Archbishop of Canterbury to address 2013 Methodist Conference; Rowan Williams: sadness at giving up post as Archbishop; Same sex marriage undermines established church position of C of E – leading RC Journal
Archbishop of Canterbury to address 2013 Methodist Conference
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, will address the annual British Methodist Conference on Wednesday 10 July 2013.
It will be the first time he has addressed the Conference, which this year meets at Central Hall, Westminster.
The Archbishop was invited by the President Designate of the Methodist Conference, the Rev Ruth Gee, who is chair of the Darlington District and worked with Archbishop Welby when he was Anglican Bishop of Durham.
Archbishop Welby will speak on the topic ‘Resourcing a Search for the Common Good’.
An oil industry executive before he entered ordained Church of England ministry, and currently a member of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, the Archbishop has written widely on the ethics of business and finance.
After his talk, Welby will take questions from members of the Conference.
The annual Conference is the governing body of the Methodist Church, and is made up of 308 lay and ordained full members representing all aspects of the Church in Britain, plus a number of associate members representing partner churches in Britain and worldwide.
The Conference meets in different locations each year. This year’s meeting is at Central Hall Westminster from 4-11 July.
Rowan Williams: sadness at giving up post as Archbishop
Wales Online – The former head of the Anglican Communion says he had ‘unfinished business’ on the question of women bishops
The former Archbishop of Canterbury has revealed it was “a sadness” for him to leave his position “with unfinished business” over the question of women bishops.
Rowan Williams told a Hay audience that the argument was a “weight to me as it is to many” but admitted he was glad to find himself with more time to, “turn into a Christian again”.
At a talk in which he and British Museum director Neil MacGregor discussed the role of imagery in religion, he spoke briefly about his feelings on leaving the post after 10 years in answer to a question from a member of the audience.
On a very rainy day at the Powys festival and as thunder rumbled overhead, Lord Williams declined to expand on his opinions on women bishops, instead saying: “It’s a sadness leaving [the church] with unfinished business but I’ll say no more about that.
“It is quite nice to have a bit more time to say my prayers and turn into a Christian again and to catch up with a bit of sleep.”
The talk followed a lunch at which the pair announced the winner of the Michael Ramsey Prize – a literary prize awarded for works penned by members of the clergy.
A Welsh vicar who wrote about his son’s struggle with autism was shortlisted for the title, which carries a £10,000 prize, but lost out to Luke Bretherton, a senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in the US, whose book Christianity and Contemporary Politics looks at the relationship between the church and the state in America.
Reverend John Gillibrand, vicar of Llangeler near Llandysul, drew on his experience of caring for his non-verbal teenage son, Adam, who has autism for his book Disabled Church – Disabled Society.
He said: “The central idea of the book is that disability in general, and autism in particular, hold a challenge to much of the Western tradition of thought. In particular, there is a challenge to our thinking of the relationship between the sacred and the secular.”
Same sex marriage undermines established church position of C of E – leading RC Journal
Establishment undermined – Editorial from The Tablet issue dated 25 May 2013
The Church of England’s position as “the Church by law established” has been weakened by the progress of the legislation to permit the marriage of same-sex couples. Not only is the law on marriage under review, but so is the nature of the Church-State relationship.
What is surprising is how few in the Conservative Party, trad itionally the party of throne and altar, seem to be aware of this. It is as if the nation is taking a significant step towards disestablishment in a fit of absent-mindedness. Perhaps not so absent-minded on the part of the more vociferous secularists, however, who have been aware all along of the potential for the gay-marriage issue to further their own agenda. They needed the Church to do its best to stop the legislation, and fail. Although the battle is not yet finished, events do appear to be going their way.
The clergy of the Church of England solemnise about a quarter of all marriages in England, and so far the law of marriage they administer has been the law of the land. This is unlike the case of the Catholic, Jewish or Muslim communities, who have their own marriage laws, customs and courts where their own doctrines of marriage take precedence. Thus the law of the land can say two people are married, but the internal regulations of each faith community can still maintain that they are not. They can ignore the civil recognition of gay marriages if they want to, in a way the Church of England cannot. At least until the gay-marriage legislation becomes law, those that the common law of England says are married are those the Established Church says are married, and vice versa, with no distinction. In a briefing note to MPs, the Church of England explained that “the assertion that ‘religious marriage’ will be unaffected by the proposals” was misleading, as “at present there is one single institution and legal definition of marriage, entered into via a civil or religious ceremony. Talk of ‘civil’ and ‘religious’ marriage is erroneous…”
Henceforth, if and when gay marriage becomes law, the Church of England will be like the Catholic, Muslim and most Jewish communities in having a definition of marriage that excludes same-sex couples. The Government has drafted legal protection for the Church of England that in effect bans it from marrying gay couples. But that will put in place the very distinction between “civil and religious marriage” which the briefing document rejected, the absence of which has until now been one of the defining characteristics of the Church of England’s unique status.
So the Church is being forced to move towards becoming a private self-governing institution with its own internal rules, alongside other institutions in civil society – in other words, towards disestablishment. Some inside the Church of England will welcome that as good for the Church. But the larger question for the rest of society, including other faith communities, is whether that is good for everyone else. Indeed, some outside will hail it as a further step towards the exclusion of religion from the public square, where faith becomes a purely private matter. That is precisely how the victory for gay marriage has been greeted in France. At least the French have had a better idea of what is at stake.