…it did happen to him, in New Court, Trinity College, during the evening of October 12, 1975. At Eton, he had “vaguely assumed there was a God. But I didn’t believe. I wasn’t interested at all.” That night in Cambridge, though, praying with a Christian friend, he suddenly felt “a clear sense of something changing, the presence of something that had not been there before in my life. I said to my friend, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about this’, because I was desperately embarrassed that this had happened to me, like getting measles.”

Since then, there have been long periods with “no sense of any presence at all’’, but he has never gone back on that night’s “decision to follow Christ’’. This is not his doing: “It’s grace. Grace is a reality: feelings are ephemeral.”

To understand the change in Justin Welby’s life, you need to know what happened before.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in a recent speech said the following:

“In some things we change course and recognize the new context. Revolutions change culture. In others we stand firm because truth is not set by culture, nor morals by fashion. But let us be clear, pretending that nothing has changed is absurd and impossible.”

This statement raises the question, “What beliefs can we as Christians, in our efforts to evangelize, maintain and what can we allow to be compromised?”

Watch it all.

Following fresh turmoil in Egypt, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have sent a message of ‘committed solidarity’ to Pope Tawadros II and Bishop Mouneer in Cairo.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have joined the call for prayers for unity, reconciliation and an end to violence in Egypt.

Archbishop Justin Welby and Archbishop Dr John Sentamu wrote to the Coptic and Anglican leaders in Cairo today, pledging their ‘committed solidarity’ amid the recent turmoil in the country.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is in talks with Pope Francis about a new initiative that would link the Anglican Communion with the Vatican in the fight against poverty.

It is understood that the plan, which emerged from meetings between Archbishop Welby and the Pope in June, will focus on how both Churches can work together to help those in poverty around the world.

Read it all.

The statement we heard at the beginning of this debate was, I know, to all of us ”“ as has been said ”“ absolutely agonising. And what it says above all is that, for us, what we’re looking at today is far from enough. We are opening a process, continuing a process in many ways, that will go far further than we can imagine. The reality is that there will always be people who are dangerous who are part of the life of the church. They may be members of the congregation; we hope and pray that they will not be in positions of responsibility, but the odds are from time to time people will somehow conceal sufficiently well. And many here, as the Bishop of Herefordshire said, have been deeply affected, as well as the survivors who have so rightly brought us to this place. Many other people here have been deeply affected and badly treated. So we face a continual challenge and reality. This is not an issue we can deal with; it is something we will live with, and must live in the reality of ”“ day in day out, for as long as the church exists ”“ and seek to get it right.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has used his first presidential address to the General Synod to call on the Church to recognise that the “cultural and political ground” in Britain is “changing”, and to “accept that there is a revolution in the area of sexuality, and we have not fully heard it”.

Speaking on the first day of the Synod meeting in York, on Friday evening, Archbishop Welby said that he was “not proposing new policy”, but spoke of the “notable hostility” to the Church’s current position.

“Anyone who listened, as I did, to much of the Same-sex Marriage Bill second reading debate in the House of Lords could not fail to be struck by the overwhelming change of cultural hinterland; predictable attitudes were no longer there,” he said.

Read it all.

The social context is changing radically. There is a revolution. It may be, it was, that 59% of the population called themselves Christian at the last census, with 25% saying they had no faith. But the YouGov poll a couple of weeks back was the reverse, almost exactly, for those under 25. If we are not shaken by that, we are not listening.

The cultural and political ground is changing. There is a revolution. Anyone who listened, as I did, to much of the Same Sex Marriage Bill Second Reading Debate in the House of Lords could not fail to be struck by the overwhelming change of cultural hinterland. Predictable attitudes were no longer there. The opposition to the Bill, which included me and many other bishops, was utterly overwhelmed, with amongst the largest attendance in the House and participation in the debate, and majority, since 1945. There was noticeable hostility to the view of the churches. I am not proposing new policy, but what I felt then and feel now is that some of what was said by those supporting the bill was uncomfortably close to the bone. Lord Alli said that 97% of gay teenagers in this country report homophobic bullying. In the USA suicide as a result of such bullying is the principle cause of death of gay adolescents. One cannot sit and listen to that sort of reality without being appalled. We may or may not like it, but we must accept that there is a revolution in the area of sexuality, and we have not fully heard it.

The majority of the population rightly detests homophobic behaviour or anything that looks like it. And sometimes they look at us and see what they don’t like. I don’t like saying that. I’ve resisted that thought. But in that debate I heard it, and I could not walk away from it.

Read it all.

Archbishop Justin said today the Church of England must “take great care” to listen to voices of suffering in the Middle East, including shrinking Christian populations, in his first published comments since returning from the region last weekend.

But he said we must contribute “as servants, not coming with some grand idea of solution.” He urged the Church to take inspiration from the dioceses in Cairo and Jerusalem which “punch far above their weight, and do it by love expressed in action.”

Injustices across the region, and the fears felt by many communities, must be confronted, but “in keeping with these wonderful dioceses, confronted with love, humility, and service,” he said.

Read it all.

THE Archbishop of Canterbury has responded to criticism that he ignored Palestinian Christians during a five-day visit to the Holy Land….

Press reports last week suggested that some Palestinian Christians were angry that, during a visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Archbishop Welby did not visit Nazareth or Bethlehem. He did, however, meet Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Read it all.

Speaking about today’s seminar, Archbishop Justin said: “The Church of England was at the beginning of national education of this country and continues to be crucial to its flourishing. Today, bishops and diocesan board of education chairs have worked together to develop a vision for the future of church schools which will continue our mission of transforming every part of our society.

“It is obviously true that good schools help produce an educated workforce. But the Christian vision is a far greater one. It is about setting a framework for children as they learn which enables them to be confident when faced with the vast challenges that our rapidly changing culture brings to us.

Read it all.

Justin Welby has begun the search for a new director of communications as he seeks to overcome the negative headlines that accompanied his first trip to the Middle East.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s failure to visit Bethlehem or Nazareth last week prompted fury among Palestinians, overshadowing the entire journey. He is now to advertise for the post as part of a root-and-branch reordering of his team.

Read it all (subscription required).

On World Refugee Day we are urged to remember the millions of people who have been forced from their homes and homelands, out into a world that is unfamiliar, frightening and dangerous. This year we are especially asked to consider the impact on families who must care for each other despite having left behind every source of comfort and security. Under these desperate pressures families can find themselves pulled apart, creating deep suffering that doesn’t just hurt now, but wounds generations to come.

Providing sanctuary to the stranger has always been a core Christian value. Every day churches around the world care for people who have been forced into becoming ”˜strangers’. They offer a welcome to people who have been robbed of their homes, their societies and their cultures.

Read it all.

[The]…Rev Matthew Reed from the Children’s Society writes that the Church of England, which is so deeply embedded in our communities, could be the ”˜transformational agency’ in our nation. As a church we are incredibly well-equipped to help change not just the lives of children living in poverty, but the society which currently prevents so many children from flourishing. ”˜This is our time,’ he writes; I share this conviction.

For me, two things are now needed. First, we must be confident in our faith that Christ is the source of all goodness. So it’s necessary for us to develop our own personal spirituality, as well as our communal spirituality, so that this encounter with Jesus is driving our understanding of what is right and good. The other is that we need to be confident, but also gracious and wise in how we share that knowledge ”“ so that we influence society in a way that people can hear, rather by the succumbing to the (all too human) temptation to try convincing people with our words alone, rather than our actions.

I am more optimistic about the Church than I have been at any other time in my life. Something is shifting; a spiritual hunger is starting to emerge. In so many ways this is an extremely difficult time for us as a society. But is it also a great opportunity to show people who Jesus is by how we live our lives.

Read it all.

Pope Francis hinted today in his first meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury that he realised the establishment of the Anglican Ordinariate had not always been easy to comprehend.

But he told Archbishop Justin Welby he was “grateful” for “the sincere efforts the Church of England has made to understand the reasons that led my predecessor, Benedict XVI, to provide a canonical structure able to respond to the wishes of those groups of Anglicans who have asked to be received collectively into the Catholic Church”.

In a public address, following private talks that last just over 30 minutes, Francis said he was “sure” the Anglican Ordinariate, erected in 2009, would “enable the spiritual, liturgical and pastoral traditions that form the Anglican patrimony to be better known and appreciated in the Catholic world”.

Read it all.

Overcoming divisions between Anglicans and Roman Catholics will require a “self-giving love” characterised by “hospitality and love for the poor”, the Archbishop of Canterbury said on Friday, at his first meeting with Pope Francis.

Archbishop Welby, accompanied by his wife, Caroline, met Pope Francis at the Apostolic Palace on Friday morning, after meeting the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch. The Archbishop and the Pope had a private conversation, after which they gave public addresses and attended a service of midday prayer together.

Read it all.

The Archbishop and the Pope affirmed the bonds of “friendship” and “love” between Roman Catholics and Anglicans when they met for the first time in Rome this morning

In their first meeting, Archbishop Justin and Pope Francis both spoke this morning of the bonds of “friendship” and “love” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.

The two leaders agreed that the fruits of this dialogue and relationship have the potential to empower Christians around the world to demonstrate the love of Christ.

Read it all.

Pope Francis met on Friday with the new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, stressing the need to work and worship together in the search for reconciliation and unity between the Catholic and Anglican communities. Philippa Hitchen was on hand in the library of the Apostolic Palace to hear what the Pope and the Archbishop had to say….

Read and listen to it all.

At the end of his first visit to the Vatican, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said he and Pope Francis shared ideas on economic justice, on the plight of Christians in the Middle East, but also on their deeply personal experiences of God’s calling in their daily lives.

Following their morning audience and joint prayer service, the leader of the Anglican Communion described the Pope as a man of “extraordinary humanity, on fire with the Spirit of Christ”. While admitting there are obstacles on the road to reconciliation between Anglicans and Catholics, he said he sensed a new vigour and common commitment “to prove the radicality” of the Christian Gospel.

Speaking to Philippa Hitchen in the garden of the Venerable English College at the end of the brief visit, the archbishop said he and the Pope also joked about the way they had inaugurated their ministries within two days of each other earlier this year”¦”¦

Read and listen to it all.

Speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral this evening, Archbishop Justin said there will never be “perfect” banks, because “in the end no human being is of themselves perfectly good.”

But the Archbishop said we can have “potentially good banks”, which are motivated by virtue and not just financial bonuses and penalties.

Such a banking system would be “realistic” about human fallibility, but “optimistic” about human potential, he said.-

Read it all and note the audio link to the full address.

The Most Rev. Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, will pay a brief, informal visit to Pope Francis I in Rome on June 14. According to a Lambeth Palace statement, it will be a “personal and fraternal” visit.

It will be the first meeting between the two prelates since their inaugurations in March. The two church leaders share a commitment to global justice, ethical regulation of financial markets and conflict resolution.

“This visit is an opportunity for the Archbishop and Pope Francis to review the present state of relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion,” said a statement issued by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out in support of a campaign encouraging world leaders to tackle hunger, saving the millions of lives it claims each year.

Archbishop Justin spoke via video to thousands gathered in Hyde Park..[Saturday] to launch the IF campaign, of which the Church of England is a member. The IF campaign is made up of more than 200 charities, faith groups and organisations. The campaign is urging G8 leaders to take big steps that will tackle the global injustice of hunger.

He said: “We’ve come to celebrate the opportunity we have to end hunger in our lifetimes. The only way that’s going to happen is by mass movements of people, like yourselves, getting together”.

Read it all and check out the video also.

During the testosterone-fuelled boom years, Christian faith was about surviving in the City, but since 2008 and the revelation that it was all built on sand, Christians have been saying unequivocally that the gospel is non-negotiable, that working in commerce isn’t about surviving as a Christian but about transforming the way we do business, that Christianity is disruptive of systemic greed and corruption: that, in short, their work serves their faith and not the other way round. They are converting markets, not just people. These are the new Power Christians.

Welby is their spiritual, as well as titular, leader. Born in 1956 into a privileged, if eccentric family, he has managed a tension between descent from a powerful Conservative dynasty (on his mother’s side, he is a scion of the Butler family, which gave us Rab Butler, the deputy prime minister to Harold Macmillan) and skeletons in the family cupboard (it was seen fit to conceal his paternal Jewish-immigrant lineage from him until he became an adult).

This background may have contributed to Welby the Outsider, part of the establishment but also a thorn in its side. It is no surprise that the relentlessly bourgeois HTB couldn’t contain him. Note that he considerably widened not only his social but his theological circle after he left the Knightsbridge church. Via Africa and the Middle East, he arrived as dean of Liverpool Cathedral, where he operated what he and Dr Williams have dubbed a “mixed economy” of traditions. Now add that eclecticism ”“ one might even call it a catholic taste in denominations ”“ to the can-do attitude of the City whizz-kid and you have someone who can tap effortlessly in to the energy of any kind of Christian witness….

Read it all.

[Justin] Welby, the people’s primate, takes the bus to meetings, tweets about shoe shopping and admits he is tempted to nod off during particularly dull after-lunch synod debates. Only last month, he gave an interview in which he let slip that one of the greatest frustrations of moving to London is that takeaway delivery men get confused when he orders. They have never had to drop off a chicken tikka masala at Lambeth Palace before.

His love of pounding the streets has been welcomed by several followers, not least Graham Daniels, a former Cambridge United left back and now general director of Christians in Sport. “It proves he is fit for purpose, not just theological but physically, too. There are 150,000 sports clubs in the country with 10 million members, so it is great to see that he can relate to all those people.”

It should not be such a surprise that the Archbishop exercises. He is, to use the marvellous Victorian idiom, a “muscular Christian”, which has never been a wholly metaphorical turn of phrase.

Read it all.

The Church of England has admonished one of its priests for calling the Archbishop of Canterbury a “w****r” on Facebook in a row over gay marriage. The Rev Marcus Ramshaw, who like Justin Welby trained for the priesthood at Cranmer Hall, Durham, also described him as a “massive mistake”.

After the Archbishop spoke against gay marriage in the House of Lords, Mr Ramshaw called for a petition to be set up urging him to resign….

Read it all (subscription required).

The newly-installed Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby will visit Pope Francis on 14 June, the Vatican has confirmed.

It will mark the first meeting between Pope Francis and the new head of the Church of England and spiritual head of the global Anglican Church.

The brief courtesy visit is expected to be “informal” but “important” according to a representative of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, whose president Cardinal Kurt Koch will meet and pray with Welby. The Archbishop of Canterbury is also expected to visit the tomb of Blessed John Paul II.

Read it all.

We do not know what was prayed. Her Majesty knelt at the beginning of a path of demanding devotion and utter self-sacrifice, a path she did not choose, yet to which she was called by God. Today we celebrate sixty years since that moment, sixty years of commitment.

There was a trumpet fanfare as today as the Queen arrived with her supporters, but let us resist the splendour of the spectacle for a moment, and focus on what was meant: “Not my will, Lord, but yours be done.”

And following her giving of allegiance to God, others – especially, with such equal and dedicated commitment, the Duke of Edinburgh – pledged their allegiance to her.

And here, in the grace and providence of God, is the model of liberty and authority which our country enjoys. Liberty is only real when it exists under authority. Liberty under authority begins, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, with our duty to God, “whose service is perfect freedom”.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Colin Hart, Campaign Director for the Coalition for Marriage, said that although the Government had won the vote today, the debate had revealed the strength of opposition to the bill.

He remained optimistic that better safeguards for those with a traditional understanding of marriage would be introduced to the bill.

He said: “We will continue to campaign to save traditional marriage and today’s vote and the concerns expressed by many peers mean we will be able to introduce safeguards that will protect teachers, registrars, chaplains and anyone who works in the public sector. And if the Government refuse to accept these changes, they risk losing the legislation at third reading.”

Read it all.

Members of four Melanesian religious orders visited Archbishop Justin at Lambeth Palace on Thursday last week. Amid prayer, worship and song, the Brothers and Sisters pledged their desire to work for “peace and reconciliation in the Anglican Communion”.

rchbishop Justin welcomed a group of Brothers and Sisters from Melanesia to Lambeth Palace on Thursday night for an evening of prayer, conversation and Melanesian song.

The visit was part of the Melanesian Religious Orders’ mission to the UK, in which they visited five different diocese around the country. The theme of their mission was ”˜Simply Living’ in which they live the question ”˜How do we live the Gospel in relation to God, creation and one another?’

Read it all.

It is …necessary to express, as has been done already, total rejection of homophobic language, which is wrong ”“ and more than that, sickening.

However, I and many of my colleagues remain with considerable hesitations about this Bill. My predecessor Lord Williams of Oystermouth showed clearly last summer, in evidence during the consultation period, that it has within it a series of category errors. It confuses marriage and weddings. It assumes that the rightful desire for equality ”“ to which I’ve referred supportively ”“ must mean uniformity, failing to understand that two things may be equal but different. And as a result it does not do what it sets out to do, my Lords. Schedule 4 distinguishes clearly between same gender and opposite gender marriage, thus not achieving true equality.

The result is confusion. Marriage is abolished, redefined and recreated, being different and unequal for different categories. The new marriage of the Bill is an awkward shape with same gender and different gender categories scrunched into it, neither fitting well. The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost. The idea of marriage as covenant is diminished. The family in its normal sense, predating the state and as our base community of society ”“ as we’ve already heard ”“ is weakened. These points will be expanded on by others in the debate, I’m sure, including those from these benches.

Read it all.

The archbishop made clear he shared [Lord] Dear’s concerns about the bill. Welby told peers the bill had created confusion, adding: “Marriage is abolished, redefined and recreated ”“ being different and unequal for different categories. The new marriage of the bill is an awkward shape with same gender and different gender categories scrunched into it ”“ neither fitting well.

“The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost. The idea of marriage as covenant is diminished. The family in its normal sense predating the state and as our base community of society is weakened.

Read it all.