PA How would you look back over your 10 years as Archbishop of Canterbury?
RW It’s impossible to register whether it’s been ”˜a success’ or not. I look back on it chiefly as a time of enormous pressure, yes, and plenty of invitations to all sorts of things, to engage in all sorts of contexts ”“ many many opportunities and lots of demands.
I think the two things I look back on with greatest satisfaction are that we’ve managed in the Church of England to launch this very new mission outreach programme Fresh Expressions, and get the Church of England to recognise the possibility of new styles of congregational life and new styles of training for ministers to go with it. I think that’s really begun to build itself in to the life of the Church.
And in the last couple of years we’ve also managed to launch the new Anglican Alliance for Relief and Development worldwide, so that we’ve put together a co-ordinating and umbrella body that helps the various relief agencies that are involved in the life of the Anglican Communion worldwide to work better together. And that so far has been very well received.
So those are, in my mind, some of the big positives of the last 10 years. I look back on those with a lot of gratitude.
And then, simply the opportunity of travelling in the Anglican Communion. I suppose, most poignantly, last year in Zimbabwe. But also visits to Congo and Sudan; visits to Pakistan at a time of some stress and tension there; and, of course, repeated visits to the Middle East over the last 10 years. It’s enormously stretching and inspiring, because you see people really work in the middle of appalling circumstances ”“ heartbreaking in some ways but a great enrichment.