The conference will be a testing time for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who is on the liberal wing of the church but has devoted himself to trying to hold the church together. Some have accused him of seeking consensus where there is none.

He seems to have disappointed radicals while failing to satisfy traditionalists, but Bishop Holloway has a strong respect for the archbishop. “Rowan is a liberal, warm-hearted man,” he says. “There is something very honourable about what he is doing. He has decided to park his own private convictions and work to preserve the unity of the institution.

“It is a very self-sacrificing thing to do and it has won him a lot of respect as well as criticism. My hunch is the good guys will rally round and do what they can to bolster him up.”

Bishop [Richard] Holloway, who was Bishop of Edinburgh for 14 years and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church for eight, attended the last two Lambeth conferences.

He says: “Each Lambeth I have been at, the press has predicted the dissolution of the Anglican communion. In 1988 it was over the ordination of women, but we found a way of living with that. In 1998 they did less well with the gay thing. I suspect this time they will get through again.

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Archbishop Williams, hoping to keep clashes and controversy to a minimum at the three-week Lambeth summit, decided not to invite Robinson, disappointing the U.S. bishop.

Robinson, who will still be coming to Canterbury to meet fellow clerics on the margins of the conference, believed clashes will be few and far between at Lambeth.

Forecasting it will end with a typically fudged Anglican consensus, he said “It will drive the press crazy. There will be no resolutions, no proclamations, no lines drawn in the sand.”

After congregating in Canterbury on Wednesday, the bishops y head into a four-day biblical retreat away from the eyes of the media. They launch into a full conference agenda next week.

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At the last Lambeth gathering was a vote, led by conservative African bishops, that homosexuality was against Scripture.

Now, “they want a low-key educational and fellowship-oriented conference to help people understand each other better,” says Jim Naughton, canon for communications for the diocese of Washington, D.C., which supports gay clergy….

But traditionalist Rev. Kendall Harmon, canon theologian for the Diocese of South Carolina, says Lambeth will fail because the format allows “no meaningful way to resolve a family struggle.”

Harmon likened Lambeth to a children’s game: “Right now they’re playing Let’s Pretend. ‘Let’s walk together as if we really are together when we are not.’ I’m not willing to pretend, given the stakes ”” the Gospel,” says Harmon, who did not go with his bishop to Canterbury.

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Check out the first entry.

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Your faithful correspondent writes today from London, amidst a week remarkable in that two very different faiths–each with its own share of tumult–are on public display.

On Wednesday, the world’s Anglican bishops will gather in Canterbury, for the start of their once-every-10-years meeting, the Lambeth Conference. One of the globe’s biggest Christian events, the conference brings together in one place leaders of the Anglican Communion, which incorporates 37 churches that trace their origins to the Church of England (plus the C of E itself, of course). Total membership? Estimates start at 70 million, in 164 nations, all told.

But not all bishops (there are hundreds) will show. There’s deep anger among some, put off about the communion’s inability to prevent a few of its members from ordaining gay men and women as priests. The real turning point came five years ago, when Epsicopalians–Anglicanism’s American branch–in New Hampshire elected a gay man as their bishop. (There are Americans firmly planted on both sides of this issue, and in the middle, too.) As the Lambeth meeting has drawn steadily closers, talk of schism has rumbled ever louder.

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The issues which are “raising their heads” in the communion were discussed as well. Bishop Brooks remarked with great regret that so much energy is placed on issues of sexuality while the “real matter of advancing God’s Kingdom is being treated as an aside.” He hopes very much that at the Lambeth Conference we may come to “a place where we can have a common mind and move forward.” But this is, as he remarked, very much threatened, if we behave in a disingenuous manner to each other. I think, if I understand Bishop Brooks rightly, he is suggesting that there is a crisis of confidence in the communion caused by the fact that people “are not afraid to say things and not keep their word.” When he was young, he was always taught that “a man’s word is his bond.” It is necessary he said, to “turn on the light in the dark places.”

Read it all and please bookmark this blog for your Lambeth reading going forward.

(ACNS) Some 650 Anglican bishops from all over the world are making their way to Canterbury for the Lambeth Conference 2008 focussing on the theme: Equipping Bishops for Mission.

The Conference will begin with a three-day retreat and, as in previous Conferences, every day will begin with Eucharist and Bible study in small groups.

More than 75% of Anglican bishops worldwide have now registered for the Conference, representing 36 of the 38 provinces of the world-wide Anglican Communion. There will be 10 husbands among the 550 spouses taking part in the parallel conference, God’s People for God’s Mission.

The Lambeth Conference this year has two key points of focus: strengthening the sense of a shared Anglican identity among the bishops from around the world, and helping to equip bishops for the role they increasingly have as leaders in mission, involved in a whole variety of ways in helping the Church grow.

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Alister McGrath, one of the most respected moderate evangelical academics, said: “It is not Rowan’s fault that he is left looking like King Canute. Big cultural forces are causing the church to split and what held it together in the past is no longer there. While there are undoubtedly theological issues, it is also profoundly political.

“Rowan has a very high view of unity and has worked hard, but it is not going to be enough. It is virtually impossible to achieve consensus and it is very difficult to exercise leadership in that context. Leadership is about more than finding consensus – you also have to map out the route that you believe to be right.”

What is constantly overlooked is that the archbishop of Canterbury has purely symbolic influence, not power. He can’t impose his will even on the Church of England, let alone the other provinces of the worldwide communion. What the position has is authority. What it has lost is respect.

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Having written glibly about the “controversial” covenant of beliefs that Rowan Williams wants the bishops to take back to their provinces, I’ve now read a draft of the thing, and can summarise it as follows:

1. If an Anglican province signs up to the covenant, it agrees to not do anything contrary to the policies of the Anglican Communion.

2. If it goes ahead and does it anyway, then it will have ignored the covenant.

3. Which means … um, we’ll get back to you on that.

Or maybe I’ve misread the draft. This whole covenant thing is elusive, shall we say.

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For some, [blessing non-celibate same sex unions] is a communion-breaking issue. Those who feel this way say that others have departed from the authority of the word of God, and from the orthodox expression of the faith and tradition of the church’s teaching on sexuality. They are so convinced of these things that they feel compelled to leave the national expression of the church to which they belong.

For others, however, this is not a communion-breaking issue. It is certainly controversial and has created strained relations within the church. But many people remain convinced of the need for continuing conversation. They are committed to principles of intentional listening, mutual respect, constructive dialogue and a capacity for tolerance of a variety of theological perspectives on this matter. For a great number of people, the conversation centres on being faithful to the word of God.

Many say, as a group of Canadian Anglican theologians have said, “the interpretation of Scripture is a central and complex matter and that, at times in the church’s history, ”˜faithful’ readings have led to mutually contradictory understandings, requiring ongoing dialogue and prayer towards discernment of the one voice of the gospel.”

For some, the conversation needs to be expanded to include the benefit of scientific research. For some others the critical question is: What constitutes loving and responsible pastoral care of gay and lesbian couples who desire to live in monogamous, life-long, committed relationships?

Controversial issues have often tested the principle of autonomy on the part of national churches that are bound together in the global Anglican Communion. So the question becomes: Is unity the ultimate value transcending all others, even at the risk of not acting on what we believe to be a gospel imperative in a local context? Or is action on a gospel imperative the ultimate value that transcends all others, even at the risk of not maintaining unity?

I believe this question is critical to our conversations at Lambeth.

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Anglican bishops from around the world were arriving in the Britain on Tuesday ahead of their once-a-decade gathering in Canterbury, which looks set to be dominated by deep splits over the roles of women and homosexuals.

About a quarter of the Anglican Church’s bishops including most from Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda are staying away from the Lambeth Conference, a week after the Church of England gave the green light to women bishops.

Another notable absentee will be the first openly-gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in the United States, who was not invited but will be in Canterbury following from the conference fringes.

It was Robinson’s consecration as bishop in 2003 which effectively carved out the battle lines in the ongoing bitter struggle between Anglican liberals and conservatives over gay and, most recently, women bishops.

The Church of England, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, is the mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has around 77 million followers.

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In the end, the Lambeth bishops must show the world a way forward for the Anglican Communion that rejects the easy compromise of doctrinal and ecclesial muddle while eschewing the route of quick separation from all but a narrow band of the like-minded. They need to demonstrate to the Church and the world that Anglicans are truly committed both to the gospel revealed by God in Jesus Christ and to walking together in charity and peace. Anglicans around the world will be praying for their bishops these next two weeks. The bishops know well how much they need it.

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Since we are quickly approaching all-Lambeth-all-the-time mode, and since there were two notable rumors just having to do (broadly speaking) with American participation in Lambeth today (one being the item immediately below this one and the other spoken to by Jim Naughton on Episcopal Cafe) can I please remind everyone that when you come across information like this anywhere (and, yes, that includes this site) you learn to check it with at least three reliable witnesses before considering it true–thanks, KSH.

Officials with the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin sought to dismiss persistent rumors that Bishop John-David Schofield of the Anglican diocese will be uninvited at the last minute to the Lambeth Conference of bishops.

“Rumors are just that,” said the Rev. Canon Bill Gadenberger, canon to the ordinary of the Anglican diocese. “The invitation is still valid. Yet much is still happening, GAFCON was fantastic and gives us much of what we need for the future…

“I must remain to do other important ministry here, such as our youth leadership camp, Camp H2O,” he said. “Bishop Schofield has tickets to leave for London next week,” Canon Gandeberger said via e-mail on July 13.

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What’s in short supply in some quarters are those much-prized Anglican virtues of patience, forbearance and tolerance. They have been strikingly absent in one small US diocese, New Hampshire, and in the dioceses of Nigeria and Sydney; each side mirrors the other’s disregard for how commitment to an institution brings a collective responsibility to each other and for each other. No one has the monopoly on truth or virtue; understandings of intimacy and sexuality are far too complex across cultures to be reduced to the western claims of superiority, maintained two gay Anglican priests separately to me. In the UK we may have achieved a welcome end to legal discrimination, but homophobia is still rife – while in other cultures there may be more tolerance than we care to acknowledge within the privacy afforded to sexuality.

Williams has been unfortunate to arrive for a torrid shift in Canterbury. Global communications are disrupting all religious traditions, traumatising identity and fuelling a literalist fundamentalism; the result is a gross simplifying of the complexity and paradox that is part of human experience. While Anglicanism’s travails are laid bare for the bloggers to pour scorn on, the Catholic church has become a parody of its own past, a ruthlessly centralised authoritarian structure in which all the debates troubling Lambeth are simply being postponed. As one priest put it to me, that is also a massive risk.

Williams has remarkably managed to instil dignity and warmth – as anyone in York Minster for his sermon before General Synod will testify – into proceedings, which gives plenty of room to hope that his Lambeth conference will pass smoothly and that those bishops prepared to turn up will find in the face-to-face encounter beyond lurid headlines that it is possible to find a way to accommodate difference. And, as Hooker would say: “Charity in all matters”.

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Referring to the ordination of Gene Robinson and the behaviour of the American Episcopal Church, Dr Jensen says in this month’s Melbourne Anglican newspaper: “If we are talking about schism and the break up of the Communion – that’s where it starts and that’s where the responsibility is.”

This is just too simple.

If there is a break-up of the Anglican Communion, then Dr Jensen and the bishops who attended the GAFCON alternative Lambeth, must take some responsibility. There is blood on their hands.

The dual issues of gay priests and female bishops are tearing the Church apart and, indeed, threaten the very viability of Lambeth.

But what do we have?

The Vicar General of Melbourne, Bishop Paul White, writing to all Melbourne clergy, before leaving for Lambeth, said it would be “premature to comment on reports of division in the global Anglican Church”.

This is unhelpful and demonstrates a singular lack of leadership. The Anglican Church is broken and some would argue its very existence is terminal.

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A Youtube Video, three cheers for the Anglican Church of Canada for providing this.

The openly gay bishop whose consecration led to the crisis over sexuality in the Anglican Communion has accused his evangelical opponents of “idolatry”.

The Bishop of New Hampshire, the Right Rev Gene Robinson, is to defy the Archbishop of Canterbury by turning up uninvited at Canterbury for the Lambeth conference this week.

The Times has learnt that the crisis is likely to worsen, whatever is decided at the conference, because the Episcopal Church of the US plans to overturn its pledge not to consecrate any more openly gay or lesbian bishops.

The US church, which will dominate the conference with 125 bishops attending, is expected then to elect rapidly and consecrate a further five or six such bishops.

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Read it all by following the link on each day on the calendar.

A leading Anglican gay bishop has described the Archbishop of Canterbury’s position in the church as ‘almost untenable’.

The Right Reverend Gene Robinson, the American churchman whose appointment as a bishop triggered a devastating split among Anglican leaders, said that Dr Rowan Williams now faces condemnation whichever way he turns.

But he insisted he had great sympathy with the embattled Archbishop and pledged to support his efforts to keep the warring sister churches of the Church of England together in the 400-year-old Anglican network.

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Listen to it all (about 11 1/2 minutes total).

Tradition-minded church leaders who want the Anglican family to stay together despite its rifts will attend. They will undoubtedly ask Jefferts Schori about complaints that the 2.2 million-member U.S. church is mistreating its conservative minority.

Of the tensions within the American church, Jefferts Schori said “we’ve attempted to deal with it in the Christian community” but haven’t always been successful.

Although the exact figure is in dispute, Episcopal officials say that fewer than 100 of the more than 7,000 U.S. Episcopal parishes have voted to split off since Robinson was elected.

The entire Diocese of San Joaquin, based in Fresno, California, voted to withdraw from the denomination, and the Diocese of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, is poised to do the same this fall.

The national church is suing to retain hold of the San Joaquin diocese and its many millions of dollars in property. Another lawsuit is moving through the courts over 11 breakaway churches in Virginia. Critics have called the legal fights “un-Christian” and have asked Episcopal leaders to halt the lawsuits.

But Jefferts Schori said, “We really don’t have the authority or the moral right to give away those gifts that have been given by generations past and for the benefit of generations now and the benefit of generations to come.”

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Here is one:

Peter Beckwith, Episcopal Bishop of Springfield, Illinois

My hope is that those in attendance will recognise the seriousness of the crisis which has been allowed to envelop the Anglican Communion, and deal with the elephant dominating our living room. The Global Anglican Future conference has described the situation for most Anglicans worldwide and addressed it. What it has said, and with which I concur, is that faithful, orthodox Anglicans will not continue to abide any further the current agenda set by the Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada and supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury through what many see as his acquiescence and benign leadership. I do not expect much to come of the conference. The process model appears very similar to what TEC’s House of Bishops has used for years which has fostered dysfunctional inefficiency, chaos, non-productivity and spiritual bankruptcy.

I believe if the first Lambeth conference had the same proposed agenda and process as projected for 2008, there very well might not have been a second Lambeth conference or even an Anglican Communion today.

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There had been 103 Archbishops of Canterbury before Dr Rowan Williams arrived at the ultimate seat of Anglican power, yet few can have presided over more turbulent times.
From women bishops to gay clergy, it has been the scholarly Archbishop to whom people have looked for guidance and leadership as the warring factions have warned repeatedly that the Church would split.

However, while he may hold the greatest sway in theory, a panel of experts – enlisted by The Sunday Telegraph – argued that to claim he is the most influential figure in the Anglican communion is no longer a foregone conclusion, and that the Lambeth Conference, which opens on Wednesday, will test that claim to its limit.

In drawing up The Lambeth Power List, they said that Dr Williams has been buffeted from one side by the liberal actions of the American Church, led by Katharine Jefferts Schori, and the reactionary zeal of the Africans, led by Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, on the other.

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This month’s Lambeth Conference has made one resolution in advance: not to make any resolutions. Such a disavowal of resolutions was part of the reason for disaffected Anglicans to set up the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon), held earlier this month in Jerusalem. Some of these members of the Anglican family will stay away from the gathering in Canterbury.

I asked Dr Kevin Ward, author of A History of Global Anglicanism, whether this lack of resolutions will make it feel different from previous conferences. “The Gafcon people weren’t happy with Rowan Williams’ intention to move away from resolutions, to make Lambeth a toothless tiger,” said Dr Ward. “They wanted more clarity, particularly in disciplining the Americans. In their view, it’s irresponsible just to have a huge talking shop when this is going on. And they also wonder what the point of Lambeth resolutions is, if they’re not properly enforced.” But not all the conservative evangelicals are boycotting, so could there still be a lobby pressing for greater clarity? “There could be,” agreed Dr Ward. “For example the Sudanese and Tanzanian bishops will be there, and plenty of other African bishops, so there might be a group demanding a resolution condemning the American Church. But the whole point of how the conference is structured is to avoid that sort of thing. The emphasis is on small groups – the model is the indaba – the Zulu council meetings, in which everyone gets heard.”

How fully and honestly should homosexuality be discussed by the official programme? It’s a dilemma. There is a danger of seeming to sweep the issue under the carpet, and a counter-danger of elevating it to such importance that new rows break out and other pressing issues are not given proper attention.

Few people have pondered this dilemma more extensively over the last few years than Canon Philip Groves. He is the Facilitator of the Listening Process on Human Sexuality in the Anglican Communion. This job originates in the less contentious part of Resolution 1:10: “We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons.” Groves is particularly good at listening to African concerns, having spent seven years in Tanzania, during which time he got to know many African bishops. He is helping to run the part of the conference set aside for the gay issue. The day is called “Listening to God and to Each Other”. At first Groves is wary of being questioned about this, for fear of seeming to have an agenda, of wanting to skew the discussion in a certain way.

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Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, was not invited to attend. But [Bishop Kirk] Smith said Robinson will be in Canterbury, just not at the event.

“I think it’s a very insulting thing to the American church that a duly elected bishop is told he’s not allowed to come,” said Smith, who will be attending his first Lambeth Conference.

“The vast majority of my colleagues feel quite upset. But Gene himself told us, ‘You need to go and make your case.’ He has been gracious and complied with the archbishop of Canterbury. I hope I will be able to convince some of the bishops I meet with to meet Gene, so that he’s not just a name.”

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Bishop Gene was speaking at the annual conference of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union held in Hertfordshire and chaired by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan.

He warned that telling gay people to go to some churches was akin to telling an abused wife to go back to her husband. He also compared the church’s attitude to him as that to parents whose son or daughter tells them they are coming out. He said:

“What is happening now in the Anglican Communion is what happens in a family when a kid comes out. It goes through a process of grieving and resistance to change until it can find a revised world view. .This church is not ours to win or lose, it is God’s church . It may be looking pretty rough now but God will take care of it. It may look a bit different in the end but God is not going to abandon his church so we don’t need to be so afraid.

“We are not at liberty to think we are on the selection committee for God’s family, our job is to be on the welcome committee and the sooner we learn that in the Anglican Communion the better off we will be.

“I don’t believe God stopped revealing himself when the canon of scripture was closed. God promises to be with us and never let us go. We are promised that the spirit will lead us into all truth. I believe that God is now leading us to the full inclusion of people of all types of sexuality. Maybe where we’re headed is just to acknowledge that all of us are incredibly diverse and God loves us all.”

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Barely had the votes of the General Synod been counted when senior clergymen (and they were, indeed, men rather than women of the cloth) began to complain that the church was, in the words of one traditionalist, “mean-spirited and shortsighted” in rejecting the idea of so-called superbishops to oversee those parishes opposed to female bishops.

There was talk – increasingly common in the worldwide Anglican Communion – of schism, of rebel clerics abandoning their ministry within the Church of England to march toward the Church of Rome, reversing the historic split within Christendom inspired by Henry VIII in the 16th century.

For centuries, the break with Rome molded the identity of many English worshipers, and yielded a central element of the Anglican self-perception as tolerant, pragmatic and, most of all, independent. Now, for some, the Vatican itself – profoundly opposed to female clergy – offers a beacon of faith.

The Anglican Communion claims a global membership of almost 80 million, an increasingly fractious body riven by debates between reformers and traditionalists, pulled this way and that by the liberalism of the Episcopal Church in the United States and by the conservatism of many African church leaders.

But the debate about the appointment of female bishops in the Church of England – the historical wellspring of the communion – seemed curiously at odds with the practices that have become normal in many ordinary parishes, where the place of women in the church is not even an issue except at the level of theological debate.

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The Bishop of Europe, the Rt Rev Geoffrey Rowell, said he would attend but could not take part in a Eucharist service held by the female head of the Episcopal Church of the USA, the Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori.

He added that he was “astonished” that so little information about events at Lambeth had been given out so far.

“We know the themes for each day and that we shall be in study groups of eight, but not much else.”

The Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Rev Nicholas Reade, added: “I too am very surprised that we have had little more than a sketchy outline. I’ve never been to a conference before where we have had such little information.”

Read it all and do note the correct spelling of Martyn Minns’ name.