So Lambeth is a conference held by the bishops of the Anglican Communion every ten years since 1867 to discuss doctrine and reaffirm the communion. The communion itself is an association of Anglican churches around the world. Each Anglican Church is actually autonomous so the communion doesn’t have power so much as influence. The conference produces “resolutions” which are not contractual but expressions of agreed values or doctrines for the communion.

This years Lambeth was controversial because after the last one, the Episcopal Church in America (which is part of the communion) ordained a homosexual bishop after the conference had resolved not to ordain homosexuals. This has provoked a reaction in some churches who have since questioned the viability of the communion and whether there still is a communion or whether there is a parting of ways for a largish chunk of the Anglican Church. There are some disenfranchised parishes in America who have sought refuge by becoming part of African Anglican churches who are not shy about condemning homosexuality. This in turn has sparked issues of colonialist tensions in the African churches setting themselves against the western churches but with some of the western churches aligning themselves with the African churches, most notably the Sydney Diocese in Australia.

As I mentioned in a previous post, these mostly African churches have come to a resolution through the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCon) to form a new council of leadership for the global Anglican Church which will be more “top-down” and have real power over the churches that seek to be part of it. Notably, the model that GAFCon has proposed will have the power to excommunicate churches which the Anglican Communion currently lacks.

In other words, the Anglican Communion is currently like a family reunion, no-one in the family has the power to kick someone out even if there are tensions and problems. The GAFCon leadership will be more like a corporation with a board of directors, but it is a bit fuzzy as to the exact set-up at the moment.

Getting back to the 2008 Lambeth, the main criticism has been that it was all talk and no resolutions. According to the Religion Report’s interview with Bruce Kaye (a former secretary general of the Anglican Church in Australia), this was quite deliberate because Rowan William’s (the Archbishop of Canterbury who leads the communion) plan was to set a mood and get general vibes of things rather than lay down resolutions that often get ignored anyway.

The long term plan for the non-GAFCon part of the communion seems to be to form a “covenant” which will be more binding and have the possibility of punitive measures for maverick churches.

It was interesting to hear Dr Kaye’s research into conflict resolution in the Anglican Church (for his book on this topic) and his thoughts on models for dealing with conflict:

...[what is missing is a model] which actually takes the conflicts that arise as conflicts to be dealt with directly. It is interesting that not at all has any institutional effort been directed to bringing the conflicted parties together in any conflict resolution or high level theological debate, about the substantial issues at all in this process. What has been pursued has been an institutional management strategy; do we exclude these people, control these people, tell them to stop doing this and so on and so forth? No-one’s actually, no instrument of the communion has actually addressed the fundamental question that’s in dispute. (Dr Bruce Kaye, “Lambeth Post-Mortem”, Religion Report, link)

What is wrong with the way conflict is handled now?

... it enables other agendas and other layers of conflict to be loaded on to this one, without the thing being clearly identified. And it enables people to conduct the argument without real understanding of the other people’s points of view. (Dr Bruce Kaye, “Lambeth Post-Mortem”, Religion Report, link)

This does seem to be the case from what I can see. From my own experience I know I can learn to respect people with whom I disagree once I’ve been able to talk with them and understand where they’re coming from. Of course I might still think they’re wrong but that’s not the point. A reasonable outcome sometimes is to agree to disagree and then identify what we do have in common in order that we can still co-operate in the places where we have confluence.

References

The Religion Report, “Lambeth Post-mortem”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2333504.htm

“Lambeth Conferences” in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambeth_Conferences

From what I can piece together, the women bishops thing all comes down to how conservative you are when it comes to scriptural interpretation and church tradition or a combination of those, for example, some liberal biblical interpreters might still object to women bishops just because it is not part of church tradition (perhaps extreme Anglo-Catholics might take this view?). Where as some relatively literal minded biblical interpreters might point to Paul’s letters (e.g. 1 Cor 14.34-36 and 1 Tim 2.11-15). Then centralist evangelicals like in the Melbourne Anglican Diocese are liberal enough in both church tradition and scriptural interpretation to not have a problem with women bishops.

As for GAFCon, I can only point to the Radio National program linked above which in summary suggests that Australian conservative evangelical Anglicans are teaming up with the conservative African Anglican churches to oppose the current direction of the Anglican Communion. Again, this seems to all come back to various mixes of conservatism and liberalism in scripture and tradition.

Actually, I think I should save my original topic which was going to be “Vatican II and all that Jazz” for another post and just leave this one how it is. If you’ve read this far and have some thoughts on the state of the Anglican church, please enlighten me in the comments.