wfn.org | ACNS3634 Archbishop of Canterbury's statement at the final

["Anglican Communion News Service" <acnslist@anglicancommunion.org>]

ACNS 3634     |     ENGLAND	|     16 OCTOBER 2003 

Archbishop of Canterbury's statement at the final press conference of
the Primates' Meeting

Good evening everyone. Thank you very much for joining us. I hope you've
had a chance, at least, to glance at the statement which has been
produced by our meeting which has, in fact, been unanimously agreed by
the meeting of the primates. And I'd like to offer a few words of
introduction to this before we turn to questions. 
It has been a very remarkable couple of days in the life of the Anglican
Communion and it has certainly been anything but easy. It has not been
without pain. But it has been honest and open and I hope that we have
grown in some real shared understanding as a result. And I do want to
take this opportunity of paying tribute to my colleagues in the
Communion for all the dedication and the energy and steadfastness in
Christian service that they show generally and that they have shown in
these two demanding days.

Such understanding as we've achieved has been very hard won and it
couldn't have been otherwise given the enormous challenges that we have
faced in these two days and the very widely differing positions that we
have brought to them. That makes our work together all the more
significant. We have, very emphatically, found the will to keep talking
and working together. In short we have grown closer together rather
than, as many people predicted, further apart during this meeting. And
that is what matters most to all of us and what I think renders any talk
of winners and losers in this irrelevant. 

Now it's quite clear from our discussions that issues around human
sexuality will continue to be difficult and divisive for the Anglican
Communion, as they are for many Christians. These issues will continue
to cause pain and anger, misunderstanding and resentment all around. But
I must make it clear that the Primates' Meeting has no legal
jurisdiction, it's not a supreme court of the Communion and it would
have been rather surprising had we been able, at this gathering, to make
all the problems go away at once. We haven't. The challenge we have
worked hard to meet has been to find some way of coping with divisive
issues as a Communion. So these two days have not been primarily a
seminar on sexuality or an attempt to revisit discussions and decisions
already taken, but rather an attempt to see what it means to be in
Communion and that remains our shared commitment. 

A word about Communion: people have talked about being in or out of
Communion within our Church. The fact is, of course, as came out very
clearly in our discussions, that Communion means a great many things,
and means more than simply a set of structures, a regular pattern of
meetings between Primates or any other official leaders. Communion means
the Mother's Union group from Lancashire going to visit Burundi, it mean
the youth workers in the West Indies going to spend five years in the
United States, and all manner of things like that. It means the existing
close relationships between provinces as, for a long time, between
Australia and Papua New Guinea whereby the life and the resource of
different bits of the Communion is shared. So the degree to which we are
in or out of Communion, as between local churches, is never that easy to
determine. Having said that, a superficial unity just clinging to
structural forms for the sake of it is not at all what we are about.
That's why I emphasise the deeper levels of Communion. 

I believe that the family we belong to, the family of the Anglican
Church around the globe, has to be an instrument of God's love for the
world and that means that, in seeking to hold together as a Communion,
we have to be seeking to serve that purpose and no other. So by
attempting to work through our differences within our family we may come
to a better discernment of what we're called to be in mission. I must
say that some of the hardest issues that were presented to us in the
last few days were ways in which mission can be affected in one part of
the world by what happens in another. 

So we look outwards again at the wider world we're in: a world that has
remained in the focus of our prayers in our time together and we can be
in no doubt about the work that is still to be done by the Church of God
at large. And that greater challenge we attempt to look and in the
service of that calling we have met and deliberated and sought God's
guidance. What has emerged I think is a statement - an honest statement
- of where we are, a statement of our willingness to work together and a
recognition of the obstacles in that working together which we still
face, but also some suggestions as to how we might cope with those
obstacles. Thank you.

[A photograph is available from the Anglican Communion web site:
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/36/25/acns3634.html]

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