Why nothing has changed as a result of Lambeth 2022.
by Martin Davie:
Prior to this year’s Lambeth Conference revisionists hoped and conservatives feared that one of the outcomes of the Conference would be a change in the position of the Anglican Communion with regard to the issue of human sexuality.
In this short paper I want to argue that the result of the Conference has been to leave unchanged the position of the Communion with regard to human sexuality and that this fact needs to be taken into account in the forthcoming discussions about human sexuality that will take place in the Church of England in the aftermath of the Living in Love and Faith process.
What was the position prior to the 2022 Lambeth Conference?
Prior to the 2022 Lambeth Conference the agreed position of the Anglican Communion was that policy decisions on matters concerning the Communion as a whole were made by the bishops of the Communion meeting together in counsel at the Lambeth Conferences. Such decisions (known as resolutions) were made by means of votes by those bishops present at the Conference and although such votes had no legal authority in terms of the Canon law of the various churches of the Communion it was accepted that these decisions had a moral authority which meant that they ought to be adhered to until they were changed as a result of a subsequent vote on the matter concerned.[1]
At the 1998 Lambeth the bishops present voted by 526-70 in favour of a resolution 1.10 on human sexuality. The resolution runs as follows:
This Conference: