The Bishop of Worcester, the Rt Revd Peter Selby, has set out a theological path through the potentially divisive issues facing the Anglican Church today.
Dr Selby's contribution focuses on the importance of ongoing Church debate on the difficult issues facing it - international debt, interfaith dialogue, ecumenism and human sexuality. He shows how the experience of the early Church, described in the Book of Acts, provides a model of working and coping with change for the modern Church.
The Bishop gave his address at the end of a Diocesan Synod held on March 14th in Kidderminster. The Diocesan Synod spent a whole day discussing the forthcoming Lambeth Conference of Bishops. (The Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops meets every 10 years and brings together all the Anglican bishops from around the world-wide church to discuss and pray about the major concerns facing the Church.) The Lambeth Conference has taken many years of preparation and the Worcester Diocesan Synod was asked to reflect on the major areas of Church life that the bishops will be considering this summer.
Dr Selby emphasised that because the Church of England is part of a world-wide Church it has to hear the voices of Anglicans in other parts of the Church. The way Anglicans experience the problems of international debt, their understanding and experience of ecumenism, interfaith relations and human sexuality in other countries provides members of the Church of England with important insights. The understanding and experience of Christians in other parts of the world cannot be ignored in a world-wide Church, he said.
In an innovative presentation, the Bishop asked why it is that these issues are such a challenge for the Church today? He said that these issues were facing Anglicans today in a new way because the questions are coming from within the Church and Christian community. We are being asked by our own fellow Christians how it can be that having shared the gospel with them and being part of a sacramental fellowship with them we can consent to enslaving, debtor, relationships which destroy their lives and those of their people." In the past there has been poverty, people of other faiths and people who prefer sexual relationships with people of the same sex but the Church is being challenged by these issues in a new way because it is Christians within the Church who are asking questions of the traditional understandings.
The Bishop is not asking for everyone in the Church to agree on a certain issue but he asks Christians at least to notice the existence of people within their own Christian community and to listen to their experience. In a reference to gays within the Church he says: "They are a witness to the attractiveness of the gospel by their very persistence in 'staying there' within range of the gospel while at the same time holding to their experience that God is active in their lives, even in that aspect of their lives that Christian faith has traditionally found it difficult to affirm." He called upon the different groups discussing the issues at the meeting to be open in their group discussions where "none should face having their Christian faith impugned or the integrity of their vocation disputed."
Dr Selby assured the Synod that there was nothing to fear from debate about difficult issues, indeed Church history has shown that the Church has benefited from such debate. He went on to remind the Synod that the early Church faced a similar challenge to its self understanding as the 20th century Church. The early Church struggled with the question whether Christians had first to be Jews. In accepting non-Jews, Gentiles, the early Church was challenged in its understanding of its own biblical inheritance and considered in a new way what it meant to be a Christian. This process culminated in the Council of Jerusalem in the first century. In reminding the Synod of the patience and hard debate needed by the early disciples at their Council he said that Anglicans today also needed hard debate and patience to hear each other in discussing potentially divisive issues. We have behind us two millennia of facing very hard questions, and of seeing in others' journeys very different from our own occasions for moving from rejection to a spirit of penitence for a vision often far too limited and gratitude for a God whose grace continues to touch people's lives in ways not previously imagined."
The Diocese of Worcester is one of 44 dioceses in the Church of England. It covers an area of 671 square miles and includes parishes in the eastern half of the County of Hereford and Worcester, Dudley and a few parishes in northern Gloucestershire and Sandwell.