A SELF-MADE DISASTER
On one hand we have to feel sorry for Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Today, everybody is denouncing him, and I mean EVERYONE (except the paid authorities under him). On the right and the left he is under withering attack, a perfect storm of slings and arrows. On the other hand, one cannot feel sorry for him. He created this disaster himself, out of the blue. He has no one to blame for this debacle but himself. He has managed to offend everyone and please no one. This is not a place an archbishop of Canterbury should want to be.
The news hit the world on Friday, 15 February, in a letter of Josiah Isowu-Fearon, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion. He announced that the archbishop had invited all current bishops of the forty Anglican Communion provinces to the Lambeth Conference next year, but had told those with same-sex spouses that the spouses were not invited. All opposite-sex spouses were invited.
The media world lit up immediately with loud reaction from the most lofty newspapers, as The Times, of London, down to the most lowly Internet bloggers (ahem). If one Googles the subject, one will find a long list of reactions to the news. Other than The Times (requires subscription), Reuters carried an important story describing the reaction, "Anglican Church Slammed for Excluding Same-Sex Spouses from 2020 Conference." Perhaps the best article on the Internet now, that I highly recommend is the Episcopal News Service story. Find it here .
Lest one think only the pro-gay-rights side denounced the Archbishop's action, one should scan the opposite side. Perhaps the best statement from the anti side is Stephen Noll's, "Lambeth Hypocrisy: Disinviting the Spouses." Find it here . Of course, what the GAFCON crowd wants, and is in fact demanding, is that not only gay bishops be banned, but the U.S. Episcopal Church be banned and replaced at Lambeth by the homophobic Anglican Church in North America. This is not going to happen, but what is going to happen is that many bishops of GAFCON will stay away from Lambeth the way they did in 2008 when they created the anti-gay-rights GAFCON.
So, Justin Welby, the ABC, has made a mess of things. Everyone is criticizing him. No one is defending him. If he is trying to hold a feuding Communion together, he is finding it far more difficult than he imagined. In fact, he added fuel to the fire. One lesson he should learn from this is that every decision he makes regarding homosexuality has huge consequences. He should make these with the utmost of caution and reason. The problem here is that he is approaching homosexuality as an administrative issue when it is a moral issue. As the archbishop of a major Christian tradition, one would expect him to choose morality first. The church as an institution flows, or should flow, from morality, not the other way around. Is it moral for the church to discriminate against and exclude open homosexual persons? I think not.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from this bruhaha is that homosexuality is still the fundamental issue facing the Anglican Communion today, as it has been for the last twenty-plus years. The five schisms in the Episcopal Church loudly pretended that their actions stemmed from theology not social policy. Only lately did Bishop Lawrence admit that he left the Episcopal Church because of the transgender issue. Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that the issues around homosexuality directly led to the schisms as it is leading to the division in the Anglican world today.
Where the Anglican Communion goes from here is very much an open question. First World provinces are moving quickly and decisively to human rights for and inclusion of gays as their cultures are doing. Equatorial Africa is fighting a counter offensive demanding that Anglicanism condemn homosexuality as their cultures have done traditionally. GAFCON has institutionalized homophobia in the guise of fundamentalism. While reiterating their loyalty to the Communion, the GAFCON leaders have in fact been working to break it up into two blocks, an anti-gay majority and a pro-gay minority. This is what the Archbishop of Canterbury is trying to prevent. His experience of the last few days should tell him he has a lot harder job than he had thought and he needs to reevaluate the way he is going about this. Above all he needs to do the right thing. Years from now, history will judge him on whether he took the morally courageous stand, not whether he kept the Lambeth Conferences going.
