Anglican Bishops' Conference at Lambeth Commences
Diocesan Press Service. August 1, 1968 [67-12]
LONDON, England -- The first week of the Lambeth Conference was one of infinite variety for the 460 Bishops who are here in London for a month-long series of meetings bringing together a large majority of all the Bishops of the Anglican Communion.
It is the latest in a series of Lambeth Conferences which began in 1867 and which have been held periodically ever since. The last one was held in 1958.
The world has changed greatly since that time, contributing to a Lambeth agenda which is considerably more urgent and relevant than at previous conferences. Racism, war between nations, the gap between the affluent nations and those that are undeveloped, poverty and starvation are a few of the pressing topics to be considered by the Bishops, who after a first week of varied activities have now settled down to business in sub-sections which will meet for the rest of the month.
Plenary sessions at the conclusion of the Conference will make public decisions made in the work sessions, considering the theme of "Renewal in the Church" -- in the Faith, in the Ministry, and in Unity.
The first week of Lambeth '68 was devoted to getting organized and getting settled in London hotels and flats, attending the opening services, hearing the keynote speakers set the guidelines for the discussions to follow and attending a couple of garden parties.
More than 3,000 persons jammed Canterbury Cathedral for the opening service of Lambeth on the afternoon of July 25. A procession of 600 took an hour to take their places in the Cathedral in a service of Evensong replete with all of the colorful pageantry of the Church of England. There were Metropolitans and Patriarchs, representatives of all of the Churches -- Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox -- and there were Anglican Bishops and Archbishops by the hundreds, all of them processing in groups of the individual national Churches and preceded by their own banners.
The Archbishop of Canterbury preached the sermon from his Archepiscopal throne placed in front of the high altar.
The second of the great services was held in Westminster Abbey on Sunday, July 28, with all of the Bishops and Archbishops participating in a service of the Holy Eucharist which packed the Abbey, another of the great shrines of the Church of England.
The Most Rev. Leonard James Beecher, Archbishop of the Province of East Africa, in his sermon called upon the Church to minister to the world through programs of action and to serve as an active, reconciling agent in and to the world.
The plenary session which officially opened the Lambeth Conference on Saturday morning, July 27, heard greetings from Pope Paul VI, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople and Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, secretary general of the World Council of Churches, who spoke on behalf of the 65 official Observers who are at Lambeth.
Dr. Blake referred to the many great changes that have occurred in the world since the last Lambeth Conference in 1958.
"Let us remember what God has been doing since last you met at Lambeth," he said. "Through the vision He gave to Pope John XXIII, Vatican Council II was called and was enabled to start the Roman Catholic Church on a new and exciting, dangerous and hopeful path, a movement that requires every Christian communion radically to examine its own tradition and its own direction if it is not to be left behind.
"God has also in these ten years shaken the very foundations of world society, upsetting most of our assumptions. In this same time He has bound all men into one interdependent neighborhood and challenged them to survive or perish together. We have seen youth reject the values and life their parents had been struggling to secure. We have seen black men, brown men, bronze men and yellow men begin a world-wide attack on white racism and white domination in Church and world. We have seen in these ten years communist parties become symbols of an outdated status quo, in both the east and west, and attacked by new revolutionaries. We have watched as new technology gives man power to build and destroy, to explore and to use the world and space and men themselves in new, frightening and exhilarating ways."
An emphasis on ecumenicity and the need for renewal within the Church characterized the three main addresses at the plenary session, delivered by three of the great leaders of the Anglican Communion.
They were the Most Rev. H.H. Clark, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada; the Most Rev. Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York; and the Most Rev. Jacob de Mel, Metropolitan of India.
Archbishop Clark stressed the need for Asian and African Bishops to be heard at the conference and said that their world is not, and should not be, the western world. He said the Church's crisis could not be fully understood without their help.
He was critical of the Church, which he said has failed to hear, with few exceptions, the "plaintive cries of the conquered and enslaved. " He cited South America as one example.
Archbishop Coggan said the Anglican Church is losing large numbers of well qualified women for service in the Church because of its timidity and disastrous ambivalence of attitude.
"Our women's colleges are closing and the numbers of those coming forward are reduced to a trickle," he said.
He said the Church for too long has restricted the ministry of women to women and children and suggested there should be no reason why a deaconess should not be allowed to fulfill all the functions of a deacon.
Archbishop de Mel urged the Church to take calculated risks in developing schemes of unity and chided some of the Anglican Churches in the western world for interfering in dialogue that has been going on among the Churches in Africa and Asia.
He said there is a "passionate desire" for people to come together and emphasized that a divided Church cannot adequately serve the world.
There were also several press conferences on the schedule of Lambeth, which has been described as the "most open" of all the Lambeth Conferences. It is still not as open as it could be, and many of the sessions will be closed to the press.
The Archbishop of Canterbury met with the press at Lambeth Palace before the beginning of the Conference, and will meet with them again when the Conference closes. Ironically, the two press conferences are the only two events on the Lambeth program which are to take place at the palace from which the Conference gets its name. All other sessions are being held at Church House, Westminster, adjoining the Abbey.
Another press conference was presided over by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Ian Ramsey, Bishop of Durham, who is chairman of the Archbishop's Commission on Christian Doctrine. The subject was the "Thirty-Nine Articles," contained in the American Prayer Book, as well as many other Churches of the Anglican Communion, and the purpose was to discuss ways in which the manner of subscription by the clergy to the Articles might be changed and improved. Many Anglican Churches require ordinands to subscribe before ordination to a belief in the Articles, which date from 1571.
The Commission rejected a number of proposals to re-write the Articles and proposed instead a new method of subscription which would "modify the formula of assent," in which the Articles would not be mentioned. This, it was felt, would ease "the consciences of those who cannot at present make the required subscriptions without mental reservations."
To add to the variety of program, the Bishops also found time to attend two garden parties, one given by the Dean of Canterbury following the opening service, the other by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, on Monday, July 29.
The Queen made her appearance punctually at 4 p.m. accompanied by Prince Philip and Princess Margaret, and they all three circulated amongst the guests chatting with most of those gathered on the grass of the Palace gardens. The band of the Coldstream Guards played during the afternoon and tea and cake were served in tent pavilions.