wfn.org | Remarks of Dr. David Ford at Final Plenary Session

["Lambeth98" <storm@indigo.ie>]

ACNS LC112 - 8 August 1998

Remarks of Dr. David Ford at Final Plenary Session

Dr. David Ford, 
Regius Professor of Divinity, Cambridge University

Written in association with 
The Rev. Professor Daniel W. Hardy, 
Dr. Michel Higton
The Rev. Tim Jenkins
The Rev. Ben Quash

The Bible, The World and the Church: Lambeth 1998 and Beyond

How can we begin to do justice to the event that we have been
taking part in during the past three weeks? 

In the rest of this session there will be this address, two more
videos, and a discussion between four bishops. This presentation
has been drawn together by the group responsible for the earlier
plenary presentation on The Bible, the World and the Church, and
that group has been working closely with Angela Tilby and her
video team. It is an interim attempt to tell something of what we
have been experiencing here, and the guideline has been to try to
understand the significance of the Conference in relation to the
Bible, the world and the Church.     

1.  Realising Anglican Identity

Clearly it will take a long time after we leave here to discern
what has been most significant in the events and experiences of
the Conference. I think many of us feel overwhelmed in various
ways. Yet at this stage we can perhaps agree with Brother Sam who
said in the video that what he saw happening was a communion
coming to life - and coming to life is not always easy. One
bishop put it like this: 'These weeks at Lambeth have in many
ways been a realisation, an embodiment, of Anglican identity'. So
it is worth thinking a little about what has been happening here,
in order to see better who we are.

1.1  Worship and the Bible	

Asking people the question: Where has the Conference been most at
home together? the same answer has been given time and again: we
have been most at home in worship and in the small Bible study
groups. The worship has never been without the Bible at its
centre, and the Bible studies have been embraced by worship. And
at the heart of both Bible and worship is what perhaps unites us
most strongly: the desire for God, that hunger and thirst for God
which is itself a gift of God.

Careful attentiveness to worship and scripture shapes our living.
The reports of Bible study groups have been full of moving
accounts of ordinary and extraordinary Christian living - and
also Christian dying. The depth and intensity of life in and for
Jesus Christ in our Communion, and the suffering which that can
bring, has come home to us in first-hand accounts from all over
the world. Through all this we have found others - and even
ourselves - more transparent to God. As we have inhabited the
Bible and our tradition of worship - which has now developed in
so many ways around the whole world - we have recognized our
family likenesses and realised the strength of our bonds - bonds
which in Christ are stronger than death. 'It is my family that
has been martyred', said a Canadian bishop. 

Word and sacrament, our worship and our Bible studies: these have
not on the whole made headlines, but they have been at the heart
of the Conference, and they underlie the ability of the
Conference to face sensitive issues in sections and in plenaries.
How much easier it would have been if we had only come together
to worship and discuss Second Corinthians! 

1.2  Neither ruthless nor lawless: the ministry of unity  

But this is a gathering of bishops with responsibilities in
church and society in every continent. So besides word and
sacrament, there is another feature of Anglican identity being
embodied at Lambeth: our characteristic form of Church order. How
has that been seen here? 

The Anglican Church has always existed in a context of rival ways
of ordering the Church. 

On the one hand, it has refused an authoritarian solution, where
one central authority holds out the attractive possibility of
getting rid of the messiness of debate, dissent and rival
interpretations of scripture by pronouncements and commands which
permit of no argument.

On the other hand, it has resisted the sort of diversity in which
everyone is free to do according to their own interpretation and
conscience, and noone is ultimately accountable to anyone else. 

Anglicanism has characteristically tried to hold these tendencies
in tension and develop good order. We in this Conference have
welcomed the Virginia Report which explores the next stage in
this complex order at the international level. It is an order
which combines freedom of Christian conscience with mutual
accountability, and in doing so we believe ourselves to be in
continuity with the New Testament and the early Church.

And the practice of the Conference bears this out. We have been
constantly trying to reconcile, on the one hand, diversity,
independence and different contexts, with, on the other hand,
mutual accountability, which calls bishops, who have a special
ministry of unity, to be answerable to one another and for one
another in the body of Christ. And as Bishop Rowan Williams
reminded us, the body of Christ includes the communion of saints,
past and future. 

I think there is one place where this ministry of unity and
reconciliation among bishops has been most evident. The
subsection on human sexuality under Bishop Buchanan wrestled
together on behalf of all of us. They have given us a sign of our
agony but also of hope. Yet it is also clearly unfinished
business. I suppose one question is: Can the Communion as a whole
have something of that quality of engagement which has been
possible here under special circumstances? 

1.3  Mission in the World

We have glimpsed the potential of the episcopal ministry of unity
and reconciliation in other ways too, especially in the
Conference's concern to relate the Gospel to life in the world. 
Anglicanism is naturally deeply interwoven in the world.  That is
why we struggle to interpret the Bible for our own situations,
and why our Church is shaped in ways appropriate to life in
different places.  And we must be careful, not only to discern
what is right, but to find ways of making it effective in the
life of the world.  Our proclamation of the Gospel cannot be
separated from what we do in ordinary life, especially how we act
for justice and human welfare.  That was the remarkable
achievement of those concerned with international debt and
relations with Islam, and in the strong concern for unity with
other Christians.  

1.4  Lively Thought

Besides worship, the Bible, the shape of our common life and our
mission in the world, there has been a further characteristic
mark of our Anglican identity here. There has been lively
thought. Our tradition calls us to lively thought. Passionate
seeking after wisdom is encouraged by the Bible. The love of God
involves using all our minds. 

It was clear that the Conference was never going to be able to
read the solution to all our problems straight out of scripture.
We have had to pay attention to a wide range of sources, we have
listened to each other and to the past, and we have paid
attention to what is going on in the world. And all of that is
fully in conformity with what goes on in scripture. So there has
been a great deal of hard thinking. 

One member of the subsection on human sexuality said this about
his experience: 'The processes of labour, clarification, taking
responsibility for positions one was opposed to, paying attention
to the demands of the truth of scripture and of pastoral concern:
that had to be experienced to be believed.' There we see
scripture, tradition, the world and reason together, internally
related to each other within a worshipping community. And it has
been a process of mutual accountability that has tried to avoid
both authoritarianism and turning our backs on each other.  

^From many comments, I suspect that a major frustration has been
the pressure of time and the short-cuts that have had to be
taken. Lively thinking takes time and deep concentration if it is
to arrive at wisdom. If we look at Church history and see how
long it has often taken to come to a common mind, and then at how
long it has taken for positions to be received or rejected by the
 Church, three weeks is the blink of an eye.  	

2.  Beyond Lambeth 1998: The Next Ten Years

If those elements I have been discussing describe something of
the reality of Anglican identity being lived out here, the
obvious question on the final day of the Conference is: How are
things to be taken further beyond Lambeth? Clearly the reports
and resolutions offer substantial answers to that question. But I
am sure all of us come away with some key thoughts, distillations
of the significance of the Lambeth 1998 for the future. I have
been collecting and discussing some of these thoughts around the
Conference, and I offer you just four of them now. 

2.1 Worship and the Circulation of News

The first is about our worship. Clearly our continuing prayer has
to be: Come, Holy Spirit! - on ourselves and on our whole
Communion. We are always together in worship before God. But how
can our prayer for each other be specific? This marvellous
document, the Anglican Cycle of Prayer, has been received by all
of us. Now there are faces to many of the dioceses. Many of us
have found here either that we were simply ignorant of each
other's Churches and situations or that, especially in the case
of those Churches more exposed to the media, we had a picture
which had to be changed considerably when we heard some inside
stories. CNN and the BBC have not given the same impression as
that of a local bishop. Paul's letters and visits were
inseparable from his prayer for his Churches and theirs for him.
Perhaps we can find ways of sustaining something of the
circulation of news and understanding which we have had here. As
well as overcoming ignorance and stereotypes, that might inspire
our intercession for each other. I suspect that this circulation
of specific prayer might well be the most important single
preparation for the next Lambeth Conference.

2.2 The Bible and the Communion of Saints

The second thought is about the interpretation of scripture. Many
questions have been raised about this, and most of them still
remain on the table. I had a moving letter from a Brazilian
member of the conference asking a basic question: how can
personal, prayerful reading of scripture be related to social and
political interpretation and also to scholarly, academic
interpretation?  

After the next video we will hear four bishops discussing some
basic points about scripture. In preparation for that I want to
take what Bishop Rowan Williams said about us making moral
decisions in the communion of saints, and extend it to make the
point that we also read the Bible in the communion of saints,
with whom we also worship. Their understandings of the Bible may
have much to teach us before the next Lambeth Conference. One
such understanding, the statement on scripture produced by the
1958 Lambeth Conference, will be the starting-point for the
bishops' discussion in a few minutes.

2.3  The Circulation of Money

The third thought was suggested by studying parts of 2
Corinthians Chapters 8 and 9 in a Bible study group. That is one
of the great biblical statements about the generosity of God and
how the circulation of wealth and the strengthening of communion
go together. In the Archbishop of Canterbury's address to the
spouses he told the story of his visit to southern Sudan in 1993.
He saw the conditions there and wanted to do something. But there
were no Anglican Communion resources he could call on, and he
said that he realised then: 'We are not yet a Communion.' He
announced the setting up of an Anglican fund to help share money
between provinces and enable response to urgent need. In 2
Corinthians Chapters 8 and 9 we have studied , and several
resolutions in the Conference make the same point. It may be that
the sincerity of our demands that creditor nations should forgive
unpayable debts will be measured by the scale of generosity our
Communion practises. The last part of the Conference resolution
on debt challenges dioceses to give 0.7% of their total income
for development programmes. What if that were to happen?

                                               

2.4 Networks and the Circulation of Theology

The fourth thought arises out of a bishop's remark that a
remarkable number of resolutions mention networks. There are
networks to do with dioceses, provinces, regions, communications
of all sorts, migrants and refugees, ecology, mission and
evangelism, cities, young people, ecumenism, inter-faith matters,
and prayer. I am sure this is no accident. Networks serve
circulation within the communion and beyond it, and they fit very
well with a Church order which resists both authoritarianism and
fragmentation. They are essential to a dynamic unity. They are
perhaps the most significant transformation in the shaping of our
Communion life. Between Lambeth Conferences they might be seen as
the extended embodiment of what we have experienced here in
concentrated form.

And these networks place great demands on our capacity for lively
and godly thought. As a theologian I am deeply concerned about
how we develop centres and networks of those whose vocation is to
love God with all their minds in the sphere of studying, teaching
and researching. Whatever else we say about our young people,
education is vital for them. It is vital for clergy too. And for
laity. We will fail them all if they do not receive a Christian
faith which invites them into a mind-stretching and lifelong
pursuit of truth and wisdom. 

Conclusion:  Beauty and the Face of God

Now for some concluding remarks.   

When Susan Cole-King told us on the feast of the Transfiguration
about her father, Bishop Leonard Wilson, and his experience of
torture, she quoted him saying about one occasion in his cell:
'Something of God's indestructible beauty was conveyed to my
tortured mind.' And she described the transformation of one of
his torturers whom her father later confirmed: 'He looked gentle
and peaceful'.   

When Jean Vanier told us about the passion for unity that gripped
him as he lived with those he called 'some of the weakest and
least presentable members of the body of Christ', people with
severe mental disabilities, he spoke of the revelation of their
beauty. He said that the struggle for unity means loss, pain and
effort, walking with the crucified Jesus, but that at the heart
of unity is the mutual revelation of our beauty: frailty and
suffering becoming transparent to God.

I hope that we too, in our struggles and suffering, have been
able to glimpse in our Communion something of the love of God,
something of the beauty of gentleness, of peace, of
reconciliation - the indestructible beauty of God and the beauty
of each other in God's image, so that we know there is nothing
that 'is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus
our Lord'  (Romans 8.39). 

And as we prepare for the closing service the question that was
put at the end of the first plenary session after the drama of
Jacob's wrestling at Jabbok Ford still stands. The question is:
Can we now say to each other, as Jacob said to Esau in Genesis
33.10: 'To see your face is like seeing the face of God'?

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