ENGLAND: Archbishop of Canterbury urges church to see issues 'three-dimensionally'
Episcopal News Service. February 9, 2010 [020910-05]
Matthew Davies
Complex issues in church and society should be approached with a "three-dimensional vision," Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams urged members of the Church of England's General Synod during his Feb. 9 presidential address.
"Seeing something in three dimensions is seeing that I can't see everything at once: what's in front of me is not just the surface I see in this particular moment," he told synod members gathered for their Feb. 8-12 meeting in London. "So seeing in three dimensions requires us to take time with what we see. It may help us look more critically at solutions that seek to do too much all at once; and perhaps to search for structures that will keep open the ability to learn from each other."
General Synod is the main governing body of the Church of England. It meets at least twice a year.
Williams' comments came on the eve of a debate during which synod will consider a one-sentence resolution that would have it "express the desire that the Church of England be in communion with the Anglican Church in North America." The ACNA is made up of individuals and groups that have left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as those that have never been members of those two provinces. Opponents have criticized the legislation, saying that it interferes in the life of another province.
Although Williams did not directly address the pending debate, he described recent experiences of "three-dimensionality" he said he had encountered in Episcopal Church parishes and said he knows that similar stories could be told of parishes in ACNA. "There is the simpler sense of three-dimensionality which just reminds us that the other we meet is the person he or she is, not the person we have created in our fantasies," he said.
Williams described his recent visit to the Episcopal Diocese of New York's parish of St. Ann's in South Bronx, one of the most violent and impoverished communities in the city. "I watched them feeding several hundred people, I was taken to the after-school club where local children learn the literacy and other skills they don't get in their public schools," he said. "I spoke with an astonishing Hispanic woman who has single-handedly created a campaign against gun crime in the Bronx that seeks to bring a million women on to the streets in protest, and I saw how prayer unobtrusively shaped every aspect of this work and how people were introduced to Jesus Christ."
Williams said that the experience at St. Ann's reminded him of another parish he'd visited in New Orleans in 2007 -- "a local church planted as a result of the relief work of the diocese, when local people begged for a church to be opened because they had seen the love of Christ in the work done with and for them."
These encounters, he said, represent "three-dimensionality in the Episcopal Church which some are tempted to dismiss as no more than a liberal talking shop."
Williams then recalled a telephone conversation in December with Archbishop Henri Orombi of Uganda, "discussing what was being done by Ugandan Anglicans in the devastated north of the country -- in the rehabilitation of child soldiers and the continuing, intensely demanding work with all victims of trauma in that appalling situation, work that no one else is doing or is trusted to do; and the ongoing work of care for those with HIV, where the Uganda church was in the forefront of African responses to that crisis." He described this as "three-dimensionality in a church that has been caricatured as passionately homophobic and obsessed with narrow Biblicism."
Williams opened his address with some comments concerning the debate on the Equality Bill, a proposed act of the U.K. Parliament designed to protect discrimination in employment on grounds of religion or belief, sexual orientation and age. The bill has been criticized by some Church of England members, including bishops in the U.K.'s House of Lords, who are concerned it would restrict the rights of religious organizations to decide whether gay people and women are suitable for certain jobs.
Williams said that the debate over the status and vocational possibilities of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the church "is not helped by ignoring the existing facts, which include many regular worshippers of gay or lesbian orientation and many sacrificial and exemplary priests who share this orientation. There are ways of speaking about the question that seem to ignore these human realities or to undervalue them; I have been criticized for doing just this, and I am profoundly sorry for the carelessness that could give such an impression."
However, Williams told synod members that "very few Christians were contesting the civil liberties of gay and lesbian people in general; nor should they have been."
"The basic conflict was not between a systematic assault on Christian values by a godless government on the one side and a demand for licensed bigotry on the other," he said. "It was over the question of how society identifies the point at which one set of freedoms and claims so undermines another that injustice results."
Concerning the issue of assisted suicide, Williams cautioned that "the freedom of one person to utilize in full consciousness a legal provision for assisted suicide brings with it a risk to the freedom of others not to be manipulated or harassed or simply demoralized when in a weakened condition."
Other topics addressed by Williams were the proposed Anglican covenant, a final draft of which has been sent to the provinces for their consideration and possible endorsement, and the debate on women bishops, which synod will take up at its July meeting once a committee has completed its work of revising draft legislation.
In his concluding remarks, Williams said: "It is only a three-dimensional vision that can save us from real betrayal of what God has given us. It will oblige us to ask not how we can win this or that conflict but what we have to give to our neighbor for sanctification in Christ's name and power. It will oblige us to think hard about freedom and mutuality and the genuine difficulty of balancing costs or restraints in order to keep life moving around the Body. It will deepen our desire to be fed and instructed by each other, so that we are all the more alarmed at the prospect of being separated in the zero-sum, self-congratulating mode that some seem to be content with."
Williams urged synod members that they "may be able to show to the world a face rather different from that anxious, self-protective image that is so much in danger of entrenching itself in the popular mind as the typical Christian position. I deeply believe that this church and this synod are still capable of showing that face and pray that God will reveal such a vision in us and for us."
The full text of Williams' address is available here.