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One More Nail in the Lambeth Coffin
By Charles Raven
Special to VirtueOnline
www.virtueonline.org
June 1, 2007
Further evidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury has already made up his mind that ECUSA/TEC bishops will be invited to Lambeth 2008 irrespective of their response to the 30th September deadline agreed at Dar es Salaam comes from England in the May edition of the Worcester Diocesan News.
In July next year, a 'Diocesan Assembly' is to be held and will be "about celebrating and deepening our identity as the Anglican Church in Worcestershire". Celebrating Anglican identity on the eve of the Lambeth Conference is a bold step to take. In fact, no-one could accuse the organisers of a lack of ambition, having secured the services of the Archbishop of York, Ugandan born Dr John Sentamu, despite the fact that he will be sharing a platform with another key speaker, the Bishop of Rhode Island, Geralyn Wolf, who was among the 62 ECUSA/TEC bishops who consented to the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.
So if the second most senior figure in the Church of England is prepared to affirm a form of Anglican identity at such a sensitive moment with a bishop who has consented to an action which has given the clearest possible signal of her church's intention to depart from the historic faith of the Scriptures, what should we conclude?
Given the timing, it seems highly improbable that the Archbishop of York would not have consulted with others at the highest level and so the obvious conclusion to be drawn would be that the Church of England hierarchy has already decided which way it will jump. This can be nothing other than a very clear indicator that the Church of England will continue in communion with TEC irrespective of the Global South Primates' calls for repentance on the part of those who have violated the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10 and the clear warning of the 'Road to Lambeth' statement that they will not attend a Lambeth Conference to which such bishops are invited.
Perhaps the explanation for this approach is that the English Archbishops have privately given up on trying to hold the Communion together and are instead focusing on the survival of the Church of England. After all, if the Archbishop of York can teach alongside an ECUSA revisionist, is not the message that here in England we can somehow be more measured and hold everything together? But at what price? The Church of England's preference for studied ambiguity and for process rather than principle only serves to deepen spiritual and moral confusion at home and alienate the Global South. It is precisely this avoidance of the underlying issues in the past which has led to the tragic fragmentation of the Anglican Communion today.
Despite Dr Sentamu's Ugandan origins and his evangelical/charismatic background, the Global South leaders are right to be wary of him. It seems that he is no less susceptible to domestication by the liberal establishment than many other evangelicals in the English House of Bishops. In a confused picture, this much seems clear - there is no longer any point in looking to the Lambeth Conference or the mother church of the Anglican Communion for a lasting resolution of this deepening crisis.
---The Rev. Charles Raven is Senior Minister of Christ Church Wyre Forest which is an independent Anglican congregation but located within Worcester Diocese.
By way of response to this article the Archbishop of York wrote VOL to say that it is a gross presumption without factual merit that the Archbishop will be "sharing a platform" with Geralyn Wolf as the article suggests. The Archbishop has been invited to speak on one day of a four day conference as has Geralyn Wolf. This is not so much sharing a platform as breathing the same air a couple of days apart.
