Leaders of the Anglican Communion will meet next week for
five more days of intense discussion about its future. I say more, because this
is not the first of such meetings, and previous ones have seldom produced much in the way of genuine reconciliation. This being
said, the next meeting will, as in the past, achieve good things in other areas to
be covered in its agenda. Items are likely to
include the problem of religious violence and the ever growing problem of
violence against women and children (the two often belong together), the environment,
and yet another attempt to arrive at a shared ethos concerning human sexuality,
along with a corresponding re-configuration of the Communion's structural life.
It would be easy to think of this meeting as being about
the things which matter, as well as those that matter less. But what you think matters,
and what you think matters less, will depend to some extent on who you are and
where you stand in relation to other Anglicans. If you are a traditionalist, what
really matters is that the Bible’s teaching on sexuality be respected and fully
adhered to. If you are a liberal, you will be aware of how conditioned we are
by our specific cultures (what is called contextuality), that the bible is a
library and not a book and that its various books had a particular editorial
bias. You will want compassion and the hospitality of mercy to prevail.
Both of these broadly delineated parties will know that while
whatever is resolved in relation to the other issues on the meeting’s agenda
(the things which seem to matter less) may lead to good things happening in the
medium term future. But they will also
know, if they are honest about it, that the example the Communion is setting in
terms of its own relations and, specifically, how it treats its gay and
transgendered people, diminishes its credibility in many of these other vitally
important areas.
The problem of how to heal the Communion’s divisions is
not, as many think, one of unity for the sake of unity. It is much more subtle
than that, and much harder to resolve. Papering over differences has been
proved to be a waste of time. It doesn’t work, because arriving at functional
unity, whatever form that takes is not going to make us love each other as we
should.
Furthermore, most people, if they have heard of the
Anglican Communion at all, do not in the least care about how it orders its
life structurally. They care, if they
care at all, about the kind of leadership which the world needs to see coming
from the Church, a leadership which is always subject to the commandments to
love mercy and justice and to walk humbly with God. This kind of leadership
brings about a very different kind of unity. We might, incidentally, benefit
from seeing more of it in the context of the debate over the UK’s membership of
the European Union. The nation waits for its Church to set the example.
So what might be a possible way forward? Archbishop
Justin Welby hopes and prays for wisdom and that the Communion will learn, in
its separate camps, ‘to love each other as we should’. Loving each other is not
simply a matter of settling differences, as the Archbishop rightly points out.
It is a matter of transcending difference. We do this by confronting the fear
which for more than two decades has dominated the Communion’s internal
relationships, stunted its spiritual life and diminished its credibility in the
world to the point of near non-existence.
There is only one way to overcome this deeply destructive
fear and that is to look fear in the eye by ‘becoming’ the person, or group one
fears most. So the liberal looks the traditionalist in the eye and experiences
at the deepest level of their being what it feels like to be that person,
shaped within a specific context and faced with me, a liberal. The same is true
in reverse; the traditionalist makes himself vulnerable (most of those present
will be men, hence the masculine pronoun) from the place where trust can
inhabit the human heart. Both parties are prepared, for the sake of Christ who
loves us all, to ‘hurt’ there, to lose face, or even to feel that he has
betrayed his Church. These feelings will not last long because the activity of
grace works at an astonishing speed.
Voltaire wrote that ‘God is a circle whose centre is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. The Church is called to be like
God.
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