Archbishop addresses the Global South Gathering
The Archbishop of Canterbury has used his video address to the Fourth Global South to South Encounter meeting in Singapore to emphasise that it is the work of God's Spirit that can heal the tensions within the Anglican family.
Dr Williams was speaking specifically to two items on the meeting’s agenda: challenges for the Church’s mission and the Anglican Communion Covenant, which he described as a new way of "grounding our mission".
“The text of the [Anglican] Covenant is a whole,” he said. “It is something which lays out the foundations of our faith, the language that we share, and the hopes that we share, but it also--we hope and pray—sets out a path for the future, a path of mutual attention, mutual respect, the kind of obedience to one another that the New Testament proposes for us, but so much in the Christian tradition also suggests - the careful listening to one another’s needs, and discernment of what we can say together... So one of my prayers for your meeting in these days is that you will discover something about that mutual obedience, the covenant with one another that comes out of our grateful acceptance of the covenant God makes with us in the blood of Jesus Christ.”
He went on to say that the Anglican Communion had been reflecting on the need for a covenant “in the light of confusion, brokenness and tension within our Anglican family – brokenness and a tension that has been made still more acute by recent decisions in some of our Provinces.
“In all your minds there will be questions around the election and consecration of Mary Glasspool in Los Angeles. All of us share the concern that in this decision and action the Episcopal Church has deepened the divide between itself and the rest of the Anglican family. And as I speak to you now, I am in discussion with a number of people around the world about what consequences might follow from that decision, and how we express the sense that most Anglicans will want to express, that this decision cannot speak for our common mind.
“But I hope also in your thinking about this and in your reacting to it, you’ll bear in mind that there are no quick solutions for the wounds of the Body of Christ. It is the work of the Spirit that heals the Body of Christ, not the plans or the statements of any group, or any person, or any instrument of communion. Naturally we seek to minimize the damage, to heal the hurts, to strengthen our mission, to make sure that it goes forward with integrity and conviction. Naturally, there are decisions that have to be taken. But at the same time we must all...share in a sense of repentance and willingness to be renewed by the Spirit.
“So while the tensions and the crises of our Anglican Communion will of course be in your minds as they are in mine, I know from what you have written, what you have communicated about your plans and hopes for this conference, that you will allow the Holy Spirit to lift your eyes to that broader horizon of God’s purpose for us as Anglicans, for us as Christians, and indeed for us as human beings.”