Goddard2Goddard Letter 8 part 1: Andrew to Giles

27th February

Dear Giles,

Thanks for your letter of 25th Feb and your reflections on where we are in our conversation and where we are as a Communion after Tanzania. Your \'nothing\'s changed and everything\'s changed\' was particularly striking and while I agree with it I would fill it out quite differently from you.

In the areas where you say \'nothing\'s changed\' I think quite a bit happened. To have Phil Groves (Facilitator for the Listening Process) there talking to the Primates is to my mind quite a significant bit of progress. I hope and trust that more provinces will now take that process forward a lot more seriously and it is clearly going to be important at Lambeth 08. I\'m more intrigued by your \'we still have no resolution on the question of human sexuality\' as I guess I\'m not clear what \'resolution\' here means. If 'resolution' means an agreement by everyone that solves all our differences then clearly we are not there(!). However, I think the Primates have not only again reaffirmed I.10 as you say but also made clear that any diocese or province that acts against it leaves its relations with the Communion \'damaged at best, and this has consequences for the full participation of the Church in the life of the Communion\'. That principle was clearly behind the request at Dromantine for withdrawal from ACC but I don\'t think it has ever been stated quite so starkly and that means I think that quite a lot has changed in terms of understanding the current limits of diversity.

You won\'t be surprised to know that I don\'t think that we have here a \'glaring inconsistency\' in relation to I.10. I\'ve not done the careful research but I think it is unprecedented for a province to disregard a clear, overwhelmingly supported Lambeth resolution that claims the teaching of

Scripture as its basis for appealing to provinces not to take certain actions. Going back to women\'s ordination, although a woman priest had been ordained during the Second World War, when the Lambeth Conference made clear its unhappiness (as it clearly did in 1948) no more such ordinations occurred 'until a new consensus had emerged\'. If a province had disregarded those (weaker) resolutions we might have discovered they had quite a \'normative\' status and authority.

I shared some of your \'worst fears\' and think we indeed owe many congratulations to Archbishop Rowan and others for avoiding a major split.

I\'m also glad nobody was excluded and, in retrospect, have to admit I can

see wisdom in allowing the Presiding Bishop to remain as a full member who signed off on the communique rather than - my preferred option beforehand - reducing her to a diminished, perhaps observer, status due to her own actions as Bishop of Nevada and the actions of her province at General Convention.

I'm pleased the Alternative Primatial Oversight request was not simply granted as I think it needed much more careful work and thought. However, I do think \'everything has changed\' in terms of what the Primates did instead to help out those in the US who oppose the actions of the last two General Conventions and stay committed to Communion teaching. There is now to be a Primatial Pastoral Council chaired by a Primate chosen by the Archbishop of Canterbury which will implement a Pastoral Scheme for a province. In this Scheme there will be appointed a Primatial Vicar who will be delegated some of the powers of the Presiding Bishop and be accountable not to the province\'s internal structures but to the internationally formed Pastoral Council. This represents a very serious

and unprecedented implementation of the requests of the last two Lambeth Conferences that the Primates take up enhanced responsibilities to act in times of crisis including "intervention in cases of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within provinces, and giving of guidelines on the limits of Anglican diversity in submission to the sovereign authority of Holy Scripture and in loyalty to our Anglican tradition and formularies” (Lambeth 1998, III.6).

The question of refusing to receive communion together is clearly a contentious and painful one. I really do not think it was a political point not to attend and that, as you acknowledge, it will have caused the Primates who were absent much pain. Perhaps I can say something of my own personal experience here. You may know I came to the 10th anniversary service of Changing Attitude last year which Gene Robinson attended and after which he spoke. I have to confess I went unclear and wrestling in my own mind as to whether or not I would be able to receive communion, well aware that many of my friends certainly would not. I honestly did not know as I entered whether or not I would be able to do so in good conscience but through the service became strongly convinced that - despite the fact that most of those gathered there were working for and celebrating something in the church I opposed and that situations would arise in which I might talk about at least 'impaired' communion with them - I should receive. For all our differences we were brothers and sisters in Christ and it was the Lord's table to which we were all called as saved sinners. In the service I found particularly powerful and moving - given he was my personal tutor at Cranmer and I always loved it when we sang it in chapel - the congregational singing of Michael Vasey's version of A Song of Anselm with those beautiful words, 'Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us, in your love and tenderness remake us'. Words that must have spoken in different ways to all those there and I felt powerfully spoke to us as a divided church in these painful times. My own view is therefore more in line with those Global South Primates who, despite their differences, shared in communion but I fully understand why some - especially those who head and represent provinces that have officially broken communion - felt they could not do this.

So, overall, I think Tanzania actually represents something very significant indeed for the life of the Communion and that 'everything has changed' not primarily because of what did not happen but because of what did.

There's so much I'd love to respond to in your letter but I want to try and address what I sensed was its most heart-felt plea about the listening process becoming a 'banging my head against a wall process'. It's a feeling I sometimes have (eg I've yet to see any sustained response to the attempt to engage in dialogue that I and others offered back in 2003 with True Union in the Body?) and I know many others who share my view also feel this. It does raise major questions of what this 'listening' is all about and whether it has a particular agenda or requires certain agreed presuppositions or outcomes. The problem is that it seems to me that to participate together in 'working out a theology of relationships which is widely applicable' - if it means acceptance of sexual relationships outside marriage - is simply to ask me to abandon my premises. It is, if you like, to call on me to jump across the street to stand on your tall building! It would be like me insisting that if you were serious about listening then we would only talk about patterns of non-sexual friendship that may be able to offer a vision of redemption for gay and lesbian Christians. Not sure how we get round that but hope we can try to find a way.

The blockage that you see in the process is that I've not been able to acknowledge that there may be potential that your view might have validity. I may come back to that in a later letter as I often do follow through the thought-experiment, 'what would I need to be persuaded of in order to accept either the validity or the truth of others' views in this area?'. You say that I need to recognise 'that alternative views may be held with integrity' such that those who think like you 'need not automatically be expelled from the Communion'. So the crunch question to me - 'are you prepared to allow the potential for a diversity of views on this subject within full members of the Communion?'.

Well, with a deep breath and quite a lot of trepidation, I want to try and wrestle with my own reactions and response to this, aware that it is something where my own thinking - and even more, my feelings - are in flux and I sometimes am more 'hard-line' and sometimes 'softer'.

[ For part 2 of this letter, please click on www.inclusivechurch.net/article/details.html

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