Recommendation 4 - Union Among the Churches of the Anglican Communion - Encyclical Letter 1.8: Of commendatory letters

Recommendation 4

Union Among the Churches of the Anglican Communion - Encyclical Letter 1.8: Of commendatory letters

1. This Committee would renew the recommendation of the first Lambeth Conference, that letters commendatory should be given by their own bishops to clergymen visiting for a time other Churches than those to which they belong.
2. They would urge yet more emphatically the importance of letters commendatory being given by their own clergymen to members of their flocks going from one country to another. And they consider it desirable that the clergy should urge on such persons the duty of promptly presenting these letters, and should carefully instruct them as to the oneness of the Church in its apostolic constitution under its varying organisation and conditions.

It may not, perhaps, be considered foreign to this subject to suggest here the importance of impressing upon our people the extent and geographical distribution of our Churches, and of reminding them that there is now hardly any part of the world where members of our Communion may not find a Church one with their own in faith, order and worship.

[NOTE: The Lambeth Conference of 1878 did not adopt any formal Resolutions as such. The mind of the Conference was recorded by incorporating the Reports of its five Committees, received by the plenary Conference with almost complete unanimity, into an Encyclical Letter which was duly published. Recommendations embodied in the Committee Reports were evidently accorded equivalent status to formal Resolutions, and they are reproduced here as they appeared in the course of the Encyclical Letter, under appropriate reference.]