This slim, accessible, and engaging edited volume, published on the eve of Lambeth 2008, is one contribution to the conversation ostensibly encouraged by the 1998 Lambeth resolution 1.10. This unapologetically perspectival collection of papers from the Rebuilding Communion conference held at St Deiniol’s Library in Wales falls into three sections.
Section A is reserved for Simon Sarmiento’s concise yet instructive arrangement of the ‘dots’ — those key events, statements, and resolutions — to be joined in order to gain an outline of the global Anglican communion of churches’ furore over human sexuality during the intervening decade. Sarmiento’s disciplined exposition and restrained commentary prevents this first chapter from reading like the dry litany of formal pronouncements and ecclesial machinations that such an undertaking risks becoming. His twenty-five page potted history and the resources appended serve a very important contextual function for the more personal reflections that follow in Section B.
In these chapters, two to seven, we hear the voices of individual Anglicans — gay and straight, male and female, lay and ordained — speaking from their experience of how this issue has played out in Africa (Davis Mac-Iyalla), Asia (Savitri Hensman), Australia (Muriel Porter), Britain (Richard Kirker), Latin America (Mario Ribas), and North America (Michael Hopkins). Although each chapter heading begins with the refrain, ‘Paying the Price’, these brief offerings (all under nine pages) are far from uniform in style or scope.
From Mac-Iyalla’s shocking first-hand account of how church and state in Nigeria were complicit in the slander, physical violence, false imprisonment, and forced exile he suffered, to Porter’s sense of the failure of synodical processes to promote real debate across doctrinal fault lines, these six vignettes count the cost of the current controversy in concrete individual, social, geo-political, institutional, ecumenical, and missional terms.
Hensman’s essay, from an Asian perspective, perhaps best highlights the role of culture in shaping and maintaining orthodoxies, whilst also promoting Anglicanism’s capacity to articulate an adequate theology of culture — something that Kirker likewise addresses from a more strictly ecclesiological starting point within the Church of England. Narratives from the Americas (Ribas and Hopkins) of equivocating leadership and ecclesiastical expediency, and of faithful, creative ministries exercised within a system of ‘sacramental apartheid’, bring this section to a close, illustrating the structural incoherence and ambiguity that many Anglicans are living with.
A somewhat eclectic selection of papers comprises Section C, which has a more theoretical remit. In a further tribute to the editorial work of Peter Francis (whose letter as Warden of St Deiniol’s to concerned bishops and other parties in relation to the conference serves as the book’s Introduction), these final six chapters are similarly tight, running to just fifty-seven pages between them.
They range in approach from a statistical analysis of attitudes to homosexuality amongst lay people in England (Andrew Village), which points to a shift in the nature of the chasm away from ‘generational’ towards ‘theological’, to a consideration of the topic in terms of human rights (Donn Mitchell), with a frank assessment of Anglicanism’s uneven record from that vantage point. Again, however, there are notes of optimism throughout, as authors point to the resources available for rebuilding communion, whether these be aspects of a broader Anglican heritage, such as distinctive hybridity (Martyn Percy), or the pastoral efficacy of liturgy (Michael Ingham), or lessons to be learned from particular local expressions of that identity as is argued with reference to ubuntu as a model of koinonia in Africa (Edwin Arrison), or externally mediated reconciliation in Bosnia (Donald Reeves).
As the title of both colloquium and text accurately suggest, this is an essentially constructive, albeit partial, undertaking that also names clearly both the pain of fractured communion and the cost of its repair. If received in that spirit, it could provide a broad spectrum of readers with a valuable source for ongoing reflection and dialogue. Indeed, if there is not room in the listening process for candid, theologically grounded testimony from lightly tethered rafts of voices such as this, then we may have already declared ourselves unwilling to pay the price of rebuilding communion.
