"When the Word on the Street is RESIST"

Here's the link to the original text of Bishop Peter Selby's Address to the Inclusive Church Conference.

As I reread Bp. Peter's address, I am enormously impressed by its prophetic brilliance and timeliness, especially in light of the fact that Bp. Peter says that his ideas are not new and were first expressed in 1991 in his book titled BeLonging: Challenge to a Tribal Church. I present a few choice quotes from the address and my brief responses:

I write in the knowledge that the Archbishop speaks and acts as he does out of a profound concern for the unity and mission of the Anglican Communion, and that he acts as he does in the belief that his role as its principal Primate and ‘instrument of unity’ demands that he does. I sadly believe that his good purposes have been and are being subverted.

Indeed, the Archbishop's words are being widely subverted by a good many folks to suit their own purposes, and not always to good purposes. It seems to me that if the Archbishop spoke and wrote with clarity, his words would not be so easily exploited and subverted.

For in that paper these denunciations of homophobia are made without any reference to the fact that the Archbishop was personally responsible for a decision – I refer of course to his requiring Jeffrey John’s withdrawal from his acceptance of the see of Reading – that was personally hugely painful and damaging. While I don’t know any gay person who doubts Archbishop Rowan’s personal sincerity in making those statements against homophobia, I know many who say that their situation in the Church is far worse than it was during his predecessor’s time, something paradoxical to say the least, but for which he surely needs to own some responsibility. Expressing horror at overt homophobic acts is only a part of what we need to do; we also have a responsibility to acknowledge the distress that is being inflicted on LGBT people by the teaching that is being proclaimed and the characteristic style of the debate. In particular, when the Archbishop says that there must be no questioning of LGBT people’s human or civil rights or of their membership of the Body of Christ, it needs to be said that what he is questioning has serious implications for both; I shall not forget the occasion when a bishop who is unmarried wrote to me after the article I wrote dissociating myself from the statement of the House of Bishops made on civil partnerships, ‘Being celibate doesn’t make you acceptable’. (My emphases)

Pressing Jeffrey John to withdraw from his appointment as Bishop of Reading was, I believe, a serious misstep from which the Archbishop never recovered. After that decision, perhaps other paths harmful to LGTB persons, however unintentionally, were easier for the ABC to take.

The Archbishop’s opening warm comments on TEC carry little weight if most of his thoughts are actually directed against it. It needs to be said also that, as is shown by the strong American critique of TEC in the paper I mentioned above, The Anglican Covenant: Shared Discernment Recognized by All, opinion within TEC is deeply divided, and it is that division within TEC which, arguably, has been projected outwards into the Anglican Communion.

Yes, indeed, once again. All too often, I saw the Archbishop's words directed to and about TEC as offensive beyond my understanding, especially coming from our "primus inter pares", the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion. The repeated, offensive remarks came so often as to cause me to consider why I wanted to be a part of the AC which looked to the ABC for spiritual and a degree of temporal leadership.

As to the "trans-communion recognisability" of the member churches of the AC upon which the ABC insists, Bp. Peter asks:

One might ask whether the history of the church bears out such a notion as having operated in the decision-making of churches over issues of considerable importance; and in particular one might ask whether the history of Anglicanism supports requiring that way of undertaking and then sanctioning developments. Is it the case that provinces have not acted on new ideas until they had consulted with other provinces and taken the teaching of ecumenical partners into account? Is it not rather the case that quite controversial decisions have been taken because they seemed to be right, and it has taken time for it to become clear whether they were legitimate developments or not?

Yes, it is the case that the member churches have moved forward in important decisions on many issues without seeking the approval of other provinces of the Communion. Concerning many weighty matters, the members have neither sought nor received the consent of other provinces, and they have not spoken with one voice. Whence this new, non-traditional idea from the Archbishop, which dismisses a large part of the history of the Communion?

What is happening to the role and person of the Archbishop is a question that cannot be avoided and is far from being just his responsibility. It has been pointed out that his paper is addressed to ‘the Bishops, Clergy and Faithful of the Anglican Communion’, a form of address very familiar to readers of papal encyclicals, including the address to ‘the faithful’, a term well known (and not always happily so) to Roman Catholics but not the usual way in which we refer to lay Christians in the Anglican Communion.

The Archbishop denies more than once in his paper that the Covenant and his paper are manifestations of centralisation; but why would he need to deny this? The sad reality is that the Archbishop has removed himself from his natural area of thought in the matter of sexuality, that is his remarkable capacity to bring a godly wisdom to bear on secular developments, a gift we need more than any other in attempting to work out how to assess current developments in human attitudes and behaviour in matters sexual. Instead the issues that surround sexuality are now treated by him only as ecclesiastical problems, to be resolved as such.

A tragedy, surely. I see the Archbishop more and more as a tragic figure, who could have avoided much of the disapprobation which has been visited upon him simply by being true to himself. Yes, there would still have been those in vehement disagreement, even to the point of withdrawing from the Communion, but he may have gained respect, even from them, for having the courage of his convictions and not making "unity" in the AC into something resembling an idol.

As Bp. Peter says in his next to last paragraph:

Above all what we need is not to take our eye off the issue, that of the treatment to be accorded to LGBT people and the ways in which they have – over many generations, not just in the last few decades – sought to live lives obedient to the gospel within the cultures in which we all, sexual majorities and minorities alike, seek to do just that. To leave that issue behind in favour of the worthy but secondary issue of how to keep the Anglican Communion together will stunt our discernment – and not keep the Anglican Communion together either. The Archbishop says the enterprise is ‘becoming the Church God wants us to be, for the better proclaiming of the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ’; but that means engaging in the search for the truth together, not settling for the stalemate which is what his paper actually advocates. (My emphasis)

Yes.