CT: Some conservatives were anxious in coming to Lambeth and some here have actually said they don’t feel any hope towards the future of the Anglican Communion. Do you share those feelings?
TW: I always tell my staff at home to distinguish between feelings and thinking because your feelings will come and go if you are tired or in a meeting perhaps and then you will feel like all hope is lost. You have to go back and pray and think.
The situation is still extremely complex. The Archbishop of Canterbury said when he invited us all that if you accept this invitation you are accepting to work with the Windsor Report and the Covenant process. The Archbishop reiterated that on Sunday afternoon and has reiterated it publicly several times.
If the Windsor Report is properly followed through and if the Covenant process actually gets somewhere where it is designed to get then things can happen which will give hope to a lot of people who are at present in danger of losing hope. I say that in general terms because I am not in charge of the process, I’m not on the group for taking forward either of those things. So I am not entirely sure what will happen with either of them and to put it devoutly I am not sure how the Holy Spirit will lead those who are working on those things.
CT: So you are open to the Covenant?
TW: Yes, sure. We have to be. In the last few Lambeths, many people believed they were working in a parliamentary style process with big sessions and big debates that would polarise people instantly and that isn’t necessarily the right way of doing Christian decision making. So the Archbishop has taken the risk ”“ and it is a risk – of abandoning that model and saying let’s pray together, work together and be together in all sorts of contexts and we will see what the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church in the midst of that.
Bishop Wright said:
[blockquote]For some reason which I don’t fully understand, it is as though some of the great tensions of our culture are being focused on the church and some of the great tensions of our church are being focused on the Anglican Communion and some of the tensions of the great Anglican Communion are being focused on this Lambeth Conference and the next 10 days. That’s why we have to spend the coming days wisely, prayerfully, listening to God and doing what needs to be done.[/blockquote]
A fascinating remark. I hear echoes from Romans 8 in +Bishop Wright’s words. (I think he said at the Wycliffe College Refresh conference a few years back something to the effect that Romans 8 was his default position) “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” The church finds itself at the place of creation’s groaning – and well it should be for it is to there that God has called us to witness and to pray. As Bishop Wright says in his winsome little Romans for Everyone commentary: “The church is not to be apart from the pain of the world; it is to be at prayer at precisely the place where the world is in pain. That is part of our calling, our high but strange role within God’s purposes for new creation.” The Lambeth Conference is certainly on my prayer agenda even as I don’t always know how or what to pray which somehow seems to connect with the Gospel for this past Sunday.
[blockquote]CT: Do you agree with the content of the Sudanese statement?
TW: What they have done in their statement is simply reaffirm what the Anglican Communion has always taught and what the historic churches in Christendom have always taught. It is sad that these things need to be reaffirmed – clearly they do. So for millions of Christians around the world all that they have said is ‘we are still believing what we have always believed’. So it’s not exceptional.[/blockquote]
Dear +Tom,
What is exceptional is that until this time no one else has been so bold as to say it. Not you, not ++York, and not ++Canterbury.
RSB
+Tom Wright remember “Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus.†That which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. St. Vincent of Lerins, 5th century