God's People Have Suffered Enough
Episcopal News Service. March 28, 1989 [89064]
NEW YORK (DPS, Mar. 28) -- The formal description of the visit of four Anglican primates to the troubled Central American nations of Nicaragua and Panama was a "Mission for Witness and Reconciliation in Nicaragua and Panama." (See DPS 89044.)
The Anglican leaders who made the visit (March 14-21), Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Southern Africa, Archbishop Michael Peers of the Anglican Church in Canada, and Archbishop Orland Lindsay of the Anglican Church of the Province of the West Indies, did take up the mandate they had set themselves vigorously and wholeheartedly. There are indications that the visit was a fruitful one, both for the visitors and for the host nations, on a number of levels. Furthermore, the visit was an historic event in another way. It represented a step forward in the evolution of the Anglican Communion.
On the eve of last summer's Lambeth Conference, there was much speculation in the religious and secular press about the viability into the next century of the loose alliance of national Churches built on the Anglican tradition and led, traditionally and symbolically, by England's primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Could it survive its own diversity? Could such a loose structure -- meeting as a body only once every decade -- withstand the pressures created by growth, evolution, and change in its members. Could the essentially "English" Communion of the nineteenth century really become the multinational, multiracial, multilingual body the realities of the world demanded it become and still function in the corporate way its architects prayed and dreamed about? Could it cope with the evolving idea of "degrees of communion" within the body raised by the issue of the ordination of women in some member communions?
To the amazement of many who arrived at the Lambeth Conference of 1988 skeptical, the consensus about positive answers to the above questions coming out of the days of living and worshiping and talking together was a resounding "Yes" -- and with fewer qualifications than the Anglican spirit has led one to expect.
The "Yes" of the Anglican Communion, the affirmation of its own continuing existence and evolution, was expressed in the reactions of those who participated. It was also expressed, and is being expressed, in more concrete terms. The work of the Eames Commission on the issues raised by the ordination of women to the episcopate and the ways in which the member Churches can live together, with some accepting this development and others not, is one concrete and hopeful sign that "the system can work." The visit of the four primates to a troubled area of our shared world in March 1989 is an equally concrete and hopeful sign for the future.
The four Anglican leaders who went together to Central America were saying, "We are in communion; we are united by the bonds of caring." They were also saying that the Anglican Communion is alive and well and headed toward the next century.