Address given by Archbishop Rowan Williams at a meeting of the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, 27th April 2000, University college of Wales, Lampeter
Life as a primate began with something of a drum-roll for me; barely two weeks after my installation, I was off to take part in the Primates' Meeting of the Anglican Communion in Portugal this March - a meeting which was heralded in some quarters as a make-or-break event for the Communion. As things turned out, it was a good deal less dramatic (a helpful reminder of how unhelpful highly coloured language usually is in the Church's life; but how we all love drama ...). The Communion survived, more or less unchanged, though with the desire expressed for more frequent meetings between the presiding bishops of the provinces. Not a single huge crisis, then, but undoubtedly a sense of some things being at risk in the long term if we don't have the opportunity for face-to-face discussion more often than before.
Why the drama, though? Two things had been in the public eye immediately before the meeting, one problem provoking the other. There had been an enormous amount of lobbying from some quarters about the allegedly grave state of the Anglican Church in the USA - bishops denying fundamentals of the Christian faith, dioceses encouraging same-sex marriages and the ordination of practising homosexuals. And - in response to this - there had been the ordination in Singapore of two American churchmen as bishops who were to take pastoral responsibility for those in the USA who wanted to uphold 'orthodox' Christianity against their local bishops. Not surprisingly, the American primate took a dim view of this; but even those who disapproved of the Singapore ordinations included some who wanted assurances from the USA that some limits would be placed on experiment and innovation there.
The Primates Meeting isn't a court or an executive; so in fact what it could do about any of this was pretty limited. Although the Church Times described the communiqué from the meeting as a compromise without substance, and others were even ruder, it might well be doubted whether any more decisive action was really possible. The Communion remains, for good and ill, a federation of self-governing churches sharing communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury; no sanctions attach to anything such a meeting may say. In the event, it was almost inevitable that we should issue a statement of hopes and ideals rather than disciplinary regulation.
But it is interesting that, nationally and internationally, questions about sexual ethics are so much in the forefront of people's thinking on Christian identity. In one sense, it doesn't seem to me very healthy that these should be again and again the issues that push themselves to the front of the queue (and some of our African brethren at the Primates' meeting had sharp things to say about that, coming as they do from situations of intense suffering, disease, terror and conflict). It's a sign that the Church has been trapped into sharing the sex-obsession of the age. Yet in another way, perhaps it's understandable - because some of the questions involved in thinking about sexual morality tell us a good deal about our moral priorities in general. I believe we desperately need to be able to look for these basic matters and not allow a succession of specific issues to consume our whole attention, so that all that most people ever know about the Church is the attitudes of some Christians to some kinds of sexual behaviour.
Let's take, for example, the controversies in this country over Clause 28 and its possible replacement. As you may know, the Welsh Bench declared that it was not wedded to the retention of Clause 28, so long as a viable alternative could be produced which didn't make it quite so difficult to combat some kinds of bullying and prejudice, but which did keep a strict eye on the need to protect young people from pressure to experiment in their sexual lives. The draft guidelines approved by the Church of England Board of Education seemed to us to have it about right, though their future is uncertain after their rejection by the House of Lords. My concern here is not the details of this debate, but those underlying issues that might tell us something about our moral priorities.
The draft spoke of marriage and 'stable relationships' as the proper background for the bringing up of children - and there was some debate about what these 'stable relationships' might be, and whether this was a covert way of undermining marriage. You may be surprised to know that I share the uncertainty of many as to whether it's right to put marriage and these elusive 'stable relationships' on the same footing. This is because as a Christian I am bound to see marriage as something more than one kind of 'stable' partnership. Marriage is seen by Christians as a covenant: a relation not just of pragmatic stability but of committed desire. Marriage partners promise to receive from each other whatever may be offered, and to be accountable to each other at every level in their growth together. And as we know, marriages fail and break down when this accountability disappears, when one partner stops wanting to receive from the other, when one simply exploits and abuses the other, or when, more subtly but just as fatally, when one partner finds himself or herself developing and moving in ways that no longer show care and attention to the needs of the other.
But the point is that marriage is about more than just stability; it's about the risk of passionate commitment - wanting the fellowship of another so deeply that you mortgage your own abstract freedom by a rash public promise intended for life. What's surprising isn't that some such enterprises fail but that people should want to undertake them in the first place. And I'd go on to say that marriage is the obvious and focal context for bringing up children not just because it provides a fairly steady background, but because of what it says about passion and commitment: a person can be that significant to another person, significant enough to prompt a total and reckless promise. Other relationships may have stability of one kind or another; for that matter, many marriages can provide a background that is unstable, manipulative, pressured, psychologically or physically violent. But a marriage in which the commitment is grasped and honoured is a nurturing context for childbearing because it teaches children that people - including themselves - are worth that level of passion and faithfulness and risk.
I suspect that what's wrong with our sex education these days is not lack of candour and information, or lack of moral clarity, but lack of imagination in this area, lack of celebration of the gift and challenge of this faithful promise. Strangely enough, the commercial cinema suggests that the image and hope of this is not as dead as we might think; if I were constructing a course to teach about marriage I'd show a video of Hugh Grant's Notting Hill. Forget the floppy hero and his neurotic film star beloved: look at his married friends, two prosperous young lawyers - but she is paralysed from an accident and unable to have children. Yet every word and gesture they come out with is full of absolute mutual joy; far more erotic, I'd say, than Hugh Grant's clumsy courtship of Julia Roberts.
Marriage matters because of this evoking of gift and and risk and mutual joy, because this is the very heart of what we believe about our God and how he works with us. Our ethics must begin with and return to what we know of God in Christ; and if marriage shows us, as Christians have long believed, a specially vivid likeness of God in Christ, it's quite right that this area of our ethics should matter and that we should work to put this vision clearly before our society, obsessed with sex and illiterate about deep desire and commitment. A child growing up in a working marriage should know not just the assurance of stability but the excitement of this risky, passionate decision to be there for each other at all costs. It gives a dimension of depth to a child's relationships; it should shape once and for all the child's sense of what's possible for them and of what they are worth. Brush this aside and you contribute to a society where people value themselves at less than their worth, don't know how to value each other, and can't understand why freedom and surrender should ever belong together.
But I wonder if you can guess where this is now heading? I want to go back to where I started, the Anglican Communion - and our own province too. The desire to find a place in the Church where we won't be bothered and compromised with the failures, errors and misbehaviour of other Christians is hugely powerful. Why should I have to be answerable for the idiocies of some American radical? Why should he have to be answerable for the wafflings of some pretentious Welshman? But if the Church is Christ's spouse, Christ has made to both him and me the same promise; for him and me he has taken the same risk, borne the same cross. Ruptures in the surface life of the Church continue, but it is objectively and lastingly true that when I turn to my baptised brother and sister I see the object of Christ's commitment - and therefore someone with whom I am bound, like it or not. As in a marriage, I have the right to ask the most awkward questions about accountability; I have the right to challenge what may seem the thoughtless or insensitive exercise of power by another; I have the duty to examine my own use of power, my own forgetfulness of the need and reality of the other.
What's more, to pursue the analogy, if Christians are going to be nurtured in churches, they need to grow up in an atmosphere where passionate commitment is in the air; where the sometimes painful loyalty of one Christian community to another teaches something about Christ' fidelity and about what we owe to each other as individuals. Our common life is itself a Christian education. And, as we've said in this hall many times, our ability to cope with conflict is itself a missionary matter.
This is why, at the heart of the communiqué from Portugal is a passage (almost entirely neglected by the media) in which the Primates set out what churches might expect in and from each other. I'll end with this passage; I suggest that it might form a fruitful basis for our working with each other as individuals, for our co-operation as congregations in a diocese, a dioceses within a Province, as denominations within the wider family of Christian confessions. It expresses what I believe to be the heart of why it's worth continuing to believe that the Anglican Communion isn't a waste of time.
We believe that our call to faithfulness and unity makes demands on our life of interdependence in several ways:
We expect to see in one another a worshipping life, gratefully celebrating the sacraments given by the Lord Jesus and publicly proclaiming the Word of God in scripture.
We expect to see a passion to share the unique good news of Jesus Christ.
We expect that, as we experience this worshipping life, we shall gratefully learn from each other aspects of the riches of Jesus Christ that no one church could learn for itself in isolation.
We also expect that, when we see in each other what we believe to be failure or unfaithfulness, there will be freedom for plain speaking and 'fraternal rebuke'. We expect honesty and challenge from each other. But we'll also look for humility, self-examination and a willingness to preserve those bonds of communion that reflect the unity we share ...
As in any family, the assurance of love allows boldness of speech. We are conscious that we all stand together at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, so we know that to turn away from each other would be to turn away from the Cross.
More than a compromise without substance? I hope so.