Stephen Bates profiles Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on the eve of the Lambeth Conference.
As he prepares to welcome the bishops of the worldwide Anglican communion to their once-a-decade meeting at the Lambeth conference tomorrow, his first as Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams knows that as many as a quarter will not turn up and that there are open challenges to his leadership of the third largest Christian denomination, both from across the world and within the Church of England.
Last week, as the Anglican general synod in York overruled his advice to provide stronger safeguards for those opposed to women bishops – even though he himself is in favour of women in the episcopate – he sat with his head in his hands. Derided by conservatives, despaired of by progressives, his leadership flounders in division and dismay.
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If this ever was a dispute about what the church thinks men get up to in bed together, or even, as evangelicals like to claim, about scriptural authority and obedience to the Bible, it now looks much more like a highly politicised power struggle for the soul of Anglicanism, with the archbishop stuck in the middle, trying to hold the show together.
Are they people of the Book, or people of the Spirit: governed by indelible words and rules laid down 2,000 years ago, or by the evolving spirit of Christian understanding in a changing world?
Some evangelicals are demanding a church within a church with their own disciplinary structures and self-appointed tests for orthodoxy; some archbishops claim loudly that the church is broken; others will not share communion – the fundamental test of fellowship – with those they deem unclean because of their liberalism towards gay people.
Although archbishops of Canterbury have only seen themselves as leading a truly international church in the last 50 years, just as the British empire evaporated, the office has always remained a central focus of Anglicanism. Part of the definition of being an Anglican is that you are in communion with Canterbury.
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The US and Canadian churches also feel confused and abandoned. Robinson’s election was the excuse for some conservatives in the traditionally socially liberal Episcopal church to launch their attempt to dissociate themselves by setting up their own networks, supervised by province-breaking African bishops. The Africans have even started making some of the conservatives bishops in their own churches – Rwanda has nearly as many American bishops in its church as Rwandans – entirely against Anglican traditions of episcopal autonomy.
Liberal American bishops – many of them old friends of Williams, who knows the US well – have been baffled by his apparent unwillingness to understand their democratic polity. Although some who consecrated Robinson privately now say it was a mistake because it upset the rest of the communion so much, they insist that he was properly chosen and rightfully elected.
It exasperates them that the archbishop has spoken as though the Episcopal church is evenly divided, when actually its schism involves half a dozen dioceses out of 113, and that it took Williams four years to attend a meeting of the US bishops in New Orleans last September. By all accounts, they were distinctly unimpressed – and he and his staff were surprised to find that the Americans were serious and godly men and women, not the atheistic ogres painted by their opponents.
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Nevertheless the void has been filled by more determined and aggressive characters than he and disaffection is spreading. The recent meeting of evangelicals in London attracted far more attendees than the organisers expected.
“It wasn’t just the usual suspects,” one evangelical English bishop said. “The church will have to take them more seriously, but the House of Bishops isn’t ready to do that. He’s lost the respect of liberal catholics over the gay issue and conservative evangelicals don’t like him because they are too stupid to understand his theological nuances and think he isn’t a proper Christian. History will judge Rowan to have been much more effective than people like to suggest. The Lambeth conference and the Anglican communion are busted flushes now, but that’s not Rowan’s fault for trying.”
The insurgent coalition remains confused: American high church Catholics making convenient common cause with English, African and Australian evangelicals such as the Jensens who say they could never attend a high church mass.
They want their definition of Anglican orthodoxy imposed, but not by an archbishop with views such as Williams’s. They insist they are not leaving, but that is possibly because they mostly have nowhere else to go. Anglicanism remains, in the old evangelical phrase, a convenient boat to fish from: outside the seas are dark and choppy. They would not have the status of the institution, its buildings or its resources.
The profile continues:
This is just the small change of daily abuse from Virtue and other online commentators and so far the reverse of truth or reason as to be risible. Although Anglicanism has gone through previous crises, this is the first to be fomented and exacerbated by the internet.
Not so long ago, it would have taken weeks to get a letter to Nigeria and then a response. Now, Peter Akinola, Archbishop of Abuja, one of the leaders of the conservative faction, a man who says homosexuals are worse than beasts, can be juiced up to outrage within minutes.
This was him at a meeting of conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem last month: “We must rescue what is left of the Church from the error of apostates … we cannot dare not to allow ourselves and the millions we represent to be kept in a religious and spiritual dungeon … We can no longer trust where some of our Christian leaders are taking us.”
Not all African Anglicans think like Akinola. Njongo Ndungane, recently retired Archbishop of Cape Town, says: “There is a lack of charity, tolerance and magnanimity, a lack of listening and understanding, and Rowan has been taken advantage of. Our strength is unity but instead colleagues are focusing on the disintegration of the communion. They are fixated on one issue. It’s a power-play going on.”
Williams has tried hard to steer a middle course. It has not stopped him suffering regular abuse, more repeatedly, harshly and degradingly than most – he has had dog excrement in the post – but on a more concerted and organised scale than his predecessors.
He’s meekly taken it too: “The trouble with Rowan,” Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, once boomed, “is he’s too damn Christian towards these people.”
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