The Lambeth Commission On Communion - Home Page
The Lambeth Commission was established in October 2003 by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the request of the Anglican Primates. The mandate spoke of the problems being experienced as a consequence of the above developments and the need to seek a way forward which would encourage communion within the Anglican Communion. It did not demand judgement by the Commission on sexuality issues. Rather, it requested consideration of ways in which communion and understanding could be enhanced where serious differences threatened the life of a diverse worldwide Church. In short, how does the Anglican Communion address relationships between its component parts in a true spirit of communion?
I haven't had time to read the report, but I can already tell that it will try my patience. My dad reminds me that the Episcopal church didn't split over the issue of slavery in the 1860s, as so many Protestant denominations did; he is hopeful that we will not split over the issue of human sexuality either. But sometimes I wonder if maybe we should have split over slavery. Did we make a deal with evil in order to stay united? Will we again?
I don't know. But I do know that this issue is causing great grief among people of faith. I am somewhat bewildered by it, myself, as the "issue" of gays and lesbians in the church is a non-issue for me: they're here, they're human, they're included. Fully. That's how it seems to me.
But it's late at night and I've watched too much baseball in the last two days to be coherent, so that's all I'm going to say about it for now.
Monday, October 18, 2004
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2 comments:
Elisabeth---I'm with you. I had really hoped to avoid schism, but the conservatives will not be happy with any halfway measure. They want the Presiding Bishop and all those bishops who participated in Gene Robinson's consecration to be publicly flogged and disgraced. They want us to perform a witch hunt for gays and lesbians in our seminaries and among our ordinands. They want blood---and I, for one, am not prepared to give it to them.
Sometimes the right thing to do in a bad marriage is simply to wish each other well and go your separate ways. The property split will be ugly, of course, but that's no reason to sacrifice our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to those who seem to have forgotten Jesus' injunction to love one another and to love your enemies.
In a similar way, I often these days wonder (except for that slavery thing) whether it would have been better if the American Civil War had gone the other way. Would the descendants of Cromwell be happy with their own pure country, The United Red States of America?
It would be lovely to live in a land free of the bigotry of religious certitude, but I don't think that country exists. In a process theology kind of way, the struggle forward to the Garden is a neverending story, for there will always be forces hellbent on taking us back to it.
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