ENGLAND: Continuing Indaba project puts resources on web
Episcopal News Service. April 30, 2010 [043010-04]
ENS staff
The Anglican Communion Office's Continuing Indaba project has launched a new presence on the World Wide Web.
"The arrival of Continuing Indaba on the Internet as part of the Anglican Communion web site makes visible the preparatory work already in hand for the series of pilot conversations between dioceses from different parts of the communion to take place during 2010 and 2011," according to an Anglican Communion News Service story.
The Rev. Canon Dr. Phil Groves, Continuing Indaba project director, said in the news story that the project "seeks to draw upon biblical models of engaging in conversation across difference and upon a diversity of cultural insights to energize local and global mission. It aims to restore trust so we can listen to one another and the insights we bring so that Christ can be made known."
The project is sponsored by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and was endorsed by the Anglican Consultative Council in May 2009 via Resolution 14.12. The work is being funded by a $1.5 million grant from Episcopal Church priest the Rev. Marta Weeks by way of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Information about the grant is here.
Continuing Indaba grows out of requests to listen to gay and lesbian Christians that have been made intermittently since Anglican Communion bishops at the 1978 Lambeth Conference recognized "the need for pastoral concern for those who are homosexual" and encouraged "dialogue with them." Bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conferencecommitted, through Resolution I.10, "to listen to the experience of homosexual persons" and called for a "means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the communion," while at the same time "rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture."
It was not until 2005 that the ACC, the communion's main policy-making body, called for "mutual listening" and requested that adequate resources be allocated so that "study, discussion and reflection" could commence "within each member church of the communion." The work done between that meeting and the 2009 ACC gathering constituted the bulk of the so-called Listening Process.
Visitors to the new Continuing Indaba site will find an outline of the project explaining its origins within an African conversational method for resolving real or potential conflict through mutual listening and debate, the release said. The process emerged from the Indaba-style format used at the 2008 Lambeth Conference.
That model "is now being expanded to enhance the world-wide Anglican Communion in its quest to intensify relationships in the cause of shared mission," the ACNS story said.
The site carries news of the initial series of "hub" meetings around the world during late 2009 and early 2010 meant to develop resources to "guide and inform the model conversations between participants from dioceses from across the world."
There is also a library of the resource papers. The library will expand as the project develops "in the hope that a growing and continuous process of conversation will be ignited throughout the Anglican Communion," the story said.
The website will carry reports from each stage of the project and from each of the pilot conversations as they are planned and take place as a way to inform people of the project's progress and to inspire others "embark on their own journeys of conversation across the communion."
Previous ENS coverage of the Continuing Indaba project, with additional background, is here and here.