Let's Argue Like It's 1998

The Lambeth Conference is an international meeting of Anglican bishops. The conference discusses church and world affairs and the global mission of the Anglican Communion for the decade ahead.

This year, the Archbishop of Cantebury, Justin Welby, called the 15th Lambeth Conference which will happen in about a week's time and will take place across venues at the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral, and Lambeth Palace.

The conference theme is "God’s Church for God’s World - walking, listening and witnessing together." and the bishops will explore what it means for the Anglican Communion to be responsive to the needs of a 21st Century world.

Meeting around every ten years since 1867, the Lambeth Conference is one of the four Instruments of Unity in the Anglican Communion.

Over six hundred bishops and their wives or husbands - unless you are homosexual and, therefore, your spouse has been asked to stay home - will travel to the conference. They will represent dioceses and Christian communities from around 165 countries of the Anglican Communion.

The Lambeth Conference aims to resource, inspire, and encourage Bishops in their local ministries; supporting their pastoral and leadership roles in church life and mission. For many of the bishops attending, this is a rare opportunity to meet with their peers from around the world, as they learn from one another and share their ministry experiences.

There will also be a joint program for bishops' wives and husbands running in parallel - unless you are homosexual and, therefore, your spouse has been asked to stay home. This program is designed to equip and support them in their vital roles too.

This will see the participation of many spouses - unless you are homosexual and, therefore, your spouse has been asked to stay home - from across the Anglican Communion, which will provide a key opportunity for spiritual reflection, growing connections and sharing stories about their vocation and ministry experiences.

Bishops attending the 15th Lambeth Conference could be asked to vote once again on Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Conference, which rejected homosexual practice as “incompatible with scripture”.

From an article on churchtimes.co.uk, here is a description of Resolution 1.10, agreed in 1998:

Human Sexuality

This Conference:

1. commends to the Church the subsection report on human sexuality;
2. in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage;
3. recognizes that there are among us persons who experience themselves as having a homosexual orientation. Many of these are members of the Church and are seeking the pastoral care, moral direction of the Church, and God’s transforming power for the living of their lives and the ordering of relationships. We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptized, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ;
4. while rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, calls on all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn irrational fear of homosexuals, violence within marriage and any trivialization and commercialization of sex;
5. cannot advise the legitimizing or blessing of same sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions;
6. requests the Primates and the ACC to establish a means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the Communion and to share statements and resources among us;
7. notes the significance of the Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality and the concerns expressed in resolutions IV.26, V.1, V.10, V.23 and V.35 on the authority of Scripture in matters of marriage and sexuality and asks the Primates and the ACC to include them in their monitoring process.

There are many comments to be made and feelings to be had about this resolution, including amazement that marriage only between a man and a woman continues to be held as scripturally accurate, and that a person's only other choice is abstinence (no sex before marriage, no marriage unless you are a man and a woman).

This is a tired debate that has been going on for decades and sometimes it feels like maybe there is progress, until something like this happens.

Already a letter has gone out from the Scottish Episcopal Church stating that "the wording of that call does not represent the position of the Scottish Episcopal Church as reflected in the Church’s Canons, which recognizes that there are differing understandings of marriage in the SEC."

I pray with all my heart that the Anglican Church of Canada agrees with Scotland.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has stated that no resolutions - definitive announcements - are to be made at this Conference. After a plenary on a particular topic, Lambeth would instead issue “calls”: declarations, affirmations, and specific calls to the Anglican Communion to pray, think, and reflect on a topic, and for each Province to decide on its response.

For each call, bishops will vote electronically either to affirm: “This call speaks for me. I add my voice to it and commit myself to take the action I can to implement it”; or: “This call requires further discernment. I commit my voice to the ongoing process.” Bishops not at the conference will be able to vote remotely.

The voting choice offered to the bishops is limited: there is either "yes" or they can vote that a question needs more discernment. As of now, they won’t be able to stand up decisively for people’s God-given human rights and vote no.

The Bishop of Los Angeles, the Rt Revd John Harvey Taylor, stated in an interview with Church Times, "Lambeth doesn’t legislate or set policy. But that won’t matter to a global audience that is likely to read that a majority of Anglican bishops refused to affirm the dignity of every human being. It’s exactly the wrong message to a world in agony. It’s the opposite of the Christian values of healing and reconciliation. It divides, hurts, scapegoats, and denies. It tempts younger people to flee faith and serves no one but the gods of secularization, who are lying in wait for the whole world.”

There are a lot of people who will be closely watching this year's Lambeth Conference, and there are a lot of people who are going to feeling pain, grief, anger, sorrow, and plenty of other emotions. The debate of the scriptural definition of marriage is old and tired. There are more pressing matters in the world than who loves who and who marries who.

Six hundred bishops gathering to move the church forward, and instead we've returned to 1998.

I pray that those who plan to stand up against a revisiting of Resolution 1.10 are successful and those pained by the events that will unfold over the next couple weeks know that they are loved by God, no matter what any human being tells you.

*Information about the conference at the beginning of this blog is retrieved from https://www.lambethconference.org, with some of my own edits for accuracy.