Bonus: Lambeth Reflection

Hello all! The following is a reflection from one of the two head stewards from the Lambeth Conference 2008. This was the gathering of all Anglican Bishops that happens every 10 years at Canterbury Cathedral in England. The writer is Erin Rutherford. I originally heard this as a sermon at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church. Erin works at an international school here in Taipei and has lived in Taiwan for 7 years. She was a steward at the 1998 conference and led the stewards this summer. I hope this provides an alternative perspective to the exlusion/schism coverage that seemed to dominate the U.S. media. Enjoy!

"I can probably assume that some of you, particularly those who’ve grown up with clergy in the family, or a parish priest who has aspired to be bishop look forward to a Lambeth Conference like you look forward to the Olympics or an election. They are events that define our communities. And Lambeth defines us as Anglicans. This was my second Lambeth Conference, having served as a steward in 1998. There is no denying that the 1998 Lambeth Conference did resemble the Olympics at times as people felt themselves to be victorious over others and I can assure you that the air was so thick at times that scenes from the Taiwanese legislature weren’t inconceivable. We like to think it’s a time when the church’s wisest, most insightful, and decisively pastoral leaders assemble to celebrate their faith, meet peers with common concerns and then return to assure us that the church universal is united in mission. And that may have been the case a hundred years ago when the church was reasonably homogeneous in terms of colour and cultural expectations but it certainly isn’t now and let’s not forget that the Anglican Church has never been one for uniformity theologically.

The job I had been given was called “Stewards Manager.” There were two of us, and our job was to train and manage the fifty five young people who had volunteered four weeks to serve the needs of the conference. They ranged in age from 18 to 34 and we did our best to train them in intercultural communication, conflict resolution, event security, emergency procedures, dealing with the Press, first aid and the technical equipment they needed like walkie-talkies. Mixed with this was of course worship, visits to the Cathedral and the social activities needed to ensure that the group stayed close and committed to one another for the duration of the conference. When the conference started our job was to do the scheduling for the stewards, to attend various meetings during the day like security briefings, technical planning meetings, production meetings and redistribute stewards when the meetings meant changes to the scheduling.

During the week leading up to the conference, BBC Radio 4 was interviewing a number of divisive and controversial clerics who included Gene Robinson but also included Gregory Venables, the Archbishop of the Southern Cone. While he was clearly invited to give his views on the question of homosexuality in the episcopate but given what my priorities were at the time, what struck me most were his comments on the organization of the conference. He pointed out that ten years previously bishops were sent package after package of study material and the objectives and desired outcomes of the conference were known in advance. However in 2008 he had received no more than three sheets of paper and a few emails and he didn’t even know where he was supposed to go to register. And there was some truth to this. The reason for this was that the tone of the conference was meant to be entirely different from the spectacle, rupture and disagreement of 1998. This Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had decided early on that underlying the structure of the conference would be a look at the notion of “covenant,” a relationship of promise. To him, covenant meant an understanding as to how we will relate to one another and how tensions will be handled and discernment taken forward. As far as I could tell, he didn’t want to pander to the demands of either side of what was on everyone’s mind.

Almost in anticipation of the lack of opportunity to make a statement, as you surely heard, an event took place in Jordan a few weeks pre-Lambeth in which members of the church with a traditional view on the interpretation of scripture concerning human sexuality, decided to take a public stand against the Archbishop of Canterbury and the so-called liberalism of some western churches. Partly because of the conference in Jordan and partly for other reasons related to it, this year’s Lambeth Conference was without the bishops of Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and, of course, Sydney. Fortunately there were exceptions. The Bible study leader for my bishop at home in Vancouver, Michael Ingham, was a dissident bishop of Kenya who decided to come on his own saying that "I believe we are all children of God and the children of God belong together." We also had a Nigerian steward who, early on, explained that though she took a similar position to her church on matters of sexuality, she realised that it was based on limited experience and she should meet gay people before making a decision. I decided that it wasn’t quite the moment to explain that she surely already had.

Now having said all of that, I don’t want to downplay the dark shadows that had been cast over the Lambeth Conference by what happened in Jordan. But for me personally, in order to get through a very demanding four weeks – the stewards, not politics, needed to be my highest priority. Fortunately their energy and their commitment were infectious. Equally as encouraging when I arrived was that recommendations we had made ten years ago were listened to and implemented and as most young people in the church know, having their voice heard can be rare.

And changes hadn’t only taken place for the stewards. Another striking difference was the equality given to the Spouses Conference. The Spouses workshops were no longer about mitre making or planning the perfect luncheon. Spouses of bishops were delegates also and while their programme was sometimes different they were validated in their centrality to the work and support of the episcopacy. Key to this joint agenda was the joint day in which bishops and their spouses came together to consider the abuse of power in the church. While 1998 may have made headlines for its vote on human sexuality, it could have made much bigger headlines if the press had got wind of the flagrant abuse that took place at the conference itself. The insistence on the part of Jane and Rowan Williams in hosting a different kind of conference was, I believe, a testament to their insightfulness and the relevant tone.

If you’ve done any reading about this Lambeth you know that there were no votes. That whole conference gatherings were few. That bishops met in what they called Indaba groups. Depending on your news sources, you may have read that bishops were frustrated because their Indaba facilitators treated them like they were in Sunday school and they couldn’t talk about what they wanted to – sexuality. Instead they had to talk about the environment, about social justice, about the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and our relations with other faiths. The resistance from the bishops to engage in meaningful discussion about these issues could be staggering to the young people at the time. While, admittedly, most of the young people took a position one way or the other on the issue of openly gay bishops, it was clear to them that even if it needed to be addressed as an issue of justice, or as an issue of scriptural authority, so did hunger, so did clean water, so did Robert Mugabe and so did climate change. And to remain silent on those issues because it was more productive to hope that the other side would just leave seemed unconscionable.

A steward from Australia just last week referred me to an article on the Sydney Anglican Network website in which the Indaba process was heavily mocked. An unnamed bishop had apparently described it as a joke and rather than discussing their content, the author mocked the cultural origins of Indaba as if they surely had nothing to offer a conference where votes and schism were bound to happen. Considering there was no Australian media present at the conference, church or secular, I found this a very curious judgement.

I got to know a number of the rapporteurs, some of whom had served with me ten years ago, were now ordained or theology professors and whose job it was to sit in on an Indaba group and take careful notes and produce a report for the end of the day about what was said. It could be a frustrating process because the 40 or so bishops in the group then had to agree on whether their report was an accurate reflection of their discussions. They told of how at first the bishops were engaged in their work, that the relevance of the topics was significant and impressive. But as the days passed and we were anxious for the end, people started to push. How could they have come to this event and not yet talked about sexuality? How could the Archbishop’s so called Covenant for the Communion arise from what seemed such an unproductive set of discussions?

At the same time, somehow not surprisingly, the stewards had realised that in functioning as a group, we respected the dignity and integrity of each other, that a covenant had several forms as we shared interests and shared our lives for four short weeks. It wasn’t because we were representing our dioceses or our provinces that we had to get along, we didn’t share a contract, we shared a relationship. As Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi pointed out when he spoke to the conference one evening, where a contract is about interests, a covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an 'us'. Covenants are predicated on difference. And that is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.

As you would assume stewards did, they spent a number of evenings in the college bar. One particular night was especially memorable as somewhere in our second round of Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, a bishop came over to our table and asked what it was we were so happy about. Someone said near me, is he at the same conference as us? Somehow for us, our identities as Anglicans, our vastly differing cultural backgrounds and our inherent understanding that we shared a fate meant that covenant had already taken shape.
Jonathan Sacks went on to remind us of Jeremiah who, in describing covenant said: “I remember the devotion of your youth, the love of your betrothal, how you were willing to follow me into the desert, through an unknown, unsown land.” Covenant is what allows us to face the future without fear, because we know we are not alone. Covenant is the redemption of solitude when the issues we face seem too much to bear alone.
Something else that had been transformed in ten years was the acknowledgement of the contribution of the young people who stewarded the event. Both delegates and conference management treated the stewards as valued members of the conference community. I felt that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the management fully demonstrated the qualities of the landowner in today’s Gospel. It is obvious to us, I hope, that the landowner wasn’t interested in paying for labour so much as he was in ensuring that the labourers didn’t go home hungry. The Archbishop had a vision which allowed the stewards to not go home spiritually empty, but to feel that their membership in the church was as valued and important as any bishop’s.

Of course, this was a reciprocal agreement in a sense. The stewards were quite possibly the most exceptional group of young people I’ve ever worked with. They were insightful, helpful, hard-working, polite, curious, determined and full of initiative. The most remarkable part about the stewards was their humbleness. These were young people who despite an incredible range of professions, life-styles and interests came together for the simple privilege of serving God’s community through the conference. Unlike the labourers in the vineyard in today’s Gospel, they did not assume that there would be extra recompense for their work. Their reward was being part of an incredibly supportive community that put cooperation before difference. They too represented the same theological divide as the bishops, but they put teamwork first. They laboured out of love and joy for the opportunity to work. Equally as incredible to me was the respect with which they were treated by bishops. Whether they were following the lead of the Archbishop or the church has simply got better at choosing its leaders, I don’t know but until this summer’s conference I had never attended a church event, especially not the Lambeth Conference of 1998, in which bishops, often with a tremendous sense of entitlement, weren’t patronising of young people and saw them as equal in God’s eyes.

Of course, I’m not naïve or deluded enough to think that the experiences of 55 young Anglicans in Canterbury this summer will go down as a world wide example of how the conference was a success. If we are lucky, it is a message that will be shared in their 55 parishes. But it was clear to me that some bishops would be returning home uncomfortable because they hadn’t been able to split the church and some would be uncomfortable with the vastness of the mission we have yet to fulfil. All of them, though, must acknowledge that regardless of what happens in the next few years that without the devotion of youth, there will be no church. What Jonathan Sacks described as covenantal goods, that is love and friendship cannot be split to suit our own interests. And that is something for which we should feel not only gratefulness, but hope."

Erin Rutherford