The following article is from the September/October 2008 issue of Encompass. Encompass is a free, monthly publication produced by the American Anglican Council.  If you would like to receive Encompass click here  and join the AAC. There are no membership fees or dues required for AAC membership. 

This Side of Lambeth: Communion Conflict Continues

BY ROBERT LUNDY, EDITOR

For 141 years the bishops of the Anglican Communion have periodically met in Canterbury, England. Called the Lambeth Conference because the Archbishop of Canterbury held the first meeting at his private residence, Lambeth Palace, the meeting is convened every ten years and, due to a need for more space, is now held on the campus of the University of Kent and close to the ancient Canterbury Cathedral.

The Lambeth Conference of 2008 officially began on July 20 with a grand display of ecclesial pageantry as hundreds of bishops processed into historic Canterbury Cathedral. But as bishops in their flowing robes entered the eleventh century church, so did the discord and strife that have overshadowed the Anglican Communion for several years now.

Some participants saw discord when their fellow bishops could not take Communion with them. Others saw strife in that more than 200 bishops representing over half of all Anglicans were boycotting the conference and did not attend. While the assembled bishops came from diverse backgrounds and various parts of the Communion, they each came with the knowledge that the Anglican Communion was not a stable one.

With this reality, Lambeth organizers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, had a monumental task in front of them: how do you have a successful communion meeting when there is little sense of communion?

Simply put, the Lambeth design team and Archbishop of Canterbury’s solution was conversation. Before it began, the 2008 Lambeth Conference was designed to not have any resolutions or votes. The conference was centered on dialogue. While bishops discussed important matters, no formal conclusions, resolutions, or positions were produced by the conference. Instead, organizers developed reflection and observation documents that illustrated what the bishops discussed in their reflection groups.

The groups, called indaba groups, a Zulu word describing a type of community discussion, contained around 40 members. Each indaba group was broken down into five sub-groups of eight bishops each. These smaller groups of eight were the bishops’ bible study groups and were chosen by the Lambeth design team. Each day, the indaba groups had a discussion topic given to them, and each group was supposed to converse about the days’ topic for two hours.

The conference’s conclusion saw a 44-page document published that, quoting the document itself, was “not the primary outcome of this Conference…The status of the document is that of a narrative. It seeks to describe our lived experience and the open and honest discussions we have had together on the daily themes of the conference.”

If concrete results or direction was what members of the Anglican Communion were expecting from the Lambeth Conference, then the indaba groups’ narrative was not going to provide it; however, there was another group on hand that produced some ideas as to a way forward in communion.

Formed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in February, 2008, the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG) was asked to address outstanding questions arising from the Windsor Report and the various formal responses from provinces and instruments of the Anglican Communion. The six member group, composed mostly of Primates, provided observations during the conference on what it thought was the best way to deal with the problems in the Anglican Communion.

The groups’ observations, though candid about the turmoil in the Communion, brought few original ideas to the conference. The WCG reaffirmed all three moratoria recommended by the Windsor Report (same-sex blessings, non-celibate homosexual bishops, and cross boundary interventions) and clarified that the moratorium on same-sex blessings included all celebrations and not just the creation of official liturgies. Their “observations” document did call for a “Faith and Order Commission” that, if implemented, would be a fifth instrument of communion.

When asked about the proposed “faith and order commission” the Archbishop of Canterbury said, “It is a flag raised to see who salutes it. There is a strong feeling we need another structure that would be a clearing house for some of these issues. There’s quite a head of steam behind that. I’m actually quite enthusiastic about that. We’ll see how that flies.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury was another influence on the conference. Archbishop Rowan Williams gave three main addresses at the conference. In them, he advocated for a Communion Covenant and urged the bishops to seek what he called true Christian unity. The Archbishop also set out an agenda that, among other items, included: calling a Primates meeting in early 2009; seeking detail on a WCG-proposed “pastoral forum” (This forum is similar to the pastoral council called for in the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué and the now-disbanded Panel of Reference recommended by the Windsor Report); building “bridges” with the GAFCON primates; and continuing the development of the Communion Covenant which is expected to be finalized and sent to the provinces after the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in May, 2009.

The 21-day conference ended on August 2 with much of the same pageantry it started with. Reactions to the conference have been mixed. Some bishops claim it enriched their sense of communion with their fellow bishops while others claim the conference was a waste of time.

No matter what the reactions are, little has changed in the day-to-day life of the Communion. Revisionist bishops in the U.S. and Canada, including Bishop Marc Andrus of California and Bishop Michael Ingham of New Westminster, Canada have pledged to continue permitting same sex blessings and pressing for the consecration of non-celibate homosexual bishops.

Episcopal priests continue to bless same-sex unions with five publicized blessings occurring in the state of California since the close of the Lambeth Conference. According to The Living Church, all six diocesan bishops in California signed a statement “that calls on Episcopalians to defeat a state ballot initiative that would amend the state’s constitution to read ‘only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.’”

TEC lawsuits against former parishes have not been suspended, and in September the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster began property lawsuits against two parishes that re-aligned with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. And, just as when the conference started, discord and strife remain prominent and shadowy over this Communion.†