Collapsing the Scrum

Our Lambeth journey continues and we are only a few days away from its conclusion. As I have said elsewhere, for me, it has been simply and successfully a gathering and place of encounter: meeting and engaging with other bishops from other parts of the Anglican Communion and addressing the issues in respectful, mutual dialogue. I couldn't have asked for more: it is the sort of Lambeth I have prayed for.

This process hasn't suited everyone, particularly those who feel they need swift resolutions to a crisis. If I have one main worry at this stage it is that someone will try to collapse the scrum - to stop the play and disrupt the process by demanding a new process or a U-turn in our current process at this eleventh hour.

As is so often the case with people, so it is, I believe, with Anglicanism: our greatest strength, paradoxically, may also, at times, be our weakness. So it is with our diversity and inclusiveness, but these are worth clinging to. And all this will take time and many more weeks of listening into the future.

Pray that no one will try to collapse or pull down the scrum!

As others see us

Yesterday evening I was a guest of a member at a dinner of The Nikaean Club held in honour of the ecumenical participants at the Lambeth Conference. The after dinner speaker was Cardinal Walter Kasper.

I had never been to the Nikaean Club before and knew little about it. Now I know a good deal more. It was set up by Archbishop Randall Davidson in 1925 to commemorate the sixteenth centenary of the First Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church held in Nicea in 325.

It exists 'to further relations with non Anglican Christian churches, to assist students from such churches and to offer hospitality on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury to representatives of such churches.'

Along with the many members who were there last night were the great number of ecumenical guests attending the Lambeth Conference as well as representatives of those churches with which we are in Communion.

Being there last evening prompted me to highlight for you my experience of the wonderful contribution non-Anglicans are making to our gathering, our work and our reflection. In my Bible Study Group we have a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (who is currently President of Princeton Theological Seminary) and, together with him, in our larger Indaba Group we have a Swedish Bishop, a Moravian Bishop and a representative of the Lutheran World Federation. Each of them has been a blessing and, frequently, at just the right moment, one of them has had the right word for we Anglicans.

Thank God for them: they help us to see ourselves as others see us.

Pick 'n Mix Resolution

I said I would return to mention the exhilarating address by the Chief Rabbi. However, meanwhile it has been widely reported elsewhere. There were so many gems in it. He spoke about how, on the one hand, contracts are agreements with mutual benefits, covenants, on the other, are about respecting the intergrity and dignity of the other. Covenants are about relationships: coming together to share interests and lives. He said:

'Contracts benefit; covenants transform"

Yesterday I went to an optional session called 'African Voices'. We heard the voice and stories of LGBT Africans from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Their message was simple: 'We are here!' While the event was reasonably well attended I counted only 7 bishops there (including two Irish and one Welsh).

So much for the listening that the resolution of Lambeth 1998 (1.10) enjoined on bishops! It seems it is indeed possible to pick 'n mix which parts of that resolution you prefer.

Dining Hall Security Alert

Yesterday was an exhausting day which started peculiarly but was enlivened by moments of grace.


The peculiar start was arriving for breakfast at Eliott College to find a small crowd gathered outside. There was a security alert. Some time later the police emerged with a black suitcase with a piece of string hanging out of it - not someone's laundry but, I was told, a case of books for a book launch. That's one way of promoting your book!


More important, while I was waiting outside I met David Mac Iyalla who had bundles of the daily newsletters for InclusiveChurch. Davis is a Christian, an Anglican, from Nigeria and is gay. (Strange - I have heard several African bishops and two archbishops say in recent days that there are no gay people in their countries). Davis is the leader of Changing Attitude Nigeria, a group that works for equality for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) members of the Anglican Communion. I was glad to meet him and to have the opportunity to hear part of his story from him face to face (in contrast see my post of yesterday!). He fled Nigeria in 2006 having received death threats.There are some reports that he has also received death threats (which the British Police have established have come from outside the UK) since arriving at the Lambeth Conference. This week Davis' application for asylum in the United Kingdom has been granted.


As the day went on it was searing hot. The Bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain came to my rescue. Just before my Indaba group he came up to me and said that Ana (his wife) had said to him that since the Church of Ireland had given his Church in Spain the apostolic succession that they wanted to give me a gift. 'It is a fan for gentlemen,' he said ' without flowers.' And so I am now the proud owner of a very clerical looking (and very effective fan). Roll on those over-heated churches in Cork, Cloyne and Ross who always turn up the boilers when the bishop is coming. I shall now arrived equipped with a liturgical fan!


In the afternoon I needed the fan for the hearing session organised by the Windsor Report Continuation Group. Nothing to report there: same old, same old.


And what an evening! The evening lecture was enthralling. It was the first time since arriving that I could say I was exhilarated. Our lecturer was the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks. More about him later in the day. I've missed the morning Eucharist and need to get to the dining hall where I trust there will be no more book launches!

Not Here - but Here

One of the sadnesses of the Lambeth Conference 2008 is the absence of about 230 bishops. To be honest though, I could not say that I am specifically missing anyone: the conference campus is a busy heaving crossroads of cultures and it seems that most facets of Anglicanism are, in some way, represented.

Those who did not come ought, in my view, to have come. They should have come to make their point face to face and to engage in dialogue.

Instead, it appears some who are not here have devised other ways of being a ghostly presence, making pronouncements from afar or from elsewhere. Still others are finding ways to make their presence felt in other ways, albeit anonymously.

My own direct experience of this left me bemused. Several days after we arrived, the receptionist in Keynes College, where I am staying, knocked on the door of my room and delivered a package. Yes, it was for me; my name and diocese were on the envelope.

Inside was a book by the absent Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester (which is not far up the road) and a note on behalf of the publisher of the book to say that it was a gift to me from two bishops (unnamed) who felt unable to be present but who were praying for me on my pilgrimage.

I asked around and discovered that I was the only one in my bible study group, for example, who had received one. I was bemused. I still haven't found many others who also received them.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of the gift and in order actively to engage with the two absent bishops who are praying for me I emailed the publisher to say 'thank you' for the gift and asking him to reveal the names of the two bishops.

The response today was that he (the publisher) did not know either. He said

I am afraid that I have absolutely no idea. Chris Sugden mediated between them and us.

What is Canon Chris Sugden (executive director of Anglican Mainstream) doing mediating the distribution of books at Lambeth? I don't even know him!

Why do two non-attending bishops feel the need to send a book (by another non-attending bishop) to a bishop who is attending? Why did they do it anonymously? Surely it should be possible to engage face to face; we are a Church after all. I hardly think they lack courage or are afraid of me.

In fact, why didn't they just come to Lambeth, join in, and say to me what they seem to have wanted to say?

Indaba Works

Our Indaba has started to work. Now it is beginning to do what, I believe, it is meant to do.

I say that ours is beginning to work, not because we have solved issues or had a breakthrough. The real breakthrough was the breakout from our designated Indaba topic and schedule and agreeing, as an Indaba group to enter into conversation together and to address our own articulated concerns. This is what Indaba should be as I believe it was first offered to us by the Archbishop of Canterbury when, last April, he announced that we would use this process. He said:

We have given these the African name of indaba groups, groups where in traditional African culture, people get together to sort out the problems that affect them all, where everyone has a voice and where there is an attempt to find a common mind or a common story that everyone is able to tell when they go away from it. This is how we approached it. This is what we heard. This is where we arrived as we prayed and thought and talked
together.

So this is what we are doing. I don't know what is happening in all other Indaba groups but I understand that some others have also re-shaped their Indaba process, for the good.

It is true to say also that I have heard a number of people say that they don't like the Indaba process. I suspect that at least some of these are those who are good at speaking in big assemblies; others are missing the opportunity of wooing or whipping up the whole crowd, and still others, sad to say, for whatever reason best known to themselves, would, it appears, be happy to set aside the journey towards mutual understanding in order to precipitate that crisis that some people so desperately seem to want. Yes, want!

For now, for some of us at least, after a hesitant start, Indaba is working. And this is coming from one who, as my friends and colleagues know, hates small group work!

Something else, Indaba may well have something to teach us all in our western cultures in the shaping of our ecclesial lives and even our synodical processes. But then Indaba takes time, time and more time - something we in the west seem to have all too little of.

Common Ground in Strange Places

Yesterday was my first opportunity to choose a self-select session, as they are called. They run in the late afternoon. Typical for me - the one I went to did not make the official programme and was announced at short notice. But it pulled a crowd.

Hot off the press is a small but significant booklet (only 125 pages) The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion.

Yesterday it was distributed to the bishops and introduced to those of us who went to a self-select session chaired by Archbishop Barry Morgan (Wales). Among those who spoke were Canon John Rees (legal adviser to the Anglican Consultative Council) and Professor Norman Doe (Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University).

Professor Doe (and no one has done more than he has to examine the laws of the churches in the Anglican family) introduced the work done by the Anglican Communion Legal Advisers' Network.

This publication is indicative of a work in progress. It is not a book of laws or a code. It is the fruit of detailed analysis and comparison of 44 sets of laws from throughout Anglicanism. It is a description of the common principles identified and how they were formulated as common principles. It is not a project designed to give everyone the same ecclesial legal system.

There are 100 legal principles (macro principles, as Norman Doe, calls them) which show common ground that we have which fall into eight common categories throughout the Communion: Church Order, the Anglican Communion, Ecclesiastical Government, Ministry, Doctrine and Liturgy, Ecclesiastical Rites, Church Property and Ecumenical Relations. The 100 macro principles unfold further into sub-statements (650 micro principles) where there is also common ground.

Yes, friends, more common ground - and in places that don't immediately come to mind!

I celebrate this (and am hugely interested in it - no surprise there, Canon Law is my thing), however, I am among those who do not believe that law alone can hold us together. Our laws, as the examination and study of them show, manifest our shared inheritance, our common pilgrimage and are further evidence of our deep-rooted connectedness with each other as a family of churches.

As I say, law alone, cannot, I believe, hold us together. This is why I am inherently quizzical about the idea of the proposed Anglican Covenant and am determinedly opposed to the appendixed scheme for regulating (enforcing?) that Covenant.

And for those of you who hate things legal and worry about its role in the life of the Church you will be glad to know that the very first of the Common Principles address your concerns:

'Law exists to assist a church in its mission and witness to Jesus Christ.'

'Law is not an end in itself.'

'Law should reflect the revealed will of God.'

'Law is intended to express publicly the theological self-understanding and practical policies of a church.'

'Laws should reflect but cannot change Christian truths.'

Common ground - for now - in strange places indeed. Such is the importance of this legal work that 62 - almost a tenth of the bishops at the Conference - attended yesterday's self-select session.