The Living Church has published another article, which summarises what the archbishop said at a meeting of Anglican delegates to the Assembly:
Archbishop Williams Urges Shared Sacrifice, Continued Dialogue
This gives a lot more detail than was in the earlier ACNS report linked previously here. Read it all, please. The concluding paragraphs are:
The “challenge to every single member of the Communion” therefore is “together [to] rediscover a sense that we are all under the judgment of God; that we are all called to holiness; that we are all called to sacrifice.”
It will not do to present the problem “as a matter in which one side would win and the other lose” as “we need each other desperately. And that is my deepest conviction about the Anglican Communion,” Archbishop Williams said.
“We need therefore to go on meeting and listening,” he said, “where people listen and look, not in great political assemblies, but in fellowship between parishes, dioceses, and projects.”
That is the way forward to an “Anglican future that is not completely polarized, that is not completely divided culturally, ideologically, theologically. Where we can share with one another patterns of obedience of Christ without expecting them to be always the same everywhere, but at least trying to be recognizable to each other.”
“We need therefore to go on meeting and listening,” said the ABC — does this mean that the North American Churches are now allowed to attend meeting of the ACC? That ALL the bishops of TEC will be invited to Lambeth? That we will be able to break bread together without agreeing about everything? One of the things that I have found frustrating about ++Rowan’s time as ABC is that it has become like Vatican watching (or Cold War Kremlin watching) with different people putting their own interpretations on his mysterious words (“what this really means is…”). I do not… Read more »
When first reflecting on the Windsor Report on the morning of its publication, four things struck me: 1. The cruel way the report isolated Gene Robinson, particularly as the Lambeth Commission had not even met with him. 2. The way the Report gave a skewed (the nicest word I can think of) historical account of how differences had emerged and been dealt with in the Communion hitherto. 3. The fact that the report had NOT followed the submissions of many and declared homosexuality contrary to God’s will, and left the door open for further discussion. 4. The impossible new standard… Read more »
I fear the archbishop’s words get the “what he really means” treatment for two reasons. First I think he is intentionally obscure. Second, many do not want to hear the same things in the obscurity.
He has, I think, fallen into the error of institutionalism. Ah well, I have my own basket of errors. Mine at least do no more than trivial harm to the church.
FWIW
jimB
Martin Reynolds —
I too very much wanted to try to work with the Windsor Report, but the more I have pondered it, the more hopeless it has seemed (& the more of a rushed job by a committee that didn’t even have adequate time to paper over the cracks) — it is so disingenuous about the history of the ordination of women (& its “reception”) that the integrity of the entire document must be called into question.
Fr Prior My will to engage with the Windsor Report was also strong, but this document is attempting to recast the Anglican Church in some other form, and as you say its account of the ordination of women is risible and does cast doubt on the integrity of the whole. Now that the Communion has appointed a “Listener” – while at the same time putting any possibility of change beyond reach – it creates a major dilemma. The more we cooperate with the Windsor Process the more we collude with its agenda. My own Church here in Wales stands much… Read more »