This time last year, shares in Archbishop Rowan Williams on the
imaginary stock exchange of spiritual leadership were plunging with
the same trajectory later experienced by Lehman Brothers in the
real stock exchange. According to ecclesiastical bears in the
summer of 2008, the Anglican Communion was about to break up over
the issue |of gay bishops, the Lambeth Conference would be a
disaster, and Williams was hastening the inevitable schism by
maladroit pronouncements such as his controversial (although much
misquoted) endorsement of some aspects of sharia law.
Fortunately, the measurements of Mammon are not applicable to
archbishops of Canterbury. But if they were, the present incumbent
of the throne of Augustine might now be given the Wall Street
accolade of a “turnaround stock.” For the commentators who were
disparaging Williams a few months ago have changed their tune.
“Dear Rowan, You are on a roll” began a recent encomium in the
Guardian, citing the effects of his sermons and statements
on the global economic crisis. The March issue of the
Atlantic gave the archbishop a 7,000-word rave review,
saying that “his distinctive theology and leadership style may
offer the only way to open the Anglican church to gay people
without breaking it apart.” These articles are but two
manifestations of a groundswell of opinion inside and outside the
communion. For whether grudgingly or admiringly, there is relieved
acceptance that Williams has pulled his church from the brink of
schism and given it a new agenda of outward-looking spiritual
priorities.
Sadly, some ultra-conservatives share neither the relief nor the
acceptance, but that may not matter too much since for the time
being they have managed to marginalize themselves. By boycotting
the Lambeth Conference last July, the 200 absent bishops led by the
hard-line Nigerian primate Peter Akinola created a vacuum.
It was filled by not by Williams exerting authority (unlike the
pope, the archbishop of Canterbury is merely an advisory
primus inter pares) but by Williams offering
guidance. It worked. The 650 bishops who did attend followed
Williams’s lead away from divisive resolutions toward a “covenant
of shared principles” and a new “pastoral forum” for resolving
future crises.
The bottom line, to revert to Wall Street jargon, was that there
was no meltdown of the 80 million strong Anglican Communion, as its
Jeremiahs had been predicting. The moderate center held. There were
no expulsions and no explosions at either end of the spectrum on
the divisive issues that have caused such tension between the
American and African provinces. Most of the 140 bishops
representing the liberal ECUSA (the Episcopalian Church in the
United States of America) sat quietly and listened with what was
perhaps a new degree of sensitivity as their more conservative
brother prelates from Asia and Africa explained what pain had been
caused by the consecration of the openly gay Gene Robinson as
bishop of New Hampshire.
Although this is not a controversy that will go away, Williams
did succeed in creating an atmosphere of prayerful civility in
which the opposing positions could be more thoughtfully reflected
upon. “In some parts of the Communion homosexual relations are
taboo, in others a human rights issue,” was the conference’s
succinct summary of the impasse in its final communiqué. Yet an
admitted impasse is a great deal better than the trading of
Internet insults, which had previously seemed to be some bishops’
preferred method of debate. So Williams deserves the credit for
lowering the temperature and strengthening mutual understanding.
That may not sound like great progress, but in the context of
impending schism it certainly was.
Without alienating the moderate conservatives Williams pointed
the church’s compass toward a global Anglicanism in which
Christ-centered diversity and quiet tolerance should become
preferable to personalized division and noisy judgmentalism. The
journey toward such a middle-way consensus may still have its
detractors and deserters. But as the pilot who weathered the storm
and kept his ship tighter and more united among those who stayed
onboard, Williams did well. He was justified in saying at the
conclusion of the conference, “It was all that I had prayed for—and
more.”
IN THE YEAR SINCE LAMBETH, Rowan Williams has deftly moved
Anglicanism’s priorities away from its introverted concerns about
the sexual orientation of bishops toward more important global
issues. Archbishops of Canterbury deliver prestigious lectures
rather than papal encyclicals, but Williams carries the
intellectual clout to get his words well reported and heeded across
the 38 international provinces of his church. One outstanding
example was his Ebor Lecture in March, “Renewing the Face of the
Earth: Human Responsibility and the Environment.” Starting from
biblical texts such as Leviticus 25:23 (“The land is mine and you
are but aliens and tenants”), Williams called for “a radical change
of heart, a conversion” on our environmental stewardship of God’s
earth in order to avoid “the ultimate tragedy that a material world
capable of being a manifestation in human hands of divine love is
left to itself as humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved
by its own stupidity.”
No paraphrase or quoted excerpt can do justice to Williams’s
best speeches because they have to be studied in their magisterial
totality. Yet they are increasingly being recognized as a new
agenda for spiritual action. This is because in the heart of
Williams’s cerebral complexity there usually lurks the ambush of an
unexpected thought or call. He has developed the skill of waking up
his religious listeners, jolting the politicians, and providing
secular journalists with a good story.
“We need spirituality, not a spending spree,” was the London
Times’s headline on the archbishop’s Easter sermon. Ostensibly
this was a reminder of the virtues of monastic life, which has been
the focus of renewed interest in Europe thanks to several recent
television series. “Accepting voluntary limitation to your
acquisitiveness, your sexual appetite, your freedom of choice
doesn’t look so absurd after all as a path to some sort of
stability and mutual care,” said Williams. His espousal of monastic
values was interpreted by the media as setting the church on a
collision course with the G-20’s and Barack Obama’s preferred
solutions of massive bailouts to stimulate credit and consumerism.
This is a clash of spiritual against political judgment that
deserves to be applauded.
In this context, it is appropriate to remember that Anglicanism
was founded on the protests that became Protestantism. Williams is
right to be protesting and distancing his church from the secular
politicians who are so quick to spend taxpayers’ billions on
bailouts and credit expansion yet so slow to protect the
environment. Far from being a voice crying in the wilderness, Rowan
Williams may be hitting his stride as the spiritual leader who has
held his church together and given it new 21st-century priorities
well rooted in the ever-relevant and revolutionary teachings of
Jesus Christ.
