More seriously, this second Presidential Address showed a worrying misreading of the ground realities of the Communion. Together with many who come from churches outside the Anglo-American axis, I cannot identify myself with either side the Archbishop portrayed. It put me at a loss. What is the \u201cgenerous initiative\u201d\u009d am I supposed to take in the Communion? More poignantly, am I expected to take any generous initiative at all? Even more pointedly, has the Archbishop \u201d\u201c with his best intents \u201d\u201c completely ignored the realities outside the familiar Anglo-American perceptions? And so, the many generous acts of love from churches in the southern continents have been dismissed by the sense of \u201csuperiority and dependence\u201d\u009d in the West, as Gregory Cameron has pointed out. This is to say, British academics and US financiers have the rest of the world all figured out and neatly configured from the vantage points of sanitised settings in the West.<\/p>\n
For Canterbury does speak (unconsciously) from a centre: the centre of a domineering Western framework that has proved ineffective and burdensome to the rest of the Communion. The present crisis is not merely a clash of two opposing theological positions: liberal and conservative. The emerging voices from the South are stifled, misunderstood, and misrepresented by all sides in the West in the current debates. What has been expected of the rest of the world is often merely in conforming to set roles in screenplays that are scripted by (well-meaning!) westerners. What American and British Anglicans have often failed to appreciate is this: despite human folly and weakness, and often quite aside from institutional efforts, the Word of God has given birth to new spiritual movements in the wider world. God has kept for himself a people in the southern continents, that they may be able to save the Anglican Communion in the present dark hour (alluding to Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s exposition on Joseph in his plenary address to Lambeth).<\/p>\n