The Archbishop of Canterbury has conceded that ACC-14 in Kingston, Jamaica was a “failure” that disappointed many Anglicans across the Communion.However, the meeting of the Anglican Communion’s fourth ‘instrument of unity’ had been a “glorious failure” that saw the Anglican Communion rise from its “deathbed” to address its own shortcomings, Dr Rowan Williams said in his closing presidential address on May 11.
It was unhelpful to establish criteria for success or failure for Anglican meetings, Dr Williams told delegates to the May 2-12 meeting in Kingston, Jamaica said, as there was “no absolute measure for achievement.
In critical times – small things might be large achievements. Our willingness in certain areas to act as one and to discover more deeply how we pray as one is, by God’s grace and gift, for no other reason, an achievement,” he said.
At ACC-14 “we got up every morning, we prayed every morning, read Scripture, we affirmed our will to stay in relation, we’ve done some planning,” he noted, adding that significant progress had been made in forming an Anglican relief and development network, committing the Communion to evangelism, endorsing the recommendations of the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG), and “we even agreed on the substance of the covenant and the time scale of that work.”
Predictions of the demise of the Communion were unfounded. “If someone diagnosed as terminally ill has prayed and planned and given new evidence of energy and life from their deathbed to begin new things we might just possibly question the diagnosis of a terminal outlook,” he said.
However, concerns the Anglican Communion could dissolve into Anglican federations or an “association within which some groups are more strongly bound to one another and some groups less strongly bound” could not be dismissed, he said.
“I suspect that will be more inevitable if not all provinces do sign on to the Covenant. And I hasten to add that’s not what I hope. It is what I think we have to reflect on as a real possibility.”
Delegates nonetheless sought the unity of the church. “We have not in this meeting given evidence of any belief that we have no future together,” he said, but conceded there remained “in a good few areas an intensely felt standoff between groups in our communion.”
He also noted the anger expressed by some delegates over the handling of the debate over the Covenant was understandable as “one thing we’re not terribly good at is resolution passing.”
The heart of Dr Williams’ speech though focused on the theological lessons that could be drawn from the meeting. He chided those on either side of the political and theological divide for acting like the apostles portrayed in Mark’s Gospel who were blind to the true nature of Christ: with “their obsessiveness about getting their questions answered and their future sorted out and their status assured.”
In the Gospel the apostles’ “obsessiveness is challenged again and again by the clear simplicity of those who simply see in Jesus where there is bread to be had for nourishment,” he argued, adding this Gospel was “bad news for Christian elites, all of whom need to grow by being humbled: Archbishops, ACC members, experts of whatever kind, even commentators on the Anglican Communion.”
Drawing upon a phrase coined by the English Roman Catholic nun, Maria Boulding, Dr Williams stated “the alternatives for Christians were not success or failure, but glorious failure and miserable failure. Glorious failure is the recognition that we fall again and again and have a Lord and Saviour whose promise is so inexhaustible that we can pick ourselves up and begin the world all over again, newly created. Miserable failure takes many forms, including the form of telling ourselves that we haven’t really failed at all.”
“The Apostles of Mark” stopped being “miserable failures” and “decided that the story they were going to tell was of how they had misunderstood and abandoned and betrayed their Lord who had still loved them and returned to them. That is what I call being a glorious failure.”
Dr Williams concluded his remarks by saying that “as we look back on these 10 days we ask ourselves has this been a failure or a success, maybe we should step back and think a few Mark-shaped thoughts. And maybe if we ask is the Anglican Communion at the moment a failure or a success, we should ask the same thing. Because the Gospel seems to be saying to us: first face your failure” not that of your neighbour.
“Perhaps thinking about those potentially glorious failures, opens us out onto the prayer that turns us back to Christ-like self-giving that lets the glory through. That’s what we hope for in our fellowship, our very fragile, very flawed, very precarious Anglican fellowship,” the archbishop said.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Source (RI)
SV (ED)