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'Wish you were here', Archbishop tells boycotting bishops
By Allan Reeder, Market-Place
July 22, 2008

OPENING: More than 600 Angoican bishops gather in Canterbury Cathedral for the opening Eucharist of the Lambeth Conference PHOTO: (c) Lambeth Conference

Australia's Primate, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall (FILE PHOTO-Market-Place Online)

Despite the impact of boycotts, the leader of the world's Anglicans, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is clearly optimistic for the success of the Lambeth Conference which is now in full swing.

Asked if he had a message for the more than 200 bishops who have boycotted the once-a-decade gathering, Williams was straightforward.
"What's my message?" Williams said, "We're sorry you're not here. The great pity is to have those voices in the discussion as we have conceived it would have been for everybody a healing and a helpful thing."
Despite media predictions the international church was on the verge of a 'schism', in an upbeat press conference, the archbishop gave the impression the bishops' conference was off to good start after three days of private retreat.
"If this is the end of the Anglican Communion, I don't think anyone's told most of the people here," Williams said.
Speaking at a press conference 21 March held shortly after the opening Eucharist, Archbishop Williams defended the conference agenda against criticism that the lack of debating and voting sessions compared to the last Lambeth conference, meant it was avoiding the issues that were dividing the Anglican Communion.
"Although people some had said this didn't look like a very effective way of addressing tough issues, nonetheless the older methods we'd used didn't seem to be terribly successful either," Williams told reporters. "So it was at least worth trying something which allowed quite deliberately every single voice to be heard as part of then process, and not to rely too heavily on particular kinds, particular cultures of conference-life."
"Obviously the conference is a huge challenge. There's no way of avoiding that," he said. "A Lambeth conference depends on participants. We all have to do the work. Just as significantly millions of people are praying very, very hard about this conference and whatever has emerged in the last few days, I feel bound to ascribe to their prayers and their support."
The archbishop went on to suggest that the Lambeth Conference will give mainstream Anglicans a platform to respond to the harsh criticism from breakaway groups such as the GAFCON conference and Anglican provinces which chose to boycott the Conference.
"I think people will have to make the judgement as to whether those provinces that are not here have, so to speak, a coherent alternative to what the Communion as gathered here is saying and wanting to do," Rowan Williams told reporters.
"Clearly this isn't the end of the story," he said "The provinces that are absent ... have expressed grave disquiet and serious criticism which has to be responded to and engaged with in the months and years ahead."
Australia's primate, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, who's acting as media spokesman for the event, also rejected claims conference organisers had set out to avoid debate over the controversial sexuality issues.
"The chances of avoiding conflict when you get 650 bishops together are pretty minimal," Archbishop Phillip Aspinall told reporters at the same press conference.
"The program designers are well aware of that," he said. "What the program designers have tried to do is to engage with the conflict in a quite different way."
"The last Lambeth didn't resolve all the differences. The Lambeth before that didn't resolve all the differences and this one won't either," he said. "It's a journey, moving through, searching for truth, growing together.
"Once these differences are resolved, God in his generosity will give us new ones to grapple with," Aspinall said. "That is the human journey."