The Wardman Wire

This is Simon Sarmiento’s second Guest Column on the Wardman Wire, while David Keen is on holiday from the blog. This week Simon reflects further on the Lambeth Conference, and in particular the discussions (or non discussions) about attitudes to homosexuality.

I ended last week’s column by asking the question, is it all about sex or is it all about power? And I suggested that a suitable metaphor for the Lambeth Conference was Brownian motion, with a lot of energy being expended by participants but virtually no change of position. This week, a few hints as to the answer.

The Homosexual Elephant

Certainly they did talk a lot about homosexuality. Bishop Nick Baines of Croydon wrote on his Fulcrum blog (Scroll down to 27 July)

Please, oh please, will people stop referring to ‘the elephant in the room’. …

We are meant to infer from this that the matter of homosexuality, the ordination/consecration of gay people, the reasons for the rupture in the Communion and all matters associated with it have been sidestepped in the first week of the conference. This is rubbish, nonsense and a lie. There is no hidden elephant in the room - various aspects of the elephant are being discussed everywhere and in every room on the campus….

And it was not only American bishops who found they had to do a lot of explaining to do to bishops from Africa and elsewhere. At the start of the conference, Bishop Nick wrote this (scroll down to 20 July):

I spoke with several African bishops in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral this morning. They accused ‘all’ English bishops of preaching a false Gospel, re-writing the Scriptures, allowing any ethical behaviour that people like, and so on. They had no idea of the difference in polity with which English, American and Canadian bishops have to work. The African bishop is (in their words) ‘a little king’ and his yea is yea and his nay is nay. They do not have to deal with the complexities of English law (data protection, faculty jurisdiction, discrimination legislation, etc.) and had no idea what these involved. My explanation of bishops being subject to law led one experienced bishop to say: ‘But that puts a different perspective on things.’ Africa needs to understand the West as much as America needs to understand Africa and Asia.

Boycotts or Data Protection?

The most conservative African provinces, i.e. Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya, were all supposed to be boycotting the event, and it was impossible to confirm exactly how few, if any, from those provinces in fact attended, as the conference organizers invoked the UK Data Protection Act and bishops were encouraged not to consent to having their names released. Mention was made of the fear of reprisals against attendees by furious primates, but several English bishops also took advantage of this offer!

Nevertheless a lot of strong anti-gay statements were made by bishops who had come to the conference, such as Jerusalem and Middle East primate, Mouneer Anis, of Egypt, who gave a press conference well described here, and Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul of the Sudan, who also gave a press conference, in which he said that the Bishop of New Hampshire should resign his see. The Sudan bishops got a lot of press attention because they issued a strong statement early in the conference when other news was scarce:

We strongly oppose developments within the Anglican Church in the USA and Canada in consecrating a practicing homosexual as bishop and in approving a rite for the blessing of same-sex relationships. This has not only caused deep divisions within the Anglican Communion but it has seriously harmed the Church’s witness in Africa and elsewhere, opening the church to ridicule and damaging its credibility in a multi-religious environment.

But, although they talked a lot, they took no votes. The closest they came to an output on this topic was to endorse in general terms the work of the Windsor Continuation Group which proposed the renewal of the same three “moratoria” recommended previously in 2004 by The Windsor Report, on consecration of further gay bishops, on authorizing formal liturgies for blessing same-sex relationships, and on boundary crossings by bishops into dioceses or provinces other than their own.

Power in the Communion

The chances of that third moratorium ever coming into effect are pretty slim, to say the least. It’s no coincidence that the four absent provinces are also the four leading boundary crossers. The GAFCON (Ed: “alternative” Conference organised by more Conservative elements in the Anglican Communion) organisers continued throughout, and indeed after, the conference,to do their best to undermine the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the Lambeth Conference. The most obvious example of this was the “guest opinion” article in The Times on the final Friday of the conference written by the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi. He said:

It was clear to me and to our House of Bishops that the Instruments of Communion had utterly failed us.

Anglicans may say there are four “Instruments of Communion,” (the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Lambeth Conference; the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting). But de facto, there is only one - the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The peculiar thing is that this one man, who is at the centre of the communion’s structures, is not even elected by his peers. Even the Pope is elected by his peers, but what Anglicans have is a man appointed by a secular government. Over the past five years, we have come to see this as a remnant of British colonialism, and it is not serving us well. The spiritual leadership of a global communion of independent and autonomous provinces should not be reduced to one man appointed by a secular government.

But the conference has a magic solution to this problem called the Anglican Covenant.

Despite clear evidence that the hardline conservatives represented by GAFCON have no interest and also strong indications that neither Scotland nor Wales have much enthusiasm, the Archbishop of Canterbury is pressing ahead with it. I called it “covenant or bust” on a Thinking Anglicans blog article a few days ago. The archbishop now appears to accept with equanimity that several provinces on both the right and the left of centre will not, in the end, sign up to the covenant. Some kind of two-tier communion appears to be his objective now. But many Lambeth bishops were notably reluctant to endorse the more legalistic aspects of the current “St Andrew’s” Draft.

We shall have to wait and see.