Reflections on Lambeth’s Reflections
We need to remind ourselves what the Lambeth Conference was convened to achieve. The answer is, nothing. …
And now a Conference called for no particular reason, holding meetings designed to reach no particular conclusions, has produced not a report but a series of reflections. Read them, if you will.
Having decided to decide nothing, it appears that the Conference felt it must comment on everything. Thus the reader who is willing may wade through page after page of good intentions about good causes ranging from disaster relief to carbon footprints. Yet, of course, nothing is (nor could be) specific — not even the gospel which, it is claimed, lies at the heart of the Communion’s concept of mission. …
– John Richardson writes at The Ugley Vicar. Worth reading in full.
Reactions to Lambeth span spectrum
The Episcopal News Service has produced a summary – with links – to a range of reactions to Lambeth. You can read it here.
(Photo: Lambeth Conference media.)
‘He just slipped away, our noble prince’
Canterbury, England
I am glad I came here for this Lambeth and worshipped one last time in the Cathedral home of Augustine and Dunstan, Anselm and Becket, Cranmer and Laud, Temple and Ramsay. I had come to speak a word of hope and perhaps to intervene on behalf of our beloved, but in the last resolve the family refused the long needed measures. So he just slipped away, our noble prince, one dreary morning in Canterbury with hardly even a death rattle.
The new prince was born last month in Jerusalem. I was there—arriving late, departing early. I was never quite sure what I was witnessing. It was an awkward and messy birth. He hardly struck me as I gazed upon him there in the bassinet as quite ready to be heir to the throne. I even wondered at times if there might be some illegitimacy to his bloodlines. But that I fear was my over weddedness to a white and European world. May he live long, and may his tribe increase—and may he remember with mercy all those who merely mildly neglected his birth.
As for me my role for now is clear, to hold together as much as I can for as long as I can that when he comes to his rightful place on St. Augustine’s throne in Canterbury Cathedral he will have a faithful and richly textured kingdom. …
– From Bishop Mark Lawrence of South Carolina.
(See also, from March 2008, Bishop Mark Lawrence upholds the uniqueness of Christ.)
Photo: Bill Murton, Diocese of South Carolina.