Listening Process
The Lambeth Conference came to its conclusion today, Sunday. I would like to thank the courageous –“acting from the heart” – people who came to Canterbury from many places to tell their stories as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people, as part of the Listening Process called for by Lambeth ’98, the Windsor Document, the Primates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. As I pointed out in several settings at the conference, the strength and courage of LGBT people coming to a place where it was commonly heard that there were significant negative places of negative energy aimed at them is something to honor.
Tom Jackson, the president of Oasis California was an on-the-ground, tireless, manager and encourager for all present. Those telling their stories included: the Rev. Vicki Gray, deacon in the Diocese of California, Tom Poynor, chaplain at the UC Berkeley, Rowan Smith, Dean of St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, South Arica. Cynthia Black, Louise Brooks, and Katie Sherrod produced a powerful documentary of LGBT people telling their stories in Africa that had two showings at Lambeth. Mimi Walters journey from Baltimore, and lesbian and gay clergy came from the Diocese of North Carolina. The Rev. Fr. Michael Lapsley, of Institute for Healing of Memories spoke on reconciliation.
While there were barriers to hearing these grace-filled, transformative stories, still the connections were made. The contributions the above people made to the Lambeth Conference are akin to the dynamism Jesus talked about in his parable about a mustard seed – small, seemingly insignficant, but in the end generous and unmistakable.
Relations
The document that came out of the Lambeth Conference, the final draft of which we saw at the last plenary session yesterday, is a distillation of the Indaba Group conversations that have gone on over the length of the conference. All of us were assigned to Bible study groups that met each morning. Five Bible study groups constituted an Indaba Group, which met after the individual study groups.
What has emerged from the extended time in the Bible study and Indaba Groups is relationship. Bishops spoke honestly and deeply. We found places of profound commonality, and we named honestly pain in division that was not erased.
One Sudanese bishop said this, “After 22 years of suffering (civil war) we have learned not to run away based on what we hear, but to come and see, and then decide rather we need to run away. We are not leaving these friendships.”
There was much talk about “What I need to take back to my diocese.” People asked me that quite a lot. Was it moratoria on blessings, on incursions? Was it commitment to the relief of global suffering through the Millennium Development Goals process? An Anglican Covenant?
For me it is the relationships. Unlike most of the other products, the usefulness of the relationships formed at the Lambeth Conference will lie in the extension of the relationships into our diocese, and beyond. As I wrote in an earlier posting, part of the way bishops must now fulfill their ministry of unity is by actively extending the relationships they have to others, and even understanding that these relationships need to develop apart from the bishops themselves. I am coming home to the beautiful Diocese of California knowing that there are great opportunities for becoming a global body that contributes to the healing of the world, and that people in the Bay Area are eager to be part of this. The same Sudanese bishop who spoke so movingly of his province’s brave journey to Lambeth (when significant neighbor provinces stayed away based on what they had “heard”) has asked me whether people in California could help his people with the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sudan. Who better than we?
Products
As to the other ‘products’ I mentioned above: the document we produced has real significance as it reflects the searching, prayerful conversations over a two week period of over 600 Anglican bishops. The points of substantial agreement are thus worth our attention. In California we will be seeking ways to utilize the indaba process to consider the contents of the document, absorb and extend its learnings, and contribute back to the whole.
At the same time, the document is not legislation. We will pay close attention to it, but we must not reify the agreement points in it into laws, and we should resist interpretations that seek to employ those agreements as laws.
Some of those places of broad agreement are:
Moratoria. There was widespread agreement that moratoria are needed in the areas of: same-sex blessings, consecrations to the episcopate of partnered gays or lesbians, and incursions by one province or diocese into the ecclesial life of another province or diocese.
Archbishop Rowan in his final presidential address, given just after we received the reflections document noted that, “There will be some who cannot abide by these moratoria, and in this they signal that there are steps to deeper unity they cannot take; or it may be that they conceive of deeper unity in other ways.” I take this to be a profound and generous idea. In not abiding by the moratorium on same-sex blessings I take it as incumbent on me and on us in the Diocese to actively labor to both understand the position of those to whom that moratorium is important, and to convey the reality of our life together to the world. I must redouble my efforts at inhabiting a deeper unity.
Millennium Development Goals. Following up on the Walk of Witness in London, there will be a Communion-wide day of vigil, prayer, and fasting on September 25, while the United Nations is meeting in New York. The Episcopal Church will have a presence there, along with representatives of provinces and dioceses throughout the Communion. All of this is to highlight the need to recommit to the MDGs in order to halve extreme poverty by 2015.
This Communion-wide act of witness and advocacy is something towards which I have been working and praying for six years. I believe it is also the fruit of much of Archbishop Rowan’s ministry, the result of his ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury – combining faith and action at a global level. The global church, he said, is not just existent to manage internal conflict, but to aid in the healing of the world’s wounds. Interdependent churches, globally connected, praying and worshipping as the base of their work of healing in the world, in this consists the catholic faith.
We must see September 25 as a starting point, not as an end point. The Diocese of California has been laboring to understand and implement the Millennium Development Goals in our common life. We may view this Lambeth agreement as an opening for greater partnerships and possibilities, an answer to prayer.
Environment. Environmental sustainability is Goal 7 of the MDGs. The environmental crisis, however, was of such deep concern to the bishops gathered at Lambeth 2008 that it was given attention as a separate but related subject area in the final document. In our Indaba Group I heard bishops speak with passion and intimate knowledge of sustained droughts in Australia, degradation from wide-scale and unchecked mining in India, damn building, the pollution of the oceans, and environmental effects of globalization and “affluenza.” The window of opportunity to reverse the negative effects of climate change is closing far more rapidly than even our scientific community thought twenty years ago. One bishop quoted projections he read just before the conference began that said we have about 100 months to do the emergency work we must do.
In the Diocese of California I am heartened by the revitalized work of the Environmental Commission, and the network of liaisons to the Commission that has been formed, but am aware that at the present we exist more as potential energy than as an active network. We must and will respond to this crisis with intelligence, commitment, and will. It is essential that we not only move into greater action, but that we also see that action as prayer, that we root our action in prayer and theology. It is also essential that we link our diocesan efforts with others in Province Eight of The Episcopal Church.
An Anglican Covenant. In an address he gave during the Lambeth Conference, Archbishop Rowan said that a covenant for the Communion, “should help us grow together.” While there is widespread will for an Anglican Covenant expressed in the final document of Lambeth 2008, there was equally widespread opposition to the sections (3 and the Appendix) of the St. Andrew’s Draft Covenant that make the proposed covenant an instrument of dis-union rather than its hoped for opposite. I think we will have a covenant at some time in the future, and I think it will be a much different thing than what we have seen yet, all of which has been born out of fear and anxiety.
Bishop Steven and I have been encouraging a group of non-Episcopal Church, non- Church of England bishops, clergy and laity to form to present some lively alternative ideas for the design group, contributions that may influence what goes to the Anglican Consultative Council in late Spring of next year. There are interesting ways of creating community, and healing community that have little to do with Western legal and legislative systems, and it might be good to hear about such processes.
Partners. Finally, I want to say what a pleasure it was to work with and spend time with Bishop Steven Charleston during the Conference. We met every day over breakfast, a touchstone of real use to me as the intense days were beginning. I am so hopeful about all of our work together in the future of the Diocese of California, and Bishop Steven is joining a great ministering community at Diocesan House, and bringing his own great heart and intelligence to that lovely partnership that serves the diocese.
Bishop Steven and I also hosted an evening with the Province of Brazil, including Bishop Naudal and Carmen from the Diocese of Curitiba, our Companion Diocese. After the fun dinner, I excused myself to go to another room in the same building to host the second screening of Voices of Witness from Africa. I looked up to see all the bishops and spouses of the Province of Brazil joining us there. I think this says a great deal about our brothers and sisters in Brazil, and about the good work and life we are going to share.
We are almost at the end of the Lambeth Conference 2008. I have been both sustained and challenged by the graceful expressions of bishops and spouses who have repeated over and over to each other, in hearings, in Bible studies, in indaba groups two things: we will not leave one another, and I believe and think certain things at odds with some others in the Communion, and these beliefs have not changed.
I know that when we leave this Conference, then, that we will not bear news that some people want to hear. We will not have a ratified Covenant for the Communion (there was never an expectation in the process that we would). It is also unlikely that we will have definitively turned back the St. Andrew’s Draft of the Covenant, either.
We will I believe make important statements that reflect a newly discovered, common commitment to the relief of global suffering, including the urgency to address the environmental crisis. This is what we should do from my point of view, and I have heard the same from bishops representing every part of the Communion.
This will not be enough for those who wish to have either a strong rebuke of The Episcopal Church and Canada over human sexuality on one side, and I also doubt that something I think incredibly important, a Communion-wide commitment to safeguarding the civil rights and safety of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people will be affirmed.
But we will remain committed to one another. So my hope is genuine hope, in the theological sense – I do not know how it will finally look to live in the Communion, nor what the Communion itself will look like, but I believe in a good outcome for this.
We may have the will and vision to help in a substantial way to halve extreme poverty by 2015, and we may partner with civil society and other faith communities to avert the impending environmental crisis (one estimate quoted here is that there are only about 100 months before the climate change process will be irreversible).
I mentioned in an earlier posting that the awareness of the great web of prayers supporting us in our work has been foundational for my hope. Let me add that I went to the Night Prayer service, held each night at 9:45, early last week. It is conducted by a team of religious from around the Communion, including the Franciscans and the Melanesian Brothers and Sisters.
The service was beautiful in its sincerity and in the purity of the Melanesian polyphony singing. At the end, in the enuring silence, I sat quietly, preparing to go out of the building. Suddenly, one of the Melanesian brothers began singing a wordless tune. Then all joined in, singing, “Father make us one. Father make us one. That the world may see that you sent your son, Father make us one.” I believe God will answer this prayer. I’ve included a video clip of the Melanesian brother and sisters singing and dancing before the photograph of all the bishops was taken, to give you a sense of the joy and beauty in their music and their faces.
Becoming one will not be easy, however. Besides the clearly stated differences of those who are attending the conference, it is also true that over 200 bishops are not here in protest over the presence of The Epsicopal Church bishops (among others). I believe that these absences were enabled by the disinviting of Gene Robinson to the conference. Once a scapegoating exile has taken place, others may be actively added to the list of the unaccepted, and others may self- select out of the groups.
The recommendation to not invited Gene to the Lambeth Conference was in the Windsor Report. As we seek to be open to all it could mean to be part of the Body of Christ, we must be aware that becoming one will necessitate overcoming this severe negative dynamism set in motion by not inviting Gene.
Hearing the Melanesian Brothers and Sisters sing, leading us all in “Father Make Us One,” helps me know that this barrier to Communion can also dissolve as we move towards it, together.
