Andrew Gerns, a member of the news-team here at the Lead, is thinking that he sees evidence that there’s a plan unfolding for this summer’s Lambeth conference. But he’s thinking it’s not going to be business as usual, since doing things the “normal” way is what has gotten us to the loggerheads we’re at today.
“Since 2003, the Anglican Communion, and all the Instruments of Unity together and separately have shown us that we cannot legislate our way out of this, and that diplomatic solutions are at best provisional. The Windsor Report is a disaster precisely because it attempts to solve a problem structurally that is at heart a theological problem. But it did not spring out of nowhere.
Progressives have tended to go about solving problems by way of organizing and creating legislative and judicial solutions to theological and moral problems. And, in my view, the reasserters have gone wrong because they have attempted to impose a competing, conciliar (structural and political) solution to solve what they fundamentally see as a theological problem.
In other words, we have a legitimate series of problems and impasses, that need to be addressed concretely. But instead of building on what we do best as a Communion, and in the Episcopal Church, we have tended to focus on fixing specific symptoms through the use of interest group politics. That is building solutions based on our weakness.”
Andrew suggests that by way of response, the design team has decided to intentionally incoporate the principles of Appreciative Inquiry into the proceedings of the conference.
He makes a convincing argument. He lays out the principles of AI and then observes:
If the gathered Bishops can build on the positive core, what binds us and draws us together as Anglican Christians; if they can use the stage that Williams and the design team have set for them and allow themselves to appreciate what we have, imagine what we might become, and proclaim what we should be, and then go home and help the rest of us do what must be done, then perhaps, perhaps, this conference next month could be quite revolutionary.
Read his full thinking here.