ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY:
WE HAVE A PLURALITY OF VIEWS
The Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement today, 2 August 2022, regarding the controversy of the 1998 Resolution 1.10. Find the letter HERE . It is a strategic victory for those provinces of the Anglican Communion that are gay-friendly, particularly the American church. The nominal head of the Anglican Communion declared, "We have a plurality of views."
As for Resolution 1.10 itself, the Archbishop declared the "validity" of its "existence," something than no one has disputed. It is an historical fact. The problem has been what to do about the Resolution. How should it be applied in the Anglican Communion? In his letter of today, the Archbishop made it very clear there would be no recrimination against those Anglican provinces that do not incorporate Resolution 1.10 in within their own province(s) of the AC.
The Global South Fellowship has rejected the Archbishop's stand for toleration of different views. The leadership of this anti-homosexual-rights coalition at the Lambeth Conference have issued a statement reiterating Resolution 1.10 and calling on bishops to vote in favor of this. They are condemning homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and are calling for enforcement ("steps" for "enforcement") of these in the whole Anglican Communion. Find their statement HERE .
It is not at all clear how this voting scheme concocted by the Global South leaders at Lambeth is going to work since it is a round-about process of photographing ID badges and emailing to an unnamed source, all promising anonymity. It remains to be seen how many bishops at the Lambeth Conference will respond to this strange system of "voting" and whether others would have confidence in the announced results of such an irregular arrangement.
Today's events are highly significant in the history of the Anglican Communion. The traditional nature of the AC has been confirmed. It is a loose union of forty-two independent churches bonded by a common heritage coming from the Church of England through the prayer book. The efforts of bishops from cultures that are stridently anti-homosexual to turn the AC into another tool for their local convenience has not worked. While the majority of people in the AC may agree with 1.10, they cannot enforce it on the provinces that do not agree with it.
What this means for the future of the anti-homosexual coalition in the Anglican Communion remains to be seen now that their effort within the AC to enforce uniformity of their particular view has failed. Global South and GAFCON have been around for years and have found a certain potency in the Anglican world. They do contain the majority of Anglicans across the globe. Perhaps they will continue giving nominal allegiance to the AC while pursuing their own intolerant social agendas, or perhaps they will break away from the AC and proclaim a brand new Anglican association separate from the AC and under strict enforcement of 1.10.
The Diocese of South Carolina was in a similar quandary more than a decade ago. Look at how that turned out. The leaders took the majority of people out of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion in order to enforce an intolerant stand on homosexuality. They lost a third of their communicants, the entity of the old diocese, and a big chunk of the local parishes. They are now in a non-Anglican Communion Christian denomination of like-minded neo-Pharisees. Their future is dubious to say the least because the flow of history is toward human rights.
See also the excellent ENS ARTICLE on today's events at the Lambeth Conference.
