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Dear Affirming Catholicism Supporter,
WELCOME
Welcome to Affirming Catholicism’s first email newsletter! As you may well have gathered, the new Directors/Trustees of Affirming Catholicism have been busy in designing and creating new structures that will help us better to deliver two of our key aims:
to provide progressive Catholic teaching for today’s Church;
to speak with a clear, intelligent and generous Catholic voice in contemporary debates.
We have some very gifted people working for us in both these areas, and in future newsletters some of them will introduce themselves to you. You can read about some of the early fruits of their work later in this newsletter.
A third aim is to support and encourage an inclusive Catholic life within the Church, which is a key task for all those who support us. The movement is very grateful to all of you who support us financially through your annual supporter’s contribution - but if we are to continue to be effective, we also need your support at local level in winning hearts and minds to share the values in which we believe, and to work for a Church that lives by those values. Although you’ve probably seen this many times before, here is what we are all about (and you can read more on our website- www.affirmingcatholicism.org.uk):
We are a movement of inspiration and hope in the Anglican Communion, seeking to bring together and strengthen lay and ordained people who recognize the positive, inclusive and joyful currents in the Catholic tradition of Christianity.
We are working to make the Catholic element within Anglicanism a positive force for the Gospel and a model for effective mission today.
As reformed and reforming Catholics, we seek to renew the universal Church by including those with different perspectives and bearing witness in the world to Christ’s healing and reconciling love.
I’ll be writing to you each month to keep you up to date with what is happening at National level - it would be very good to hear back from you, and to receive your contributions for future newsletter, so that we can continue to encourage one another. Please send comments, questions, articles etc. to perran@perrangay.com.
With very best wishes for an Affirming Catholic future!
Perran Gay
Canon Precentor and Head of Worship at Truro Cathedral, Affirming Catholicism Supporter Liaison Trustee
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IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
Lambeth reflections by Perran Gay and Bishop Michael Doe
The Launch of Gospel Imprint
Women Bishops - the next steps
Catholic Fresh Expressions
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LAMBETH - RABBITS, PRIMATES AND OTHER ANIMALS
It was a great experience to be involved with the Affirming Catholicism stall in the Lambeth Marketplace, and to work alongside other members of the Inclusive Church Network in seeking to promote a progressive agenda within the worldwide Anglican Communion. I offer a few reflections on my week in Canterbury.
Each day began for me with a five minute walk from my student accommodation on to the campus of the University of Kent at Canterbury where the conference was being held. It was quite early, and most bishops were at breakfast, but the grounds were full of rabbits. They were obviously used to human company, shy and inquisitive at the same time. And then occasionally I would catch a glimpse of a purple shirted figure walking around the campus, either alone or accompanied by a spouse, or perhaps in a small episcopal group. I found the combination of rabbits and bishops a fairly surreal way to start the day, but this was nothing compared to what was to follow.
I soon noted that everyone was wearing identity badges hung from lanyards of different colours. The bishops and their spouses (who were meeting for their parallel conference) sported episcopal purple, while the staff team wore red. These were the two groups who were able to gain access to the private sessions of the conference, where the sky blue lanyards of the press, or the simple white of exhibitors such as I (the lowest form of Lambeth life) were definitely not welcome. To enforce the colour coding were stewards with green lanyards, assisted by volunteers in yellow. It made a lot of sense to me that the group work of the indaba sessions and the sometimes contentious plenary sessions should be restricted in this way, but quite why that should also include the main conference worship and major lectures from distinguished visitors such as the Chief Rabbi seemed less clear. Certainly, as a liturgist, it was enormously frustrating to know that worship was being offered a few hundred yards away in the Big Top every morning and evening by each province in its own style, and to be barred from attending it. Certainly the press felt the same, and took every opportunity of saying so.
Meanwhile in the marketplace, Affirming Catholicism was sharing a stall with Society of Catholic Priests, staffed by both volunteers and directors of both organisations, including some representatives from Affirming Catholicism in North America. At this international gathering, it was especially good to be reminded that our aspirations and values are shared by fellow Anglicans across the world, and I think that having an international team helped us in beginning conversations with others about setting up groups in other provinces and countries. We certainly heard some encouraging news about plans for Australia and New Zealand, while bishops from areas as diverse as Korea, the Caribbean, Central Africa and Mexico expressed great interest in some of our literature, particularly the new Gospel Imprint material (about which see a later article). It was wonderful to have such support from well over forty bishops at the Gospel Imprint launch party that we held almost at the end of the conference, and to know that our movement is greatly valued even by those bishops who do not feel able to lend us active support.
The marketplace itself was a colourful collection of progressive and inclusive groups, each with its own clear identity and purpose but sharing a common agenda, together with development and aid agencies, religious booksellers and ecclesiastical outfitters. To be situated within a few metres of three of the latter was a constant temptation to add to the liturgical wardrobe! Significantly, there were very few conservative groups in evidence. Those that were there were mostly concerned with issues of sexuality, and I think they may have been surprised to find themselves surrounded by so many organisations arguing for an inclusive and progressive approach.
I was also interested to note the absence of ’Forward in Faith’ and all the other traditional catholic societies. We were the only stall advertising ourselves as being ’Catholic’. It is a word we need constantly to explain (as indeed we did to many of the African bishops), making it clear that we are not Roman Catholics (although we long and pray for unity), nor are we ’traditional’ catholics of a ’Forward in Faith’ variety (although we share with them a common tradition of spirituality, liturgy and social action). But at a conference where so many who would call themselves ’catholic’ stayed away, it was left to us to argue for the catholic identity and nature of the Church. Perhaps the experience of this conference is a paradigm of how the Anglican Communion might look if ’traditional’ catholics break away from it. While we are an inclusive and progressive movement that rightly identifies with many of the aspirations of the Inclusive Church network, our distinct contribution may need to focus on our catholic identity, as we continue to provide a catholic vision for a developing Anglican ecclesiology, and to resource catholic life within the Church of England and beyond.
What of the conference as a whole? Only time will tell whether the deep divisions in the Communion will yet be resolved, or whether the Windsor Process will result in some kind of commitment to each other that is pastoral rather than juridical, and which seeks to include rather than exclude wherever possible. Gay and Lesbian Christians in particular may well be concerned that they will have to continue to pay a heavy price to preserve the fragile bonds of love within the communion. But there were positive outcomes too. Despite heated exchanges and expressed disappointments with some of the outcomes, many of the bishops reflect that there was a genuine desire to listen to one another, while the enormous support and respect shown by the vast majority of the bishops towards the Archbishop of Canterbury does augur well for the future. It may have been an exhausting and harrowing conference for Archbishop Rowan, but I suspect that his careful and clear direction has meant that the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as one of the ’Instruments of Communion’ has been strengthened and clarified.
If you want to find out more about what was and wasn’t said, go to http://www.lambethconference.org/reflections/document.cfm. Although this is a long document, the ’reflections’ that emerged from the indaba groups do repay careful study, both for their tone and content. The university campus has now been returned to the rabbits (and students), but what was said and done there in the hot and steamy days of late July and early August will have enormous implications for our future as Anglicans, and for the role that Affirming Catholicism will need to play in a changing church.
Perran Gay
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LAMBETH REFLECTION BY BISHOP MICHAEL DOE
A Sermon preached at the Affirming Catholicism Waverley Abbey Pilgrimage
Last Sunday the 2008 Lambeth Conference came to an end, with sighs of relief all round. We are still together, or at least those of parts of the Communion which want to stay loyal to Canterbury and not go off and make a new Communion in their own image elsewhere. There was much to be thankful for: Archbishop Rowan attempting what may be an impossible task, many bishops willing to listen as well as talk, and many living signs of that kind of Anglicanism and Anglican worship which movements like Affirming Catholicism seek to commend.
Every morning we gathered - as we do here this afternoon –for the Eucharist, meeting in a massive tent, the Big Top, whose twin pinnacles led the Australian bishops to name it “Madonna’s Bra”. The indaba programme was designed so that human sexuality wasn’t discussed until nearly the end, although it was always there in the background: hence the joke, “Why are we meeting in a Circus Tent? So that the elephant can stay in the room!” It was of course being barred from this tent which made the Media so angry – I must admit that their Eucharistic devotion had escaped me up to now.
Where does the Anglican Communion go from here? As someone whose job entails travelling round quite a lot of it, there is much anxiety and a lot to play for. But I offer you these three thoughts, which come as much from the life, and death, of the saint whom we remember today: Laurence the Deacon who was martyred in Rome on this day in the year 258.
The story goes that Laurence’s persecutors, who had already put Pope Sixtus II to death, demanded that he bring out all the church treasures. He promptly did so, assembling all the poor. “These, he said, are the treasures of the Church”.
So the first thought I take from the story of Laurence is that the poor come first. At the heart of our being Anglicans across the world there needs to be not theological grand-standing, not Episcopal power-struggles, but the needs of the poor. And by “the poor” I don’t just mean those who lack food, water and shelter – although I certainly do mean them, betrayed yet again this week in the World Trade Organisation talks – but I also mean those in our more affluent societies where belonging nowhere and meaning nothing is our own cultural poverty. There are enough forces in our world ignoring and exploiting the poor by extremisms and escapisms of all kinds. We don’t need to add to them. Our Gospel of good news for the poor needs to be at the centre of who we are and what we do as Church, as the Anglican Communion. You would never think that the 1998 Lambeth Conference was about International Debt, not Sex. You would never believe that the most important part of this year’s event was the London March in support of the Millennium Development Goals.
My experience as General Secretary of USPG is that Mission – preaching the Gospel and feeding the Poor – is the central concern for the vast majority of our partners
Secondly, I look to the role which Laurence had as a Deacon. As you will know, recent thinking has led us to see Deacons less as menial servants and more as those who act as a “go between”. I link that to the Lambeth Conference in this way. The central challenge which faces us today is to relate Gospel to World, or more particularly – as it was often put in Canterbury – Text and Context. On the one hand we have the Text: the Bible, and for many of us the Tradition as well. On the other hand there is our context, and across the Communion many different and sometimes opposing cultural contexts. Each of us is trying to connect the two.
And as we seek to do this, conflicts will inevitably arise. I sat in one indaba group discussing the blessing of same-sex relationships. “It is contrary to our culture, contrary to God’s natural order, contrary to what your missionaries told us”, said one bishop from Tanzania: “It harms the church, destroys out witness, and gives the Muslims ammunition against us”. And then, an American bishop from the other side of the room: “It has brought new life to my diocese, young people no longer write us off, and many of the parishes who do it are growing because people of all kinds, including young families, want to be part of this kind of inclusive church”.
Each of these, and many more, are struggling with the “go between” role, interpreting the text and being the Church in their – very different – contexts. One evening in Canterbury I was watching the rabbits which come out at sunset to graze on the University lawns. The wife of an American bishop was passing by and I was just about to say to her “Aren’t they sweet” when she shouted “Aw just wish aw had ma gun”. Cultural context is everything!
How then shall we deal with each other when such conflicts arise? I return for a third and final time to the story of St Laurence, and one simple thing: his faithfulness to Christ. In his great sermon on martyrdom, Leo the Great said of those who put Laurence to death on a red-hot iron grid “The flame of Christ’s love could not be overcome by your flames, and the fire which burnt outside was weaker than the fire that burnt within Laurence’s heart”.
If we are to stay together across the Communion we – and that’s liberals as much as conservatives – we need to stop demanding that everyone acts as we do, and instead ask the question: is the other person seeking to be faithful to where they believe God is calling them? Can I see in them, living in a very different context than mine, the flame of Christ’s love? Only then can we begin to challenge and learn from each other within the one communion which God has given us.
In this next period it’s going to be very easy for groups to go off on their own. Radical Americans demanding justice and reducing the Gospel to what fits a post-modernist age. Conservative Africans embracing Biblical fundamentalism, often for its own sake but sometimes also for the funding which comes with it.
The fact is that we need each other.
The reality is that God has called us to be together.
The truth is that our Communion can go forward.
If... like St Laurence, we will allow our lives and our churches to be shaped by the flame of Christ’s love.
Michael Doe - General Secretary, USPG: Partners in World Mission
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GOSPEL IMPRINT
We are delighted to announce the launch of Gospel Imprint, the fresh voice in Anglicanism sharing free resources with all Christians who are seeking to learn, worship and witness to the generosity of the Kingdom of God. We have been working hard with our colleagues in the Society of Catholic Priests to provide these accessible downloadable resources, which we hope will appeal to many Anglican priests and parishes, including those that would not normally describe themselves as catholic. Please take some time to visit the website www.gospelimprint.com and see for yourselves. We will shortly be launching a second phase of the project, which will provide online liturgical resources. As an Affirming Catholicism supporter, you’ll receive notification by email each time new material is available so you can be among the first to use it.
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WOMEN BISHOPS: THE NEXT STEP
Affirming Catholicism rejoices at the recent General Synod vote on women in the episcopate, which brings closer our vision of the full inclusion of women and men in the threefold ministry of the Church. In drawing up a Statutory Code of Practice, we urge that the Church should act with charity and generosity, provided that it does not compromise the unity of the Church. The article by our Chair, Jonathan Clark, that follows is, we believe, a very important contribution to this process, and we commend it to your prayerful attention.
A response to the General Synod of the Church of England’s vote on women in the episcopate
General Synod this July voted on a motion responding to the Manchester Report by the Group responsible for drafting Legislation to make it possible for women to become Bishops in the Church of England. By passing this motion, Synod affirmed once again its wish that women be admitted to the episcopate, and further clarified the means by which that should be done. Synod has affirmed that in the legislation necessary to consecrate women, the needs of those who in conscience cannot receive the sacramental ministry of ordained women be recognised through a national Statutory Code of Practice. Synod was invited to consider the provision of special structures for those unable to receive the ministry of a bishop who is a woman, but declined to support such a proposal. A key aspect of Synod’s decision is that the legislation enabling women to be bishops should not create a ‘purity zone’; that is, there will be no separate jurisdiction within which it would be possible to deny the orders of bishops – or with them priests – who are women. The ambiguity inherent in the Act of Synod, particularly, has been resolved by saying that the Church of England wishes to make provision for those who dissent from the decision, but cannot make provision for those who deny that it has been made.
Building on its previous submission to the Legislative Drafting Group (available at: http://www.affirmingcatholicism.org.uk: under “Arguing for Women Bishops”, click on “Read latest submissions”), Affirming Catholicism will seek to contribute constructively to the further process. Much of what we have already suggested is entirely in line with the decision taken by Synod. Affirming Catholicism has consistently argued that the diversity of views within the church is a sign of its life and of its catholicity. We see charity and generosity as Gospel imperatives and will continue to work for provision which enables the widest continuing diversity of view whilst maintaining a catholic ecclesiology that is founded on the principle of the whole diocese gathered around its Diocesan Bishop. We refused to support the argument for separate jurisdictional provision because it divided the church in two. However, we will support provision which is generous but does not tear apart the fabric of the church.
This position was expressed in Affirming Catholicism’s submission to the Legislative Drafting Group on Women in the Episcopate:
An inclusively catholic position demands that, to the greatest possible extent, the minority be as respected and included in the life of the church as the majority. In the case of the admission of women to the episcopate, it is clear that the ministry and morale of those who felt unable to accept the decision would be adversely affected if they were forced on a day-to-day basis to relate to bishops who were women. For pastoral reasons, it is therefore right that in such cases episcopal duties should be delegated. Nevertheless this needs to be done in such a way that the unity and coherence of the diocese are maintained at the level of overall policy and pastoral strategy, and without compromising the ordinary authority of the diocesan bishop on which the unity and coherence depend.’
This delegation might in practice look very similar to the provisions which the Act of Synod (which is in effect a Code of Practice) at present puts in place for parishes which decline the sacramental ministry of priests who are women, but it would no longer be contained in primary legislation, as is the current right of PCCs to pass Resolutions A and B.
Affirming Catholicism also believes that principles of reciprocity should govern all pastoral provisions. We will therefore work towards the inclusion in a Code of Practice of a requirement that the senior staff of every diocese should include at least one woman priest or bishop. Provision should be made to ensure, not only that those who wish may receive the ministry of a male priest, but also that those who wish for the sacramental ministry of a specific ordained woman on particular occasions and at such times as bereavement or transition are able to receive it. Affirming Catholicism will continue to work to seek the highest level of inclusion possible whilst preserving the Catholic ordering of the Church, drawing on best practice in the experiences of other Anglican Provinces which have already ordained women as bishops.
Affirming Catholicism has consistently argued in favour of extensive provision for those who in conscience cannot accept the sacramental ministry of ordained women. We believe that this generosity is an important aspect of our response to God’s call for our unity. We believe also that this is a matter of church order, and not of personal or collective pain.
General Synod has affirmed the key principle that a structural solution is not acceptable. In our submissions to those drafting a statutory Code of Practice, Affirming Catholicism will work to include as many as possible of those who disagree with the course the church is now on. We do not expect this to be an easy process for anyone involved, but we believe that it is worthwhile in order to achieve the highest possible level of unity which honours all in the Church.
Affirming Catholicism’s response to these issues is fully explored in Women as Bishops (ed. James Rigney: Mowbray 2008), which also contains the text of submissions made during the process to the Church of England’s various working groups.
Jonathan Clark,
Chair, Affirming Catholicism
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FRESH EXPRESSIONS
Calling all those interested in exploring more about Catholic and Contemplative Fresh Expressions.
Forming fresh expressions of the church in a sacramental and contemplative tradition
Preacher and Celebrant
The Most Revd. Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
Coventry Cathedral
Monday, 8th December, 2008, 10.30am - 4.00pm
The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
You are warmly invited to join the Archbishop of Canterbury in a day of pilgrimage and prayer on Monday 8th December in the striking setting of Coventry Cathedral.
In recent years, the Church of England has discerned a vocation to form fresh expressions of the church in a time of significant cultural change. In fulfilling this calling we stand in the great missionary traditions of St. Paul, of Hilda and Bede, of Claire and Francis, of Keble and Newman, of Roland Allen and Vincent Donovan.
This work of forming new communities through contextual mission is steadily becoming established in every social context and every stream of the Church of England’s life.
This day will focus on the opportunities and challenges of forming fresh expressions of church within the catholic tradition of the Church of England.
Renewal in mission comes through returning to our roots. The day will therefore focus on opportunity for prayer and reflection centred on a creative Eucharist and prayer in different parts of the Cathedral.
Booking information
The day is designed for up to 300 people only. Advance booking is essential.
There is a nominal charge of £5.00 to cover some of the expenses of the day. Lunch will be provided.
You can book online at www.freshexpressions.org.uk.
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St Matthew’s House, 20 Great Peter St, London SW1P 2BU
administrator@affirmingcatholicism.org.uk, www.affirmingcatholicism.org.uk
President, The Rt Rev’d David Stancliffe, Bishop of Salisbury
Chair of Trustees, The Rev’d Jonathan Clark
Administrator, Lisa Martell
Registered Charity, No 1122906, Registered Company No 6434273
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