By Jim Naughton
I had lunch yesterday with the illustrious Simon Sarmiento, founder and keeper of “Thinking Anglicans,” the most influential blog covering the Anglican Communion. We strolled from my hotel to an establishment called the Hereford Arms, which I considered the very picture of an English pub, and which Simon said was tricked up to make me think so.
We talked for almost three hours, which is a lot of Diet Pepsi, but after long and frequent email correspondence, and the occasional phone call, it was the first time that Simon and I had actually laid eyes on one another, and there was much to be said.
Thinking Anglicans will pass its fifth anniversary sometime in the next week or so. I would say that it “marks” or better yet “celebrates” its anniversary, but Simon says he is not inclined to mention this milestone on his blog. But that shouldn’t stop readers from seizing the next available thread, this one, perhaps, and showering with encomiums.
Simon was one of two bloggers (at #46) to make the Sunday Telegraph’s list of the fifty most influential Anglicans, and the list occupied much of our conversations. He persuaded me that Bishops Gregory Venables and Michael Nazir Ali did not belong in the Top 10. Venables, Simon says, never even ran his own parish in the United Kingdom and he has done nothing to build up the Communion in the geographically vast and numerically tiny Province of the Southern Cone, his influence, such as it is, flows entirely from poaching evangelical parishes in other provinces. He is opportunistic, not influential. Nazir-Ali, meanwhile, is distrusted by most of his colleagues in the British episcopacy who regard him as a self-promoter—visible yes, influential no.
Simon also persuaded me that Lucy Winkett of St. Paul’s Cathedral here in London deserved her spot on the list. I had argued against including her. This was largely because I didn’t know who she was, and part of my job, as the only not-a-Brit on the panel was to underline (figuratively) every person proposed for the list whose influence did not extend beyond English shores. But if Simon says someone is a real up and comer who is likely to be among the first female bishops in the English church, that’s good enough for me. The Rev. Winkett is preaching at one of the Inclusive church liturgies at Canterbury, and I am now officially eager to hear her.
Simon is especially good at helping Americans understand how the British political context (secular and ecclesial) differs from their own. The Guardian ran a lengthy profile yesterday of Tory party leader David Cameron, who may well be the next Prime Minister. In it Cameron described himself as a typical member of the Church of England, “racked with doubts, but fundamentally, we believe.”
There is no anti-gay political party in the United Kingdom, Simon said. There are no votes in gay bashing, no advantage in campaigning to repeal the still-young laws that permit civil unions. The English Church, unlike its American counterpart, is not at the forefront of a movement to extend human and civil rights to persecuted people; the state has already done that, and so the sense of moral urgency is not nearly as great.
Simon and I will see each other again during the conference, possibly on Saturday when he is coming to help explain the British news media to American activists at the conference.
After lunch I went for a long and not particularly fast run in Hyde Park, which is about half a mile up Gloucester Road from my hotel. It was my first real exercise since leaving home. I’d like to say that as I ran I had deep thoughts about the nature of the Anglican Communion, but mostly what I thought about was how nice it was to have grassy running paths beside the paved bike paths.
This afternoon, I am supposed to have lunch with Jonathan Wynne-Jones of the Sunday Telegraph. He is one of the handful of British religion writers who hasn’t headed out to Canterbury yet. Keep in mind as you read stories about what is or isn’t included in the packets that the bishops received at registration yesterday, or what the Pope is or isn’t going to do about the Anglo-Catholic faction in the Church of England, that almost nothing has happened at the conference proper to this point, and reporters have to find stories where they can. The bishops are on retreat now, and very difficult to get in touch with, so the stories lie on the periphery.
I head out to Canterbury on Friday morning, but may try to file one more dispatch before I leave. My sense, at the moment (and from a distance) is that the Anglican Communion Office and some members of the conference design team are nervous that the attention paid to Bishop Gene Robinson, and the presence of full inclusion advocacy groups will somehow force the bishops to focus sooner than might be helpful on the issue of human sexuality—that the bishops will have to deal with divisive topics, before they have built the relationships that would allow them to discuss such issues productively. I think these fears are misplaced.
The advocates of full inclusion want the Communion to hang together every bit as much as the members of the Communion office. They aren’t in Canterbury to disrupt the conference; they are there to worship and pray at build relationships—just like the bishops. Most of their activity leading up to Lambeth has been aimed not at influencing the conference, but at outing the English Church—making it plain that the posture of church elites, who stand apart and cluck their tongues at the activists from North America, is hypocritical because their own church does in shadow, what the North Americans want done in sunlight. Thanks to the publicity that followed the gay blessing ceremony at St. Bartholomew’s Church here in London last month, and the tremendous outpouring of interest in (and support for) Bishop Robinson’s visit, that has been accomplished. The leaders of the English Church may continue to obfuscate, but we will all know what they are doing.
A peaceful, productive Lambeth Conference is in the best interest of inclusion advocates. It would demonstrate that theological disagreements can be borne by a Communion committed to moving forward in mission.