Archbishop - 'Challenge and hope' for the Anglican
Communion

27th June 2006


The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams has
set out his thinking on the future of the Anglican
Communion in the wake of the deliberations in the
United States on the Windsor Report and the Anglican
Communion at the 75th General Convention of The
Episcopal Church (USA). ‘The Challenge and Hope of
Being an Anglican Today, A Reflection for the Bishops,
Clergy and Faithful of the Anglican Communion’, has
been sent to Primates with a covering letter,
published more widely and made available as audio on
the internet. In it, Dr Williams says that the
strength of the Anglican tradition has been in
maintaining a balance between the absolute priority of
the Bible, a catholic loyalty to the sacraments and a
habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual
flexibility:


“To accept that each of these has a place in the
church’s life and that they need each other means that
the enthusiasts for each aspect have to be prepared to
live with certain tensions or even sacrifices. The
only reason for being an Anglican is that this balance
seems to you to be healthy for the Church Catholic” 


Dr Williams acknowledges that the debate following the
consecration of a practising gay bishop has posed
challenges for the unity of the church. He stresses
that the key issue now for the church is not about the
human rights of homosexual people, but about how the
church makes decisions in a responsible way.


“It is imperative to give the strongest support to the
defence of homosexual people against violence, bigotry
and legal disadvantage, to appreciate the role played
in the life of the church by people of homosexual
orientation…”


The debate in the Anglican Communion had for many, he
says, become much harder after the consecration in
2003 which could be seen to have pre-empted the
outcome. The structures of the Communion had struggled
to cope with the resulting effects: 


“… whatever the presenting issue, no member Church can
make significant decisions unilaterally and still
expect this to make no difference to how it is
regarded in the fellowship; this would be
uncomfortably like saying that every member could
redefine the terms of belonging as and when it suited
them. Some actions – and sacramental actions in
particular - just do have the effect of putting a
Church outside or even across the central stream of
the life they have shared with other Churches.”


Dr Williams says that the divisions run through as
well as between the different Provinces of the
Anglican Communion and this would make a solution
difficult. He favours the exploration of a formal
Covenant agreement between the Provinces of the
Anglican Communion as providing a possible way
forward. Under such a scheme, member provinces that
chose to would make a formal but voluntary commitment
to each other. 


“Those churches that were prepared to take this on as
an expression of their responsibility to each other
would limit their local freedoms for the sake of a
wider witness: some might not be willing to do this.
We could arrive at a situation where there were
‘constituent’ Churches in the Anglican Communion and
other ‘churches in association’, which were bound by
historic and perhaps personal links, fed from many of
the same sources but not bound in a single and
unrestricted sacramental communion and not sharing the
same constitutional structures”.


Different views within a province might mean that
local churches had to consider what kind of
relationship they wanted with each other. This,
though, might lead to a more positive understanding of
unity: 


“It could mean the need for local Churches to work at
ordered and mutually respectful separation between
constituent and associated elements; but it could also
mean a positive challenge for churches to work out
what they believed to be involved in belonging in a
global sacramental fellowship, a chance to rediscover
a positive common obedience to the mystery of God’s
gift that was not a matter of coercion from above but
that of ‘waiting for each other’ that St Paul commends
to the Corinthians.”


Dr Williams stresses that the matter cannot be
resolved by his decree:


“ … the idea of an Archbishop of Canterbury resolving
any of this by decree is misplaced, however tempting
for many. The Archbishop of Canterbury presides and
convenes in the Communion, and may … outline the
theological framework in which a problem should be
addressed; but he must always act collegially, with
the bishops of his own local Church and with the
primates and the other instruments of communion.”


“That is why the process currently going forward of
assessing our situation in the wake of the General
Convention is a shared one. But it is nonetheless
possible for the Churches of the Communion to decide
that this is indeed the identity, the living tradition
– and by God’s grace, the gift - we want to share with
the rest of the Christian world in the coming
generation; more importantly still, that this is a
valid and vital way of presenting the Good News of
Jesus Christ to the world. My hope is that the period
ahead - of detailed response to the work of General
Convention, exploration of new structures, and further
refinement of the covenant model - will renew our
positive appreciation of the possibilities of our
heritage so that we can pursue our mission with deeper
confidence and harmony.”


The Primates of the Anglican Communion will meet early
next year to consider the matter. In the meantime, a
group appointed by the Joint Standing Committee of the
ACC and the Primates will be assisting Dr Williams in
considering the resolutions of the 75th General
Convention of The Episcopal Church (USA) in response
to the questions posed by the Windsor Report.


ENDS


The audio version can be found here at: 


http://db.astream.com/cofe/060627%20Archbishop's%20reflection%20on%20communion.mp3


Archbishop's letter to Primates:

"Following last week's General Convention of the
Episcopal Church (USA), I have been preparing some
personal reflections on the challenges that lie ahead
for us within the Anglican Communion. I have addressed
these reflections to a wide readership in the Anglican
Communion and they are being made public today on my
website. I wanted to bring them to your attention
accordingly, for you to draw to the attention of
members of your Province in whatever way you see fit. 


These reflections are in no way intended to pre-empt
the necessary process of careful assessment of the
Episcopal Church's response to the Windsor Report.
Rather they are intended to focus the question of what
kind of Anglican Communion we wish to be and to
explore how this vision might become more of a
reality. 


I am also sending you a copy of the press statement I
issued at the close of General Convention, which you
will see mentions the Joint Standing Committee working
party that will be assisting in evaluating the outcome
of the 75th General Convention.


I shall be writing to you again later this week, to
invite your own response to me to various questions as
the Communion’s discernment process moves ahead. 


Rowan CANTUAR:”


Text of reflection


The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today: A
Reflection for the Bishops, Clergy and Faithful of the
Anglican Communion


The Anglican Communion: a Church in Crisis? 


What is the current tension in the Anglican Communion
actually about? Plenty of people are confident that
they know the answer. It’s about gay bishops, or
possibly women bishops. The American Church is in
favour and others are against – and the Church of
England is not sure (as usual).


It’s true that the election of a practising gay person
as a bishop in the US in 2003 was the trigger for much
of the present conflict. It is doubtless also true
that a lot of extra heat is generated in the conflict
by ingrained and ignorant prejudice in some quarters;
and that for many others, in and out of the Church,
the issue seems to be a clear one about human rights
and dignity. But the debate in the Anglican Communion
is not essentially a debate about the human rights of
homosexual people. It is possible – indeed, it is
imperative – to give the strongest support to the
defence of homosexual people against violence, bigotry
and legal disadvantage, to appreciate the role played
in the life of the church by people of homosexual
orientation, and still to believe that this doesn’t
settle the question of whether the Christian Church
has the freedom, on the basis of the Bible, and its
historic teachings, to bless homosexual partnerships
as a clear expression of God’s will. That is disputed
among Christians, and, as a bare matter of fact, only
a small minority would answer yes to the question.


Unless you think that social and legal considerations
should be allowed to resolve religious disputes –
which is a highly risky assumption if you also believe
in real freedom of opinion in a diverse society –
there has to be a recognition that religious bodies
have to deal with the question in their own terms.
Arguments have to be drawn up on the common basis of
Bible and historic teaching. And, to make clear
something that can get very much obscured in the
rhetoric about ‘inclusion’, this is not and should
never be a question about the contribution of gay and
lesbian people as such to the Church of God and its
ministry, about the dignity and value of gay and
lesbian people. Instead it is a question, agonisingly
difficult for many, as to what kinds of behaviour a
Church that seeks to be loyal to the Bible can bless,
and what kinds of behaviour it must warn against – and
so it is a question about how we make decisions
corporately with other Christians, looking together
for the mind of Christ as we share the study of the
Scriptures. 


Anglican Decision-Making 


And this is where the real issue for Anglicans arises.
How do we as Anglicans deal with this issue ‘in our
own terms’? And what most Anglicans worldwide have
said is that it doesn’t help to behave as if the
matter had been resolved when in fact it hasn’t. It is
true that, in spite of resolutions and declarations of
intent, the process of ‘listening to the experience’
of homosexual people hasn’t advanced very far in most
of our churches, and that discussion remains at a very
basic level for many. But the decision of the
Episcopal Church to elect a practising gay man as a
bishop was taken without even the American church
itself (which has had quite a bit of discussion of the
matter) having formally decided as a local Church what
it thinks about blessing same-sex partnerships.


There are other fault lines of division, of course,
including the legitimacy of ordaining women as priests
and bishops. But (as has often been forgotten) the
Lambeth Conference did resolve that for the time being
those churches that did ordain women as priests and
bishops and those that did not had an equal place
within the Anglican spectrum. Women bishops attended
the last Lambeth Conference. There is a fairly general
(though not universal) recognition that differences
about this can still be understood within the spectrum
of manageable diversity about what the Bible and the
tradition make possible. On the issue of practising
gay bishops, there has been no such agreement, and it
is not unreasonable to seek for a very much wider and
deeper consensus before any change is in view, let
alone foreclosing the debate by ordaining someone,
whatever his personal merits, who was in a practising
gay partnership. The recent resolutions of the General
Convention have not produced a complete response to
the challenges of the Windsor Report, but on this
specific question there is at the very least an
acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation in the
extremely hard work that went into shaping the wording
of the final formula. 


Very many in the Anglican Communion would want the
debate on the substantive ethical question to go on as
part of a general process of theological discernment;
but they believe that the pre-emptive action taken in
2003 in the US has made such a debate harder not
easier, that it has reinforced the lines of division
and led to enormous amounts of energy going into
‘political’ struggle with and between churches in
different parts of the world. However, institutionally
speaking, the Communion is an association of local
churches, not a single organisation with a controlling
bureaucracy and a universal system of law. So
everything depends on what have generally been
unspoken conventions of mutual respect. Where these
are felt to have been ignored, it is not surprising
that deep division results, with the politicisation of
a theological dispute taking the place of reasoned
reflection. 


Thus if other churches have said, in the wake of the
events of 2003 that they cannot remain fully in
communion with the American Church, this should not be
automatically seen as some kind of blind bigotry
against gay people. Where such bigotry does show
itself it needs to be made clear that it is
unacceptable; and if this is not clear, it is not at
all surprising if the whole question is reduced in the
eyes of many to a struggle between justice and violent
prejudice. It is saying that, whatever the presenting
issue, no member Church can make significant decisions
unilaterally and still expect this to make no
difference to how it is regarded in the fellowship;
this would be uncomfortably like saying that every
member could redefine the terms of belonging as and
when it suited them. Some actions – and sacramental
actions in particular - just do have the effect of
putting a Church outside or even across the central
stream of the life they have shared with other
Churches. It isn’t a question of throwing people into
outer darkness, but of recognising that actions have
consequences – and that actions believed in good faith
to be ‘prophetic’ in their radicalism are likely to
have costly consequences. 


Truth and Unity 


It is true that witness to what is passionately
believed to be the truth sometimes appears a higher
value than unity, and there are moving and inspiring
examples in the twentieth century. If someone
genuinely thinks that a move like the ordination of a
practising gay bishop is that sort of thing, it is
understandable that they are prepared to risk the
breakage of a unity they can only see as false or
corrupt. But the risk is a real one; and it is never
easy to recognise when the moment of inevitable
separation has arrived - to recognise that this is the
issue on which you stand or fall and that this is the
great issue of faithfulness to the gospel. The nature
of prophetic action is that you do not have a
cast-iron guarantee that you’re right.


But let’s suppose that there isn’t that level of
clarity about the significance of some divisive issue.
If we do still believe that unity is generally a way
of coming closer to revealed truth (‘only the whole
Church knows the whole Truth’ as someone put it), we
now face some choices about what kind of Church we as
Anglicans are or want to be. Some speak as if it would
be perfectly simple – and indeed desirable – to
dissolve the international relationships, so that
every local Church could do what it thought right.
This may be tempting, but it ignores two things at
least.


First, it fails to see that the same problems and the
same principles apply within local Churches as between
Churches. The divisions don’t run just between
national bodies at a distance, they are at work in
each locality, and pose the same question: are we
prepared to work at a common life which doesn’t just
reflect the interests and beliefs of one group but
tries to find something that could be in everyone’s
interest – recognising that this involves different
sorts of costs for everyone involved? It may be
tempting to say, ‘let each local church go its own
way’; but once you’ve lost the idea that you need to
try to remain together in order to find the fullest
possible truth, what do you appeal to in the local
situation when serious division threatens? 


Second, it ignores the degree to which we are already
bound in with each other’s life through a vast network
of informal contacts and exchanges. These are not the
same as the formal relations of ecclesiastical
communion, but they are real and deep, and they would
be a lot weaker and a lot more casual without those
more formal structures. They mean that no local Church
and no group within a local Church can just settle
down complacently with what it or its surrounding
society finds comfortable. The Church worldwide is not
simply the sum total of local communities. It has a
cross-cultural dimension that is vital to its health
and it is naïve to think that this can survive without
some structures to make it possible. An isolated local
Church is less than a complete Church. 


Both of these points are really grounded in the belief
that our unity is something given to us prior to our
choices - let alone our votes. ‘You have not chosen me
but I have chosen you’, says Jesus to his disciples;
and when we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, we are
saying that we are all there as invited guests, not
because of what we have done. The basic challenge that
practically all the churches worldwide, of whatever
denomination, so often have to struggle with is, ‘Are
we joining together in one act of Holy Communion, one
Eucharist, throughout the world, or are we just
celebrating our local identities and our personal
preferences?’


The Anglican Identity 


The reason Anglicanism is worth bothering with is
because it has tried to find a way of being a Church
that is neither tightly centralised nor just a loose
federation of essentially independent bodies – a
Church that is seeking to be a coherent family of
communities meeting to hear the Bible read, to break
bread and share wine as guests of Jesus Christ, and to
celebrate a unity in worldwide mission and ministry.
That is what the word ‘Communion’ means for Anglicans,
and it is a vision that has taken clearer shape in
many of our ecumenical dialogues. 


Of course it is possible to produce a self-deceiving,
self-important account of our worldwide identity, to
pretend that we were a completely international and
universal institution like the Roman Catholic Church.
We’re not. But we have tried to be a family of
Churches willing to learn from each other across
cultural divides, not assuming that European (or
American or African) wisdom is what settles
everything, opening up the lives of Christians here to
the realities of Christian experience elsewhere. And
we have seen these links not primarily in a
bureaucratic way but in relation to the common
patterns of ministry and worship – the community
gathered around Scripture and sacraments; a ministry
of bishops, priests and deacons, a biblically-centred
form of common prayer, a focus on the Holy Communion.
These are the signs that we are not just a human
organisation but a community trying to respond to the
action and the invitation of God that is made real for
us in ministry and Bible and sacraments. We believe we
have useful and necessary questions to explore with
Roman Catholicism because of its centralised
understanding of jurisdiction and some of its historic
attitudes to the Bible. We believe we have some
equally necessary questions to propose to classical
European Protestantism, to fundamentalism, and to
liberal Protestant pluralism. There is an identity
here, however fragile and however provisional.


But what our Communion lacks is a set of adequately
developed structures which is able to cope with the
diversity of views that will inevitably arise in a
world of rapid global communication and huge cultural
variety. The tacit conventions between us need
spelling out – not for the sake of some central
mechanism of control but so that we have ways of being
sure we’re still talking the same language, aware of
belonging to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic
Church of Christ. It is becoming urgent to work at
what adequate structures for decision-making might
look like. We need ways of translating this underlying
sacramental communion into a more effective
institutional reality, so that we don’t compromise or
embarrass each other in ways that get in the way of
our local and our universal mission, but learn how to
share responsibility. 


Future Directions 


The idea of a ‘covenant’ between local Churches
(developing alongside the existing work being done on
harmonising the church law of different local
Churches) is one method that has been suggested, and
it seems to me the best way forward. It is necessarily
an ‘opt-in’ matter. Those Churches that were prepared
to take this on as an expression of their
responsibility to each other would limit their local
freedoms for the sake of a wider witness; and some
might not be willing to do this. We could arrive at a
situation where there were ‘constituent’ Churches in
covenant in the Anglican Communion and other ‘churches
in association’, which were still bound by historic
and perhaps personal links, fed from many of the same
sources, but not bound in a single and unrestricted
sacramental communion, and not sharing the same
constitutional structures. The relation would not be
unlike that between the Church of England and the
Methodist Church, for example. The ‘associated’
Churches would have no direct part in the decision
making of the ‘constituent’ Churches, though they
might well be observers whose views were sought or
whose expertise was shared from time to time, and with
whom significant areas of co-operation might be
possible.


This leaves many unanswered questions, I know, given
that lines of division run within local Churches as
well as between them - and not only on one issue (we
might note the continuing debates on the legitimacy of
lay presidency at the Eucharist). It could mean the
need for local Churches to work at ordered and
mutually respectful separation between ‘constituent’
and ‘associated’ elements; but it could also mean a
positive challenge for Churches to work out what they
believed to be involved in belonging in a global
sacramental fellowship, a chance to rediscover a
positive common obedience to the mystery of God’s gift
that was not a matter of coercion from above but of
that ‘waiting for each other’ that St Paul commends to
the Corinthians.


There is no way in which the Anglican Communion can
remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment.
Neither the liberal nor the conservative can simply
appeal to a historic identity that doesn’t correspond
with where we now are. We do have a distinctive
historic tradition – a reformed commitment to the
absolute priority of the Bible for deciding doctrine,
a catholic loyalty to the sacraments and the threefold
ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and a habit
of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility
that does not seek to close down unexpected questions
too quickly. But for this to survive with all its
aspects intact, we need closer and more visible formal
commitments to each other. And it is not going to look
exactly like anything we have known so far. Some may
find this unfamiliar future conscientiously
unacceptable, and that view deserves respect. But if
we are to continue to be any sort of ‘Catholic’
church, if we believe that we are answerable to
something more than our immediate environment and its
priorities and are held in unity by something more
than just the consensus of the moment, we have some
very hard work to do to embody this more clearly. The
next Lambeth Conference ought to address this matter
directly and fully as part of its agenda. 


The different components in our heritage can, up to a
point, flourish in isolation from each other. But any
one of them pursued on its own would lead in a
direction ultimately outside historic Anglicanism The
reformed concern may lead towards a looser form of
ministerial order and a stronger emphasis on the sole,
unmediated authority of the Bible. The catholic
concern may lead to a high doctrine of visible and
structural unification of the ordained ministry around
a focal point. The cultural and intellectual concern
may lead to a style of Christian life aimed at giving
spiritual depth to the general shape of the culture
around and de-emphasising revelation and history.
Pursued far enough in isolation, each of these would
lead to a different place – to strict evangelical
Protestantism, to Roman Catholicism, to religious
liberalism. To accept that each of these has a place
in the church’s life and that they need each other
means that the enthusiasts for each aspect have to be
prepared to live with certain tensions or even
sacrifices – with a tradition of being positive about
a responsible critical approach to Scripture, with the
anomalies of a historic ministry not universally
recognised in the Catholic world, with limits on the
degree of adjustment to the culture and its habits
that is thought possible or acceptable.


Conclusion 


The only reason for being an Anglican is that this
balance seems to you to be healthy for the Church
Catholic overall, and that it helps people grow in
discernment and holiness. Being an Anglican in the way
I have sketched involves certain concessions and
unclarities but provides at least for ways of sharing
responsibility and making decisions that will hold and
that will be mutually intelligible. No-one can impose
the canonical and structural changes that will be
necessary. All that I have said above should make it
clear that the idea of an Archbishop of Canterbury
resolving any of this by decree is misplaced, however
tempting for many. The Archbishop of Canterbury
presides and convenes in the Communion, and may do
what this document attempts to do, which is to outline
the theological framework in which a problem should be
addressed; but he must always act collegially, with
the bishops of his own local Church and with the
primates and the other instruments of communion. 


That is why the process currently going forward of
assessing our situation in the wake of the General
Convention is a shared one. But it is nonetheless
possible for the Churches of the Communion to decide
that this is indeed the identity, the living tradition
– and by God’s grace, the gift - we want to share with
the rest of the Christian world in the coming
generation; more importantly still, that this is a
valid and vital way of presenting the Good News of
Jesus Christ to the world. My hope is that the period
ahead - of detailed response to the work of General
Convention, exploration of new structures, and further
refinement of the covenant model - will renew our
positive appreciation of the possibilities of our
heritage so that we can pursue our mission with deeper
confidence and harmony. 


ENDS


© Rowan Williams 2006