Anglicans pay ‘too heavy a price’ for lack of central structures

01 August 2008

The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken of his frustration that the decentralised nature of the Anglican Communion has prevented a swift resolution of the disputes at the heart of the Church.

But in an interview with Premier Christian Radio’s Cindy Kent this morning, Dr Rowan Williams made clear that while he wanted a new central structure for the Communion, he was not seeking to become an Anglican pope.

The bishops are discussing the setting up of a Pastoral Forum to tackle disputes within the Anglican Communion; the proposals are due to be debated by the Anglican Consultative Council in Jamaica in May 2009. Cindy Kent asked the Archbishop whether people in the outside world wanted to see answers and solutions much earlier than that.

Dr Williams replied: ‘They do, and that only works when you’ve got a highly centralised, highly organised top-down organisation where somebody like the Archbishop of Canterbury can just snap his fingers and say ‘let it happen’

He admitted that he sometimes wished he was able to do that; but ‘not very often.’

‘But not a lot of the time because it’s not the church I belong to. And deeply frustrating as that is it is the price we pay for being decentralised.

‘We’ve probably paid too heavy a price in the last few years for that and the question is can we just draw things together; can we have a more coherent way of operating can we have a bit of a better clearing house for our problems. But, as I say, we’re not the kind of organisation where a chief executive just says “do it”’.

The Archbishop admitted that this coming weekend was ‘make or break’ for certain levels of the Communion and added: ‘We’ve got to come out with something about our problems with some steer for the way forward; but that being said there remains the question how do the Christian relationships of understanding and co-operation that have been created here survive. And I think they will, whatever happens in the next few days. And it’s not as though I feel entirely cosy about the next few days - it’s going to be very hard work. But also I’m aware of the depth of what has already been achieved.’

He added: ‘I think a number of people will go away saying “I still disagree”. The question at the moment is whether they go away saying “I disagree and frankly I don’t think it’s worth investing in the relationship” or whether they go away saying “I disagree and that means we’ve got an awful lot of work to do.”

‘I hope it will be the latter, because they have already done work and when people have built relationships they don’t just want to tear them up in a hurry. That’s my prayer.

Dr Williams said the two highlights of the Conference for him was a speech by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sachs, and the march through London in support of the Millennium Development Goals.

‘One of the things people will remember from this Lambeth Conference will be the walk of witness in London. Everyone came back from that I think really rather staggered about what we had done. “Did we really do that?” “Did we really walk through central London with the Prime Minister talking to us at the end?” and feeling that we had laid down a marker, and more than that, the prime minister gave all the bishops some very particular challenges to take back to their governments at home and pledged himself to advocacy on behalf of some very significant development related policies from here. I think that was a major event for us.

The Archbishop denied the conference had been an exercise in navel gazing, and pointed to the London march and discussions on the environment, gender issues and sexual violence, adding: It’s not as if we have spent the whole time just agonising about our structures, far from it. If anything, the complaints within the conference are that it has taken too long to get to our own business because we have been trying to focus on these slightly more big ticket global questions.’

The Archbishop has spent some time during the Lambeth Conference to meet with bishops working in conflict and crisis situations. He said: ‘I spent an afternoon last week with the bishops from Zimbabwe and if anything is designed to put anything in perspective, that is.

‘And I came away feeling I can not highly enough praise the courage and conviction of the church in Zimbabwe, which really has rallied, which has been strengthened, as so often happens, by the harassment and brutality that they have endured in the last six to nine months. That was wonderful.’



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