Lambeth Conference will issue no resolutions, says Welby. Instead there will be ‘Calls’

Jun 10, 2022 by Jill

by Ed Thornton, Church Times:

BISHOPS attending the forthcoming Lambeth Conference will not pass resolutions, but will instead make short statements known as “Lambeth Calls”, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said. This is to reflect better the fact that the Conference is “not there to order people about”.

In a video message posted on the Lambeth Conference website on Thursday, Archbishop Welby says that bishops at the Conference, which meets for 12 days in Canterbury, starting on 26 July, will seek to “discern what God is saying to the Church, but to offer that discernment . . . to the whole Church, to every single one of the Provinces. It’s not there to order people about.”

[…]

There will be, at most, a dozen “Calls” issued at the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop says, “each one will be carefully structured to talk about scripture, about the tradition of the Church, and what the bishops assembled feel to be the way that God is calling them”.

Issues on which “calls” will be issued will include evangelism, mission, climate change, and persecution. There will also be “calls” issued on “some of the contentious subjects”, he says, “but actually not with the aim of a dramatic change to the Church’s teaching, but on bringing us into deeper love for one another and understanding how God is calling us to be God’s Church for God’s world.”

[…]

Paul Handley, Church Times Editor, writes:

THE position of the Lambeth Conference in Anglican decision-making has always been contentious…the autonomy of individual Provinces has meant that national Churches can pick and choose which resolutions they follow. Or even notice: any Anglican outside a leadership position would be pushed to name one Lambeth resolution, even the one that is still the most contentious: Resolution 1.10 in 1998, which (among other statements usually forgotten) declared homosexual practice to be “incompatible with scripture”.

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