Lambeth Conference to end with conciliatory statement

Church of Ireland Primate Archbishop Alan Harper

A CONCILIATORY statement is expected at the end of the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, which concludes tomorrow evening.

Sources indicate the statement will be open and will demonstrate a willingness to embrace those approximately 250 Anglican bishops who stayed away from Lambeth 2008. They did so in protest at how decisions by North American provinces to consecrate a gay bishop and institute same-sex blessings have been dealt with to date.

Yesterday the 670 bishops attending the conference discussed a draft covenant presented by the Covenant Design Group. Archbishop Drexel Gomez, chairman of the design group, said the covenant would consider the bishops’ responses at a meeting in Singapore next month, after which the communion’s 44 churches, in 38 provinces, will be invited to make further submissions before the end of March next year, including those provinces absent from Lambeth 2008.

These will be considered by the design group at a meeting next April, following which they will make recommendations for a covenant to the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), which will discuss it in June 2009. It is expected that the ACC will then invite churches/provinces to sign up to an agreed text.

Those who don’t “would not cease to be Anglican, but clearly they would be in a different relationship to those churches which do”, as one source put it yesterday.

The emphasis in the covenant document, as Archbishop Gomez explained yesterday, would be on “autonomy within communion” and “agreement in principle to staying and working together as a communion”. The covenant document will be in three sections: (i) dealing with inherited faith; (ii) addressing common mission; and (iii) looking at the consequences which flow out of working together.

The design group “did not attempt to produce a document dealing with the issues before the communion”, he said. It was “dealing with a framework” for addressing disputes, “not sanction”, he said. The covenant would “express explicitly the glue which holds the Anglican communion together”, another source said. It would not be legalistic, but rather would be a “relational” document.

Meanwhile, the Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Alan Harper, said yesterday he would prefer to see more regular Lambeth Conferences which would be “shorter, more focused, with fewer side-shows”. He spoke of his experience of the indaba process as “immensely positive”, and in particular the more recent sessions, which had been “very, very refreshing”.

He hoped the final document which emerges from the ACC next year would be “simple, uncomplicated, and will encapsulate what it means to be Anglican. If the things said here are not reflected in it there will be very significant disappointment,” he said.

Those bishops not present had been “missed” and “were prayed for almost every day. Their position was held by a good number here,” he said.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times