It’s Lambeth Conference. Its 3 am and I lie awake at home just across the channel from where the conference is taking place. At the same time the International AIDS Conference is taking place in Montreal. At the same time Pope Francis is in his pilgrimage of penance in Canada.
In my mind all these events are linked. The first Lambeth conference I was aware of was the 1998 conference. After that conference my diocesan bishop, Bp Duncan Buchanan met with the group of young and newly ordained clergy in the diocese of Johannesburg. He looked haggard. He told us of the way he had been brutalized at Lambeth conference because of the resolution on Human Dignity and Human sexuality that his group had introduced. Instead the now infamous resolution 1.10 has been introduced and passed. But the Anglican church had been called to prayerful discernment. That was 24 years ago.
My second encounter with Lambeth conference was the one I attended in 2008: as part of a delegation drawn together by Christian Aid we offered two workshops on the church and HIV, one for the bishops and one for their spouses. The world was being ravaged by HIV, no major treatment initiative had yet been brought to the vast majority of people living with and dying from AIDS related illnesses. We offered our workshops to help inform the church and challenge the church into action. Only one bishop in the whole of the 2008 Lambeth Conference attended our workshop, and it was not a bishop from Africa, it was a bishop from Wales. (We did have 14 spouses attending the workshop we offered them) And in 2022, when there are almost 40 million people around the world living with HIV, and more than a million still dying of AIDS related illnesses every year, at the very moment the International AIDS Conference is taking place – I have heard no mention of HIV or AIDS in this current Lambeth Conference (please, someone attending prove me wrong). In 2008 the bishops were too busy fighting about sexuality and whether one of their brother bishops, Bp Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, should even be allowed to attend Lambeth.
And then we have Pope Francis, responding to our attitudes of exclusion. All the atrocities metered out against First Nation and Inuit people was because they were considered primitive, uncivilized, pagan……. They were brutalized because the beauty and wonder of who God had created them to be was not recognised. And let us not forget that the horror they endured was not only metered out by the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in Canada also ran some of those “Assimilation” schools. Is this to be mentioned at Lambeth 2022? I don’t know.
So back to the present, and my current sleeplessness. Do we the church think that the demeaning dehumanizing messages on sexual diversity which has been the bread and butter of Christian Theology for the last number of centuries is any less damaging to the Human Dignity and phycology of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and the many other people with sexual diversity that the messages we gave to First Nation and Inuit people? What of the physical and phycological abuse that has been endured in counciling and conversion “therapy”? What of the beatings, shock therapy, sexual abuse and people being disowned by church and family which has been endured because the beauty and wonder of who God has created them to be can in so many places still not be recognised. Whether you are born First Nation or Inuit or sexually diverse has never been a matter of personal choice. Rather it is simply an expression of the glorious and wonderful diversity which our God manifests in all of creation.
The Anglican church stands on the three pillars of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. Scholarship, much of which we have highlighted in the Human Dignity and Human Sexuality series, has shown that scripture can no longer be said to condemn sexual diversity; tradition shows us that there was a time when the Christian church was open and inclusive – the last one or two hundred years are not the defining age of church tradition; and everything within us must allow Reason to lead us to a place of affirming people for whom God has created them to be.
I love my church. It is the place where my own relationship with God has been nurtured. But it is not perfect. And it is not only the Anglican Church that struggles with sexuality. St Augustine has much to answer for – when will we see that it is indeed Origional Bless and not “origional sin” that defines God’s creation. And when will we stop fighting sexuality? It is an astonishing wonderful enriching part of who God created us to be. We are both physical and spiritual.
I pray for the Lambeth Conference. I pray for every bishop and every spouse who is attending. And I pray come Spirit Come – fill us with your love and creativity. Lead us Spirit, lead us to be the Church that nurtures people into life giving – life affirming relationship with God.
