Anglican Communion News Service

With stirring words the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, opened the first full plenary session of the Lambeth Conference, receiving an enthusiastic reception from bishops from around the world.

In his Presidential Address to Lambeth Conference Dr Williams called for reflection and a focus on strengthening the Communion.

“You can all help shape fresh, more honest and more constructive ways of being a Conference – and being a Communion. The Conference seeks to build up a trustful community in this time together – one reason we began with a retreat, so that our common trust in God could be renewed.”

“We must be honest about how deep some of the hurts and difficulties currently go; and we must refresh and reanimate our sense of what our Communion ought to be contributing to the whole ecumenical spectrum of Christian life.”

“It’s my conviction that the option to which we are being led is one whose keywords are of council and covenant. It is the vision of an Anglicanism whose diversity is limited not by centralised control but by consent”.

Dr Williams stressed the enormous significance and importance of existing bonds of friendship and fellowship which were, he said, “valuable channels of grace, even if some want to give such bonds a more formal and demanding shape”.

“I want to stress this partly because all those existing bonds are already being richly used by God for the service of his world. As we shall be reminded many times during these days, our own communion and unity are created and nourished by God for the sake of the Good News. 

“If our efforts at finding greater coherence for our Communion don’t result in more transforming love for the needy, in greater awareness and compassion for those whose humanity is abused or denied, then this coherence is a hollow, self-serving thing, a matter of living ‘religiously’ rather than ‘biblically’”.

“We seek for clarity about what we must do in a suffering world because….we are at one in knowing what the Incarnate Lord requires of us”.

Dr Williams reminded the Conference that “Our endings are in God’s hand; the Word, through the Spirit, is transforming us into Christlikeness, so that we may pray trustfully and intimately to our Father. And in that process our relations with each other are transformed, and even our relations with the material world around us. At our roots and at our end is the Word, Jesus our Lord, embodying all that God wants to do first for us and then through us.”

Archbishop Williams urged that this transformation should be one not only in word but in deed and in truth.

The first full plenary session of the Lambeth Conference included presentations on the design, themes and process of the conference by the chairman of the Design Group Ellison Pogo, Archbishop of Melanesia, Ian Earnest, Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, and Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of Cape Town. Roger Herft, Archbishop of Perth and Chair of the Lambeth Conference Listening Group, gave an account of the Reflections process. 

The Reflections Document, which would be issued at the end of the conference, would be developed from the discussions in the Indaba groups, each of which would choose one member to act as a Listener. Drafts of the developing Reflection Document would be aired in hearings on three occasions during the second week of the Conference before being presented in plenary session on the final Saturday.

The aim of the Reflections Document was “to be faithful to the Gospel, faithful to the Indaba process, faithful to the bishops and faithful to the Communion,” said Archbishop Herft.

An introduction to the Covenant process, to be discussed in Indaba groups on 1 and 2 August was given by Drexel Gomes, Archbishop of the West Indies and Chair of the Covenant Design Group. Archbishop Gomes traced the history of the Process to the Primates Meeting in Dromantine, Northern Ireland, in 2005 through the work initiated by the Joint Standing Committee (of Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council) to the draft text produced by the Covenant Design Group in January 2008 – the St Andrew’s Draft. The Conference, he said, “was being invited to commend or to challenge what has been produced and to respond in a way that will inform the debate about the Covenant in the Communion at large.” 

Five self-select sessions would examine the draft in detail while discussions of the Covenant in principle and in practice – “what is the potential for a Covenant in the life of the Communion” - would be in two Indabas on Friday 1 August in the morning and the afternoon. Indaba discussion would be included in the Reflections Process while work in the Covenant design Group would continue after the Conference. The Covenant Design Group would next meet in Singapore in September. A “Lambeth Commentary” would be compiled after the Conference and would feed into Provincial discernment in 2008 and 2009.

In April 2009, the Group would meet to draft a third version of the Covenant for presentation to the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Jamaica.

Bishop Clive Handford, Chair of the Windsor Continuation Group explained the background to the creation of the group “to advise on outstanding matters from the Windsor Report”. The group would be engaging with the Conference in several ways including hearings on 23 and 28 July in which they will offer some preliminary observations and inviting response both at the hearings and formally through discussion in Indaba groups on 2 August. That Indaba would look at mutual accountability in God and Mission in the context of the Covenant process.

Notes for Editors

An explanation of the Indaba and Reflections process is attached

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Presidential Address is attached in full