Anglicans the world over are holding their breath as the clock ticks towards the once-a-decade meeting of bishops of the international Anglican Communion ÔÇô the Lambeth Conference.
The Lambeth Conference is one of the global Anglican Communion’s Instruments of Communion, and it takes place every 10 years at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Officially, the Conference is an occasion when all bishops can meet for worship, study and conversation.
This year’s Conference, which runs from July 16 ÔÇô August 4, comes against a background of a gathering storm over homosexuality within the church. So intense is the debate that some commentators have often suggested that the church could be headed for a schism. At the last Lambeth Conference, in 1998, the bishops overwhelmingly passed a resolution saying that homosexuality was “incompatible with Scripture,” and that homosexuals should not be consecrated. The vote revealed the growing strength of the conservatives.
To forestall conflict, the organizers of this year’s Lambeth Conference have planned for no resolutions and no votes. Instead, the bishops will meet in small groups, on the theory that they will overcome their divisions by building personal relationships.
While the organizers are working hard to avoid a showdown, it appears that is exactly what they will get. The conservatives within the communion have accused the Church in the United States of violating the Bible and Christian teaching by consecrating the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. They also criticized the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, for failure to exercise leadership on the issue and act decisively against the actions of the American church.
Last month, more than 200 Anglican bishops from conservative dioceses around the world threatened to boycott the Lambeth Conference and, instead, attended a rival Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) in Jordan and Jerusalem.
Entire provinces ÔÇô such as Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda ÔÇô were at the alternative gathering, because of their emphasis on a Bible-based Christianity that rules out many of the liberal developments in the Western Church, such as the increasing acceptance of homosexuality.
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Although organizers of Gafcon say their goal was not to set up a rival Anglican structure, a statement issued by the Church of Uganda admitted that the aim of Gafcon was “to prepare for an Anglican future in which the gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centered mission is a top priority”.
Uganda, whose province is the second-largest after Nigeria, with 10 million members, said: “The Church of Uganda is not going to Lambeth because the purpose of Lambeth is for fellowship and our fellowship has been broken with the American Church.”
“What they [the Americans] have done is a very serious thing, and what the Archbishop of Canterbury has done in inviting them is grievous and we want them to know that.”
However, the Ugandans denied they were engaged in an act of secession: “We are simply not going to the Lambeth Conference. We are still part of the Anglican Communion, and the vast majority of the Anglican Communion opposes what the American Church has done and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s tacit support for it.”
The conservatives meeting at Gafcon have released a strongly worded theological manifesto, declaring that they see no possibility for reconciliation with the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada, which have accepted a gay bishop and same-sex unions.
The conservatives say that after years of emergency meetings and ultimatums, they have been “ignored”, “demonized” and “marginalized”. “There is no longer any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion,” the manifesto said.
While the conservative leaders played down questions about a schism, and cast their Jerusalem conference as a pilgrimage to the roots of Christianity, the archbishops of Nigeria and Rwanda announced they ÔÇô like Uganda ÔÇô would also boycott Lambeth.
At the end of Gafcon, the meeting issued its “Jerusalem Declaration” that specifically emphasises “the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family”.
However, the conservatives themselves are not of one mind about the Lambeth boycott and the Jerusalem conference. Some have said the conservatives would be more effective if they all showed up at Lambeth and tried to steer events, or staged a walkout.
About 10 percent of the bishops at the Jerusalem conference will also attend Lambeth.
One of the only two bishops not invited to Lambeth is the man whose consecration in 2003 inflamed the conservatives because he lives openly with his gay partner.
This month, Bishop Robinson and his partner celebrated a private civil-union ceremony at a church in New Hampshire. It has been reported that he plans to appear at events on the sidelines of the Lambeth Conference, even though he cannot attend the sessions.
The Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas, who served on the design committee for Lambeth, has said that the Lambeth Conference is, “fundamentally about the encounter, about conversations among the leaders all oriented to: what is God calling the Anglican Communion and the bishops to be about in the wider world?”
The conservatives are trying to answer that question in their own way.
One of the documents they released suggests that they are undertaking nothing less than a new Reformation. The document says they see a “parallel between contemporary events and events in England in the 16th century,” when the Church of England broke from the Roman Catholic Church.
“Now after five centuries,” it says, “a new fork in the road is appearing.”
However, their spiritual leader sees things differently. In fact, he believes they are misreading the scriptures. In a lecture delivered last year to theology students in Canada, Rowan Williams said conservative Christians who cite the Bible to condemn homosexuality are misreading a key passage written by Saint Paul almost 2 000 years ago.
Williams said an oft-quoted passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans meant to warn Christians not to be self-righteous when they see others fall into sin.
His comments were seen as an unusually open rebuff to the conservative bishops, who have been citing the Bible to demand that pro-gay Anglican majorities in the United States and Canada be reined in or forced out of the communion.
“Many current ways of reading miss the actual direction of the passage,” Williams said. “Paul is making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding.”
In the passage of Romans that Williams referred to, Paul said people who forgot God’s words fell into sin. “Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion,” Paul wrote.
Williams said these lines were “for the majority of the modern readers with the most important single text in scripture on the subject of homosexuality”. But right after that passage, Paul warns readers not to condemn those who ignore God’s word.
“At whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself,” wrote Paul, the first-century apostle whose epistles, or letters, to early Christian communities elaborated many church teachings.
Williams said reinterpreting Paul’s epistle as a warning against smug self-righteousness rather than homosexuality will favour neither side over the other in the current bitter struggle.
It will not help pro-gay liberals, he said, because Paul and his readers clearly agreed that homosexuality was “as obviously immoral as idol worship or disobedience to parents”.
This reading will also upset anti-gay conservatives, who have been “up to this point happily identifying with Paul’s castigation of someone else,” and challenge them to ask whether they were right to judge others, he said.
“This does nothing to settle the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment,” Williams said. But he said a “strictly theological reading of the scripture” will not allow a Christian to denounce others and not ask whether he or she were also somehow at fault.
Williams’s stand seems in agreement with the position that has been consistently argued by the Bishop of Botswana, Trevor Mwamba, who has previously declared that Anglican churches will have to return to their mission to alleviate poverty, disease and injustice and abandon a “fixation” with homosexuality.
“Very few of us take the homosexual debate as a top priority issue because there are more pressing issues facing the African church,” Mwamba told one interviewer last year. “Most African Anglicans want to get back to basics and concentrate on poverty, disease, injustice and the need for transparency in governments.”
