In response to the decisions of the recently completed General Convention, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams released a statement in which he stressed that the key issue for the Church is not the human rights of homosexual persons but about how the Church makes decisions in a responsible way.

In his June 27 statement, titled “The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today: A Reflection for the Bishops, Clergy and Faithful of the Anglican Communion,” Archbishop Williams suggested that debate in the Anglican Communion had become much harder for many people after the 2003 consecration of a non-celibate homosexual person as Bishop Coadjutor of New Hampshire. The structures of the Communion had struggled to cope with the resulting effects of that action, he said.

“Whatever the presenting issue, no member Church can make significant decisions unilaterally and still expect this to make no difference to how it is regarded in the fellowship,” Archbishop Williams said. “This would be uncomfortably like saying that every member could redefine the terms of belonging as and when it suited them. Some actions—and sacramental actions in particular—just do have the effect of putting a Church outside or even across the central stream of the life they have shared with other churches.”

Archbishop Williams said that the strength of the Anglican tradition has been in maintaining a balance between the absolute priority of the Bible, a catholic loyalty to the sacraments and a habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility.

“To accept that each of these has a place in the church’s life and that they need each other means that the enthusiasts for each aspect have to be prepared to live with certain tensions or even sacrifices,” he said. “The only reason for being an Anglican is that this balance seems to you to be healthy for the Church Catholic”

At the same time, Archbishop Williams said “it is imperative to give the strongest support to the defense of homosexual people against violence, bigotry and legal disadvantage, to appreciate the role played in the life of the church by people of homosexual orientation.”

Divisions running “through as well as between the different provinces of the Anglican Communion” complicate the process of finding a solution, Archbishop Williams said, but he spoke in favor of a formal but voluntary covenant agreement between the provinces as providing a possible way forward.

“Those churches that were prepared to take this on as an expression of their responsibility to each other would limit their local freedoms for the sake of a wider witness,” he said. “Some might not be willing to do this. We could arrive at a situation where there were ‘constituent’ Churches in the Anglican Communion and other ‘churches in association,’ which were bound by historic and perhaps personal links, fed from many of the same sources but not bound in a single and unrestricted sacramental communion and not sharing the same constitutional structures.”

A diversity of viewpoints within a province might well mean that local churches would need to evaluate what kind of relationship they wanted with each other, Archbishop Williams said, but he suggested this evaluation could lead to a healthy understanding of unity.

“It could mean the need for local churches to work at ordered and mutually respectful separation between constituent and associated elements,” he acknowledged. “But it could also mean a positive challenge for churches to work out what they believed to be involved in belonging in a global sacramental fellowship, a chance to rediscover a positive common obedience to the mystery of God’s gift that was not a matter of coercion from above but that of ‘waiting for each other’ that St. Paul commends.”

Archbishop Williams said that resolving issues by decree was an attractive idea for many people, but such a hope is misplaced.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury … must always act collegially, with the bishops of his own local Church and with the primates and the other instruments of communion,” he said. “That is why the process currently going forward of assessing our situation in the wake of the General Convention is a shared one.

“But it is nonetheless possible for the Churches of the Communion to decide that this is indeed the identity, the living tradition – and by God’s grace, the gift -- we want to share with the rest of the Christian world in the coming generation,” he said. “My hope is that the period ahead—of detailed response to the work of General Convention, exploration of new structures, and further refinement of the covenant model—will renew our positive appreciation of the possibilities of our heritage so that we can pursue our mission with deeper confidence and harmony.”

Anglican Communion News Service contributed to this report.

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