Obedience to God and determined dialogue with one another are the ways forward through the Anglican Communion’s crisis over human sexuality, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Most Rev. Rowan Williams addressed the Anglican delegates to the World Council of Churches assembly meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on Feb. 17.

Archbishop Williams admitted he did not know what the Anglican Communion would look like 18 months from now, “but if God has a purpose for us in the Communion, then we can relax” and “stop being so desperately and bitterly anxious.”

He bemoaned the parochialism and cultural suspicions that had rendered each side deaf to the reasoning of the other.

“There is a perception [among the churches of the Global South] that Western elites rule, manipulate, determine the agenda” both for the Anglican Communion and for the rest of the world, Archbishop Williams said. He said the “background noise” of this debate had become that of “empire” and of “global U.S. policy.”

He shared his belief that all Anglicans were “trying to be obedient to Christ as revealed in the scriptures.” However, some “people in the southern, younger churches would say we can’t recognize the patterns of obedience” in the Episcopal Church, for “it looks to us as if the agenda is not set by obedience but by society.”

At the same time, he said, some in the Episcopal Church “would want to say we can’t recognize the narrow appeal to the Bible that we hear in some of the younger churches as something that is Anglican. We accept the authority of scripture but we have never been a Church that has regarded scripture in an idolatrous way.”

The arguments had been cast as a false dichotomy between obedience and witness.

“I would be very sad to see Anglicanism becoming either the Church of a Western liberal elite, or the Church of anti-intellectual post-missionary society,” he said.

“Those who would see themselves as members of the Western liberal elite, we have an agenda that is clearly set by our society and we must pursue it. That is our way of being honest before God," Archbishop Willaims observed. “Those on the conservative side of our debate would say we cannot let society set the agenda, we must let the Bible set the agenda.”

The danger, Archbishop Williams said, is of “one side drifting towards a fundamentalism which is incapable of meeting the deepest spiritual needs of human beings” while the other becomes “a religious version of well-meaning Western society.”

The “challenge to every single member of the Communion” therefore is “together [to] rediscover a sense that we are all under the judgment of God; that we are all called to holiness; that we are all called to sacrifice.”

It will not do to present the problem “as a matter in which one side would win and the other lose” as “we need each other desperately. And that is my deepest conviction about the Anglican Communion,” Archbishop Williams said.

“We need therefore to go on meeting and listening,” he said, “where people listen and look, not in great political assemblies, but in fellowship between parishes, dioceses, and projects.”

That is the way forward to an “Anglican future that is not completely polarized, that is not completely divided culturally, ideologically, theologically. Where we can share with one another patterns of obedience of Christ without expecting them to be always the same everywhere, but at least trying to be recognizable to each other.”

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