naughton, spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
Apart from his Canterbury Tales blog, another one called The Gene Pool will also be on the lookout for “Gene sightings.” In a video on that blog, Robinson puts a biblical twist on his non-invitation to the conference:
“When I think about being banished to the marketplace, it occurs to me that that’s where Jesus would be. Jesus would be with the marginalized. He was always in conflict with the religious authorities of his day. He was always preaching that people trump rules…
“I’ll be at Lambeth and I’ll be telling my story and I will be witnessing to the God that I know as powerfully as I can muster. Then I’ll let the Holy Spirit do the rest.”
Robinson has already arrived in Britain. According to a letter by him posted on The Lead at The Episcopal Cafe,
Thursday, July 10: I will be speaking at the Modern Churchperson’s Union conference (along with former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, the Primate of Wales, and several African bishops).
Is Benedict planning to take in traditionalist Anglicans?
There is speculation in Rome that Pope Benedict might receive about 400,000 (yes, 400,000) Traditional Anglican Communion members into the Roman Catholic Church this summer, after the official Anglican Communion finishes its ten-yearly Lambeth Conference on August 3. Both the Church of England Newspaper in the U.K. and the National Catholic Register in the U.S. have run stories on this. Both sides are subscribers only, so all links here are to reports about them.
According to the Church of England Newspaper, talks between the Vatican and the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) focus on the question of whether a group can enter into full communion with Rome as an independent rite, similar to the Eastern rite churches that keep their own traditions and leadership. That sounds like it means they would want to use the Book of Common Prayer, keep their married clergy and retain some autonomy of member churches.
The newspaper quotes the Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, Texas, the Rt Rev Jack Iker — now in Rome on study leave — that “it is thought that the Pope is sympathetic to the dilemma of traditionalists in the Anglican way.”
It noted that “no formal dialogue exists between TAC and the (Council) for Promoting Christian Unity — the Vatican agency tasked with ecumenical relations.” Catholic Online commented:“The TAC may be getting ahead of itself on how quickly such a request will be acted upon.”
This is still speculation and we have no inside track on this. But it should be noted that Benedict has shown a taste for surprising us on such issues. Remember the baptism of the Italian Muslim Magdi Allam at Easter? The Vatican dicastery following Islam reportedly knew nothing about that in advance, even though it caused a flap in Vatican-Muslim relations.
Benedict also kept his cards close to his chest when he wrote the text of the new Latin Good Friday prayer that upset Jews when it came out. Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose Pontifical Council for Christian Unity includes the office for relations with Judaism, was not informed about the exact wording until near its publication, at which point it was also a fait accompli. One would have thought he should have been told, but…
Those weren’t the only rabbits he’s pulled out of a hat. Benedict upset French bishops in 2006 by recognising the Institute of the Good Shepherd, a group of five traditionalist priests in Bordeaux who had fallen out with the schismatic SSPX group and asked to return to Rome. The pope made them answerable to him, not the local archbishop (Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who also happened to be the head of the bishops conference at the time). Benedict let these returning priests use the old Tridentine rite that the French bishops did not want to see restored (and had not yet been boosted by the pope’s motu proprio ). All this was presented to the French bishops as a fait accompli and the official statements they made about it afterwards, when loyalty to the pope meant they had to defend the decision, were noticably lukewarm.
“Do you think Benedict would do that to Rowan?”
In fact, Rowan would see “that” as a good thing.
Those anglo-catholics who oppose women ordinations will have a place to go… out of the “anglicanism” he works for.
Provocative Harper’s essay on Anglican split over gays
The June issue of “Harper’s Magazine” has a provocative essay by Garret Keizer called “Turning Away From Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church.”
The split in the global Anglican Communion over the consecration of the openly gay U.S. Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson and the broader issue of the church’s take on sexual orientation and other social issues in general has been extensively reported on.
These fault lines are partly but far from exclusively geographical, dividing more traditional churches in the developing world — especially Africa — from those in the developed world. It threatens to undermine Anglican provinces like the Episcopal Church in the United States by creating competing authorities within them, one for a more liberal majority and another for a conservative minority.
Dissecting the jargon of the conflict, Keizer sees parallels between the corporate world and the shifting currents of globalization. “What is ‘provincial realignment,’ at bottom, if not the ecclesiastical version of a corporate merger? What is ‘alternative oversight,’ if not church talk for a hostile takeover?,” he writes, seeing these comparisons in the methods rather than the motives of those involved.
He also chimes in on a theme that has been raised in different ways elsewhere by others in dicussions of America’s Religious Right: “How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson.”
Keizer is an Episcopalian, former priest and contributing editor to Harper’s.
The Anglican split will be back in the headlines in coming weeks as Gene Robinson marries his partner, conservative Anglicans meet in Amman and Jerusalem and the Anglican Communion — minus some conservatives led by Akinola — convenes for its once-every-ten-years Lambeth Conference. What do you think the Anglican Communion will look like after this rocky patch passes?
Once the orthodox Christians leave Canterbury, the old Anglican group will be just another ho-hum liberal social activism group. It will also experience a decline in revenue. The true believers give most of the money. Liberals are cheap. Check the studies.
Lambeth Conference: News or Not?
It has been spoken of as a setting for schism. But could the Lambeth Conference — the worldwide Anglican Communion‘s once-a-decade global meeting beginning July 16 in England — be a bust when it comes to headline-making news?
That’s the way leaders of the U.S. Episcopal Church see it. There will be no grand pronouncements made or resolutions voted on, they say. The traditional Western parliamentary idea that produces winners and losers on debated issues has been scrapped for face-to-face meetings. Some of them have been baptized ”Indaba groups,” which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as a Zulu term denoting “a meeting for purposeful discussion among equals.”
The Rev. Ian Douglas, a professor of World Christianity at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts who helped plan the meeting, recently told reporters at a briefing:
“I appreciate that it’s going to be a hard job for the media because there isn’t a focal point of up-down decison making, and that (much) of what’s really happening … is going to be happening in very small, very close one-on-one relationships and deep conversation.
“I don’t envy your job. It’s going to be difficult to get ‘the story’ out of Lambeth unless you want to tell the story that as leaders come together to be better equipped in their service to God’s mission in the wider world, not only is the Anglican Communion strengthened but God’s purposes are better fulfilled in the wider world. It’s a tough story to tell but I think it’s a story.”
The 1998 Lambeth Conference did produce news — a resolution known as Lambeth 1:10 that said homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture. That pronouncement became a major part of the splintering now going on in the worldwide church after the American branch in 2003 installed the first the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of Anglican history — Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
Robinson was not invited to this summer’s meeting at Canterbury though he plans a fringe presence — after he weds his long-time partner in June.
I am a mother of a homosexual son and I have observed this brave human-being coming to terms with whom he really is.My heart aches for all homosexuals and lesbians whose sexuality has been discussed in such depth over the last few weeks and that so many in past years had to hide their identity. Lets pray that the Lambeth Conference will heal wounds and that with Gods help the church will seek to confirm that we are all equal in the eyes of God.I have noticed that many gay friends have extroadinary compassion and empathy for other people.I suspect it is because they have suffered so much themselves.I am so thankful that I have a large family who supports my son completely without reservation.I pray that the church one day will be able to do this so that all gay people will feel accepted,whole and most of all truly loved.
Rowan’s response to Anglican crisis has something for everyone
Reporters are often accused of “pack journalism” when they essentially write the same story from an event. So what should we call it when they write different reports about the same thing? That happened on Friday when Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams issued his Advent message. This was the long-awaited statement of his views on the crisis tearing away at the Anglican Communion. It turned out to be a grab-bag with something for everyone.
Jim Naughton over at The Lead blog on Episcopal Café noticed the problem and highlighted it in a quick review of the stories about the Advent message. The list shows how the same text can spawn different articles. For example, our story’s lead went for a broad overview, the AP story stressed a U.S. angle and the British papers highlighted details of the Anglican disputes.
“Reporters had their hands full yesterday trying to figure out how to pull a “lede” out of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter about the state of the Anglican Communion,” Naughton wrote. “He dumped cold water on everybody, so how to determine which side was wetter?”
Naughton, a veteran journalist who is spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, added: “One thing I’ve picked up in conversations with reporters is how weary they are of covering this story, and what a difficult time they have in determining the significance of any given event. Many of them fervently wish the story would go away.”
This story is difficult to cover and some journalists might wish it would go away. But there’s no sign it will. The Lambeth Conference, a 10-yearly meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world, is coming up next July. We can probably expect more disputes over openly gay clergy and blessings for same-sex couples, more defections from the Episcopal Church and more warning declarations from the Global South as it approaches. If that weren’t enough, Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, plans to marry his partner only a few weeks before Lambeth begins. “I always wanted to be a June bride,” the University of Miami news service reported him as saying last month.
Do readers want this story to go away? Do they think it will?
It seems to me that gay clergy are showing themselves to be seeking to exploit the church for political agenda, rather than honoring their claim of being equally represented in it. They want to pick and choose which tenents to follow.. demanding preferential treatment in the faith, rather than respecting the teachings of the faith.
The Archbishop hasn’t stated that gays are unwelcome, rather if they wish to be members of the priesthood, they can not engage in what the church views as a sin.
One also has to wonder why gays in the church hierarchy haven’t addressed various other sins as well. Such as the racism that exists in the gay community. In California, it’s an open wound that is very visible. Gay “activists” like to use the term “civil rights”, but fail to respect the civil rights of others. Hypocrites should be exposed.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Society today is “enlightened” and “non-discriminatory”? I’ve got to laugh!!
What’s enlightened about eugenics, broken families, mass consumerism, ASBO kids and the complete collapse of British family through divorce and gay marriage?
What’s non-discriminatory about designer’s babies, mass abortion, secularism, PC, “gay power”?
What’s enlightened and non-discriminatory when vivsection gets more headline attention than terminally ill NHS cancer patients? Liberal do-gooders really live in their own world.