Tom Wright reveals the Lambeth Commission’s thinking
WHEN you’re stuck in the mud, you need two things. First, you need to find solid ground underneath the mud. Second, you need to know which way to go to find the road ahead. Only then can you take the steps — which may themselves involve getting even muddier than you are already — from where you are to where you need to be.
That is the shape of the Windsor report. Sections A and B find the solid ground, which really is down there somewhere, if only we could get our feet on to it, and explains a little about how we got into the mud in the first place. Section C sets up some signposts for where we should be aiming in the long term, the solid road that would help us to avoid getting stuck like this again. Only then, in Section D, do we suggest to the Archbishop and the Primates (to whom we report, and who alone can move our recommendations forward) the steps that ought to be taken to extricate ourselves from our present muddle and mess.
We on the Commission were determined not to let our wider reflections be distorted by the immediate problems. There might in principle have been many issues that would have raised the same questions about how we act together as a Communion.
One good thing to emerge is a reminder, particularly to the Church of England, that there is such a thing as the Anglican Communion. It is both far more and far less than the old Empire at prayer, and membership has given enormous support to many beleaguered Christians, for instance in countries such as Sudan and Pakistan.
The question is: how can this Communion be enabled to flourish, above all in its task of bringing the gospel of Jesus to the world that needs it so badly?
WE WERE happily unanimous that we must remain a “communion”, not something looser like a federation. Nor do we want to create any equivalent of a papacy and curia: not simply because we want to be different from Rome, but for good reasons about the nature of authority within the Church. Healthy ecclesiology includes a dynamic interplay, under God and in the power of the Spirit, between scripture, episcopacy, and the whole people of God. We rejoice that the Anglican tradition provides a framework where this can flourish.
The fact that it seems not to have done so in the past few years indicates that things have become unbalanced, which is why the somewhat ad hoc “instruments of unity” that have evolved — the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meeting, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury — have proved insufficient to cope with the new questions. That is why, in Section C, we urge a further “tuning up” of the “instruments”, to include a Council of Advice to support and assist the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, crucially, an Anglican Covenant to provide a framework within which our future life together can flourish.
The basis for this is a fresh consideration of the key concepts of autonomy, adiaphora ("things indifferent"), and “subsidiarity” (the principle of deciding all matters as close to the local level as possible).
These work together. Autonomy doesn’t mean total independence: I have autonomy over what I grow in my garden, but, if I grow a plant that invades your garden, you will ask me to prune it. Many matters can and should be dealt with locally, but some inevitably involve the wider Church, and then local initiatives become questionable.
Similarly, all Anglicans know that there are differences we can live with (for example, bread or wafers at the eucharist); equally, there are some we can’t (suppose we tried to consecrate a practising Muslim as a bishop?). We all celebrate diversity; the question is: what sorts of diversity are appropriate, and hence capable of local expression without damaging wider unity, and what sorts are inappropriate?
One leading bishop said to me the other day: “I want us to make room for both opinions in the Church.” That simply ducks the question, as well as satisfying neither extreme. It assumes that the issue of sexual behaviour is one of the “things indifferent”. But the question before us is precisely whether or not that is the case. These issues — of how we “do” communion — lie at the heart of the report.
THE recommendations in Section D have already been criticised by some as too weak and by others as too strong. Note carefully what is said in the crucial paragraphs 134 and 144: we invite the persons concerned with the events in New Hampshire and New Westminster to express regret that “the proper constraints of the bonds of affection were breached” in the actions that were taken.
This is far more than merely saying, in effect: “We regret that some of you weren’t up to speed with modern thinking, and so have been puzzled and hurt.” It is saying: “We recognise that there were proper constraints, belonging to the bonds of affection at the heart of our common life, and we went ahead and breached them.” Everything else follows from this, including the similar, though not identical, request to bishops who have intervened in other bishops’ jurisdictions (paragraph 155).
We have set our face against speculating very far on what might happen if these requests, and the others that flow from them, do not find a favourable response. We were clear, though, that the Anglican Communion is called to take forward God’s mission in the world as a communion. We were also clear that, for the sake of that mission, we must work much harder than before at the rich unity-in-diversity that declares to the world that Jesus is Lord.
Dr Tom Wright is Bishop of Durham and a member of the Lambeth Commission.