The Archbishop of Canterbury met with members of the Hindu Christian Forum at Lambeth Palace last Friday.
Archbishop Justin heard about the history of the Forum and its current work, including the innovative ”˜Comparing Notes’ dialogue series, and contributions to this year’s Inter Faith Week.
The conversation also covered a number of issues including understandings of conversion, the place of faith in society, and the recent inclusion of caste as a category within equalities legislation.
Executives from energy companies met the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace on Wednesday, two months after he called on such firms to be “conscious of their social obligations”, given the “severe” impact of energy price rises.
A statement from Lambeth Palace said that the senior representatives met to talk about “their perspectives on social responsibility around the energy-supply sector”. This was “one of a number of private meetings hosted by Archbishop Justin in order to draw on the experience of people from different areas of national life”.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has summoned the bosses of the ”˜Big Six’ energy companies to a private meeting on Wednesday to discuss fuel poverty and rising energy prices.
The meeting comes after the Most Rev Justin Welby said he understood why people felt above-inflation price rises were “inexplicable” and called on the companies to act with “generosity”.
Four of the Big Six supliers are believed to be sending their most senior UK executives, in contrast to a recent Commons select committee hearing where just one, E.On chief executive Tony Cocker, attended to face MPs.
The Archbishop of Canterbury paid tribute to Nelson Mandela on Sunday at a special thanksgiving service for the life of the South African leader.
“Great injustice is overcome only by great courage. Evil can never be placated, it must be defeated. That means struggle, and struggles demand courage,” Archbishop Justin said in a sermon at St-Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square.
The service, which was led by the Vicar of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, the Revd Dr Sam Wells, featured a live link to Christ the King church in Sophiatown in Johannesburg.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has turned down an invitation to become part of an “army of Good Samaritans” checking on elderly people at Christmas because of Church of England policy.
Organisers of the NHS “Winter friends” campaign, under which people sign a pledge to help isolated elderly people in practical ways, have recruited a series of well-known figures including Joanna Lumley, the actress, and Stephen Fry, the broadcaster, to support them.
But their hopes of signing the Most Rev Justin Welby up as a key supporter were dashed because of a policy which prevents the Archbishop joining campaigns.
Recently I had the privilege of discussing the issue of HIV/AIDS with the Archbishops of Southern Africa and Burundi, and the Executive Director of UNAIDS, Michel Sidibé. It was encouraging hearing how much has been achieved in the global response to HIV/AIDS, yet sobering to see what challenges remain.
Last year there were 35 million people living with HIV, according to UNAIDS. New infections are down by 33% since 2001 and new infections in children down by 52%. Millions more people can now access treatment so they can live full and active lives. As a result, AIDS-related deaths have reduced by 29% since 2005. This is a hugely significant advance. It makes clear that we have the means and must maintain the commitment, as a global community, to ensure that no one is left behind in the progress on prevention and treatment.
It was also inspiring hearing how churches in Burundi and Southern Africa are responding to HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence.
Some of the rarest and most fragile religious texts in the Vatican and Bodleian libraries, including ancient bibles and some of the oldest Hebrew manuscript and printed books, are being placed online in a joint project by the two great libraries, which will eventually create an online archive of 1.5m pages.
The website launched on Tuesday with funding from the Polonsky Foundation includes the first results of the four-year project, including the Bodleian’s 1455 Gutenberg Bible, one of only 50 surviving copies of the first major book printed in the west with metal type.
The site will also host a growing collection of scholarly essays, and interviews with the Oxford and Vatican librarians, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who said the digitisation was of huge international significance.
The full text of the Archbishop of Canterbury and York’s statement on the report follows below:
‘Earlier this month, the Review Group established in 2011 by the House of Bishops under the chairmanship of Sir Joseph Pilling delivered to us its Report.
‘This is a substantial document proposing a process of facilitated conversations in the Church of England over a period of perhaps two years. The document offers findings and recommendations to form part of that process of facilitated conversations. It is not a new policy statement from the Church of England.
The Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t exactly struggling to get the press to notice him at the moment. Of course it always helps to have a royal christening to preside over to gain a decent amount of media exposure. There’s nothing though to indicate that Justin Welby is deliberately trying to court journalists in the fashion of a D list celebrity, it’s more that he is doing what he believes he is called to and people are sitting up and taking notice. In the space of a week along with Prince George’s baptism, Justin Welby has repeatedly been in the papers, taking on the energy companies and bankers (again) as well as flagging up a concern over the proliferation of foodbanks. He also managed to squeeze in trips to Iceland and Kenya for the Global Anglican Future (GAFCON) Conference. Not bad for a week’s work.
The honeymoon period that Welby is enjoying shows little sign of fading any time soon. Even his opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage, which unsurprisingly failed to go down well in some quarters, appears not to have been held against him. Where his predecessor, Rowan Williams continually had the shadow of the Church of England’s attitude to gay relationships and women bishops clinging to him, Justin Welby has been able to avoid getting bogged down in the politics of the church so far.
Read it all (another from the long line of should have already been posted material).
The Archbishop of Canterbury has denied that he wants Church of England schools to stop using children’s faith as a criterion for admission.
The Times reported on Thursday that Archbishop Welby had told them that church schools were moving away from selecting pupils on the grounds of their religion. But the Church quickly issued a statement that insisted that there had been no change in policy, and that church schools were free to continue to admit children based on their faith, if they wished.
Archbishop Welby said in the statement: “I fully support the current policy for schools to set their own admissions criteria, including the criterion of faith. Nothing in my wider comments to The Times on this subject should be seen as dissenting from this policy.”Read it all.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has sent a message of prayer and solidarity to all those affected by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
‘We are deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the loss of thousands of lives and of the suffering of millions’ caused by the storm, Archbishop Justin Welby said today.
‘Our prayers are with all those who are traumatised by the disaster and in desperate need of food, water, shelter and medical attention.’
The Archbishop of Canterbury has become president of Livability, the national Christian disability charity which works with churches to help thousands of disabled people in the UK and overseas.
Archbishop Justin Welby’s presidency will help continue the close and historic relationship between the Church of England and Livability, which was formed after two older Christian charities, John Grooms and the Shaftesbury Society, merged in 2007.
In his inaugural letter to the charity, the Archbishop said that “disabled people have much to offer to our local communities, workplaces and to society in general” but that they face “real financial hardship and unacceptable barriers when trying to access education, training, housing, transport and the care they require.”
Q.: You said recently that most of our disagreements are about power and prestige rather than dogma or doctrine. What exactly do you mean?
Archbishop Welby: ”¦We exist in different church communities, different ecclesial communities around the world and the longer that goes on, the more our different communities embed their own institutions and put down roots. Some of them have been putting down roots for centuries and that makes it harder and harder for us to say, well, actually, perhaps we need to reimagine what it means to look like the church and to surrender some of the things that give us our sense of identity in the cause of Christ. There are very fundamental and extremely important doctrinal and dogmatic differences that we have between us and they have to be worked on, as they are with Rome and the Anglicans with ARCIC, and we take those extremely seriously. It’s absolutely essential that those are worked on. But we need to make sure we’re working on them in the context of churches and ecclesial communities that say no sacrifice is too great to be obedient to the call of Christ that we may be one.
Q.: ”¦ Neither you nor Pope Francis seem remotely interested in power and prestige. Does this mean therefore that we can expect some kind of surprising healing or reconciliation in the near future?
Archbishop Welby: God has given you, and given us all, a great Pope. And he’s a great Pope of surprises”¦ and I think people are inspired and uplifted by what they see in Pope Francis, as I am. I think he’s a wonderful person. Surprises? Yes, I think there’ll be one or two surprises. We’re hoping to produce a few surprises.
Read or listen to it all (just slightly under 9 1/3 minutes).
To friends and co-workers for peace in the Hindu communities,
On this, my first Diwali since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, I wish you great peace and joy as you celebrate with your families and friends both here and across the world. Having moved back to London I am aware that every year the fireworks of ”˜Diwali on the Square’ draw great crowds from all over the capital.
My prayer for you is that in all the busyness of hospitality – of sharing food, flowers and gifts, you would find some moments of quietness and peace.
The lights of Diwali symbolise the renewal of life and hope in the midst of darkness so often prevalent in our world. The spiritual heart is found in the ancient prayer, ”˜lead me from darkness to light.’ This is something that as Christians we share with you, as we focus our faith on Jesus, the light of the world in the coming Advent and Christmas season.
This is my first Assembly. I am enjoying sense of wonder at my smallness, my tiny place among God’s great Church, which draws together women and men, young and not so young, lay and ordained, from different continents and cultures and different ecclesial traditions. Being here together a fresh vision of that to which we are called. It is an opportunity for genuine encounter, an opportunity to learn about one another and to learn from one another. We must learn to hear Christ through one another. We renew our commitment to the ecumenical journey and the ecumenical task. We need one another.
We have travelled to this place praying ”“”˜God of Life: Lead us to justice and peace.’ Peace and justice begin with us and God. When we are not at peace with God through Jesus Christ we cannot be peacemakers in the world. God calls us to be reconciled reconcilers, reconciled ourselves to God and to each other. Peace and justice become in us a cause for which any sacrifice is worthwhile when they are given birth in each of us and in the church by the Holy Spirit. For that reason we need to be seen again to be a people of prayer; faced with the God of peace and justice our hunger for unity grows, we are able to forgive and love one another with the love that God puts in our lives.
So what can we do about this? One idea would be to look for ”“ and then exploit ”“ shale gas in Europe. We may have quite a lot of it ”“ for instance in France, Germany and the UK. But to produce it we need a public consensus ”“ and there is still a lot of opposition in western Europe. Of course, the opposition is understandable ”“ fracking is loud and invasive, and the continent is densely populated. But if Europe is serious about creating wealth and jobs, it is an option worth exploring.
The country that is furthest along the road to consensus-building is the UK, which can count on political will, tax incentives and even a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury. If it does manage to create a healthy shale gas industry, it could pave the way for continental Europe to follow.
Other potential components of the solution for Europe are nuclear power, energy efficiency, better use of conventional hydrocarbons ”“ in short, anything that can make energy cheaper and more readily available.
Read it all (if necessary another link Read it all.)
…the first thing that God’s people are meant to be, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, is we are meant to be a people who know our own failure, and who come to God with nothing in our hands, with no strength of our own, simply seeking his forgiveness, admitting our weakness. One of the great failures of the church in European history is that too often it is taken in by the appearance of strength and forgets its need of God. Over recent years we’ve done that over issues of the abuse of children in Europe. We’ve failed to say where we’ve gone wrong. We are to be a repentant church.
It is very easy to be confident in your own resources. When I was at university, which was sadly a very long time ago, two friends and I decided to walk across Scotland. It was about 230 miles, so it took about two weeks. We were good walkers but bad map readers. So we probably did 300 miles because we kept going one way and having to come back another. And on one occasion we were walking in western Scotland, and we came to a valley that split into two bits, and after a little while we realised that the valley we’d taken after about four miles ended in a cliff, and the other one had the main road. So we went back, and as we were going back we met some other people coming along the same bad route. And so being nice people we said to them, ”˜This is the wrong way, there’s just a cliff at the end.’ And they said, ”˜No there isn’t. We know this is the right way.’ So we smiled politely and we went on, and when we got back to where we should have gone from, we sat down and made a cup of tea and waited for them to appear, looking embarrassed.
Repentance is when you know you’re going the wrong way and, rather than going on, you turn round and go back and take the way that God has shown you. We are to be a repentant church. That is part of the culture of Christian faith.
Religious faith is a “powerful and increasingly influential global reality” which must be taken seriously, especially in the City of London, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Most Rev Justin Welby said God and mammon ”“ material wealth or greed ”“ are not mixable, but this did not mean there was no place for faith in the City.
“That’s on the authority of Jesus Christ who said you can’t serve God and mammon. God and the City, by contrast I think, are eminently mixable.”
He was speaking at a Mansion House dinner hosted by Roger Gifford, a senior banker and Lord…
Read it all (subscription required).
Archbishop Justin Welby hailed the church’s ”˜pioneering’ work with refugees and migrants, which he said offered ”˜leadership to the whole Anglican Communion’.
He was spending two days in Hong Kong at the start of a 10-day visit to Anglican Primates in the region, which will also include Japan and Korea.
The Archbishop is visiting every Primate in the Anglican Communion during his first 18 months in office, so that he can get to know each of them in their local context, personally and professionally, in order to foster friendship and mutual understanding.
A few months ago, in late July, an interview was published in England, in which I’d been interviewed and had among many other things talked about what are called credit unions in England. These are small, local, community financial organisations. Over the last 40 of 50 years they have more or less disappeared. And if, in England, you are in a poorer part of the country, and in much of the rest of the United Kingdom, and you need some money quickly, you can get it very easily. There are many organisations. The interest varies between 2500 percent a year and 5500 percent a year. So it costs you. You borrow 200 pounds for five days. You roll it over cause you can’t pay it back. You roll it over again. Before you know it you owe two, three, four thousand.
I made what seemed to me the fairly obvious comment that I considered this to be usury and usury had been a sin since Moses. Well, it was a quiet day in the press. And they had nothing important to report, so we found that they reported it rather large scale. It was a casual comment. I wish I could say that I had a grand strategy, but I didn’t. It was an accident. But it was an accident in which God was involved. Because it has created such momentum that there is a great new movement to change the way we do community finance. And it is such a powerful movement that we’re even working with the Scots about it. And there is a miracle. It takes a lot to make the Scots willing to work with the English. Understandably, we’ve spent about 800 years ill treating them. But, what was interesting to me, was a comment by the head of our mission and public affairs department, who said he’s had to rewrite part of a book he’s writing on social action of the church, to say that it is not only about grand statements and about prayer, but in today’s society we are called to action. That in the postmodern society people look for a story of change, of engagement, of commitment, that brings testimony and witness to words and prayers.
Those who make this journey must look in two directions, the Archbishop said.
‘First, they look at the world. Jesus tells his disciples to let people come to him. To do that they have to be outward looking, in touch with the world, welcoming, generous-spirited, alive with the life of the Christ to whom they will introduce all who come.’
He added that as a Christian, Prince George ‘is to share the life of Christ which is in him, regardless of whom he meets, their faith or nature or habits, so that others find life. That sharing may be in words, or generous actions – most likely both – but it will be both very costly and infinitely rewarding.’
The second direction in which Christians must look is towards Christ, the Archbishop said….
Read it all and note the video link at the bottom for those interested.
The christening of Prince George has taken place in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace in London.
The prince, third in line to the throne, was baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The christening was private, with only senior royals, four members of the Middleton family, the seven godparents and their spouses among the 22 guests.
To carry out the task of telling people about Jesus Christ, we need to be a Church that is holy. And for us as individuals and for us as churches right round the world that is always a massive challenge. We all live in different contexts and the challenge overlaps but is slightly different wherever we live. We are dealing with very rapid changes of culture in the Global North and the issue of sexuality is a very important one. How we respond rightly to that ”“ in a way that is holy, truthful and gracious ”“ is absolutely critical to our proclamation of the gospel.
Some churches are responding to challenges in their own context that are very very different. We have churches that are caught up in the midst of wars and violence and have to learn to proclaim the gospel in the midst of that. That’s really incredibly hard, and I’ve much experience of seeing it. There are other churches that are in countries where there are governments that are corrupt and it can be very hard to proclaim the gospel truly in those situations. Wherever we are, there’s a different context; but wherever we are, in our own context, in the right way, we have to live as a Church that is holy.
In addition, the gospel has to be proclaimed by a Church that is in unity….
After morning tea we turned to the opening plenary session and the chairman’s address. Archbishop Wabakula of Kenya is a softly-spoken man but even his gentle voice could not disguise the power of what he had to say. We reported yesterday that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had been challenged by the Primates in their meeting and Wabukala had equally firm words to say. Here’s the key paragraph,
Five years on, the paralysis of which we spoke has intensified. And it has become clear that the Communion now needs new wineskins, a new way of ordering its affairs to fulfil the world wide scope of the Great Commission. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has now come to this conclusion and I am grateful for
His Grace’s honesty in acknowledging that the Anglican Communion’s neo- colonial leadership structures need to be replaced when he preached here at All Saints Cathedral last Sunday. However, it is difficult to see how stable and effective leadership can be developed unless the depth of the spiritual crisis we face is acknowledged. Organisational change on its own will not be enough. Even the very weak theological discipline of the Anglican Covenant has failed to win consent despite years of negotiation and the Archbishop of Canterbury is no longer able to gather the Communion.
Or, put in simpler terms, it’s not enough for Welby to visit GAFCON and tell them that he recognises that the current structures are failing. If he will not deal with the real issues (the apostasy of the American and Canadian churches) then GAFCON will continue on without him. He no longer commands any leadership amongst them.
Archbishop Welby’s whirlwind visit to Nairobi on Sunday provided an opportunity for him to take the measure of six Primates and half-a-dozen other key leaders, including the General Secretary of GAFCON, Dr Peter Jensen, and the retired Nigerian Archbishop, the Most Revd Peter Akinola, in a private meeting at All Saints’ Cathedral.
The conservatives also had an opportunity to size up Archbishop Welby. All of those questioned after the meetings expressed a personal regard for the man, but were sceptical that his office could provide a solution to the divisions within the Church if it sought to take a neutral stance.
“Archbishop Welby’s statement ‘The old ways are no longer appropriate, the old structures no longer work,’ given on the eve of GAFCON, give us hope,” Dr Jensen said. Nevertheless, the future envisioned by Archbishop Welby “began with GAFCON 2008”, Dr Jensen said. “It’s time for him to catch up.”
Read it all (scroll to the bottom of the page).
The Archbishop was visiting Kenya to offer condolence and solidarity following the attack, while encouraging Archbishop Eliud and other bishops and clergy ministering around the Nairobi area.
Following his sermon Archbishop Justin had lunch with Archbishop Eliud, five Kenyan bishops and those Anglican primates who had arrived early in Nairobi for the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which starts today.
The Archbishop was unable to attend the conference due to a prior engagement in Iceland and the baptism of Prince George in London, but has sent a video greeting.
Amid deep division in the worldwide Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby on Sunday emphasized the need for mission and evangelism.
“The more seriously we take the Bible, the more effectively we will be able to deal with our divisions,” Welby said.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has made a detour of more than 8,000 miles to visit Kenya – on his way to Iceland.
Archbishop Justin Welby, who arrived on Saturday night, gave sermons at All Saints Cathedral on Sunday morning.
He made the “last-minute” 24-hour trip to offer condolences after the Westgate centre attack, Lambeth Palace said.
He is also meeting conservative Church leaders who are in Nairobi for this week’s conference of the traditionalist Anglican group, Gafcon.
Watch it all and form your own conclusions and make your own prayerful evaluations (a little over 27 minutes).