Next week the long delayed Lambeth Conference gets underway. The conference is the gathering of bishops from around the Anglican Communion which used to take place every 10 years.
The conference hasn’t taken place for 14 years and was delayed by Covid and also because relationships within the Anglican Communion were so difficult that it has taken years of careful diplomacy from the Archbishop of Canterbury to get to this point, where there seems to be a viable quorum of bishops who would actually attend.
Famously, the last two Lambeth Conferences have been dominated by questions about the legitimacy of same-sex couples.
And yes, of course this is ridiculous. And no, it being ridiculous doesn’t stop it from being true.
The touchstone of this argument is a resolution which was agreed by the bishops at the 1998 conference. The resolution is referred to as Lambeth 1.10. It says some platitudinous things about people who are described as having “homosexual orientation” but also simutaneously condemns same-sex relationships as being incompatable with Scripture.
An enormous amount of work has been done to try to get the bishops of the Anglican Communion together again. One of the things which seemed to many bishops to have been promised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who convenes and invites people to these affairs is that this conference was about people saying things which they were united about and some effort seems to have gone into suggesting that there would be no more voting on divisive resolutions.
One rather unpleasant fact of gathering the bishops is that the Archbishop decided to invite those bishops who happened to be in same-sex marriages but expressly disinvited their spouses. The Lambeth Conference exists in a pseudo-1950s age where spouses – usually wives, are invited too at great cost to the dioceses their other half leads. In the case of bishops from Scotland, it is costing £5000 per bishop to send them to the conference and a further £5000 for their spouse to go and I gather that 6 spouses are going to the tune of £30 000.
Thus, Scottish Episcopalians have been expected to fund a conference that was homophobic by design.
I must confess that I don’t understand why any of the spouses of bishops from Scotland are going, much as I think they are collectively fantastic people with great skills and wisdom.
The Archbishop, like Archbishops before him has staked his own reputation as someone who takes reconciliation seriously, on bringing people together for the conference.
It has come as a considerable surprise therefore that a list of proposed resolutions (renamed as Lambeth Calls in order to maintain the fiction that there will be no more resolutions) has been published in the last two days. Indeed, it has been published so much at the last minute that many bishops from around the world were either already travelling or packing their smalls.
And lo! Buried deep in the Lambeth Calls we find that the bishops are going to be invited to affirm a resolution which suggests that Lambeth 1.10 represents “the mind of the whole of the Anglican Communion” and which once again suggests that it isn’t legitimate for Anglicans to bless same-sex couples or marry same-sex couples.
Apart from anything else, it must be blatently obvious to everyone in the world that the Anglican Communion is not of one mind about this. It bewilders me that anyone could suggest that it is. For to state that it is is a bald, bare-faced lie.
Christians are not supposed to bear false witness or lie in public about things. (Lying is a sin that I presume we all do actually agree about).
In one sense, it is deja vu all over again. We seem to have been here before, with the legitimacy of gay lives being up for debate. Such a debate is homophobic and seems even more so when one discovers that the bishops can’t vote against it – they can only vote in favour or vote in a way that suggests that the resolution Call needs more work.
Up until now, I’ve believed that though there were problems with the conference itself, our bishops were right to be there. However, events of the last 48 hours have made me change my mind.
The resolution now before the bishops (for debate in secret, closed sessions) isn’t merely about the legitimacy of same-sex relationships. This time around it is expressly about the legitimacy of provinces of the Anglican Communion making it possible for same-sex couples to be blessed or indeed married.
The bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church have issued a statement today about all this. It isn’t easy to find on the SEC website but it can be found here: https://www.scotland.anglican.org/a-statement-from-the-college-of-bishops-preparing-for-the-lambeth-conference/.
My personal view is that this is a poor response to a bad situation. Although I have much sympathy with our bishops having little time to formulate a response, they don’t seem to understand that our church’s legitimacy in making decisions about marriage is being debated this week, as is their own legitimacy in administering the decisions which our synod has made.
This isn’t actually about same-sex couples any more. Actually it never was, it was always about power, but it has seemed to be about same-sex relationships to many up until now. It doesn’t help for our bishops in Scotland to maintain that narrative any longer.
Nothing good comes from engaging with processes that are homophobic by design. Nothing.
It is my view that our bishops and those of other countries who share our values and ethics should have nothing at all to do with such a vote and should instead make it very clear that they have been invited to this conference under false pretenses.
I don’t think the Conference would have been much of a starter if it had been known all along that a vote such as this was on the cards.
That’s why it seems particularly deceitful for this to have emerged right at the last minute.
The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t look like much of a reconciler right now.
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