Faith & Reason: Church turns its back on Western agenda

AS THE marquees come down and the used name-tags pile up, the administrators of Lambeth 98 can feel relief that their mammoth feat is over. Over the last three weeks they have serviced around 2,000 people: primates, bishops, spouses, speakers, consultants, report writers, technicians, church organisations, stewards, visitors, journalists, and photographers. The rest of the country has looked on, their interest occasionally titillated through reports and images, benign or bizarre. We've had boatfuls of bishops floating down the Thames, actors with staves depicted in moving dramatic narrative, mouth-to-mouth confrontation between gay rights activists and African episcopates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury solitary and pensive on a park bench.

But as hundreds of visitors move off towards airport departure lounges an important question is, what has the Lambeth Conference actually been about?

The answer is to be found more in the people than in the agenda. Somewhere in Lambeth Palace hangs a picture of a pre-war Lambeth Conference: very English, very establishment, very white. Benevolent faces of gracious ecclesiastical dignitaries smile out at us, no doubt Oxbridge-educated with double Firsts in Latin and Divinity. The old photograph conveys a powerful visual impression of the Church of England, Home and Colonial: old school chums reunited for a prayerful chinwag about Keeping the Faith in all climates and conditions.

By contrast, photographs of Lambeth 98 tell a very different story. Poly- ethnic, racially diverse, old and young, male and female, the assembled bishops give us the clearest possible statement that the Anglican Communion has changed. This conference has not been about the continuation of a quaint old English tradition, nor about bringing Anglican leaders back home from far-flung outposts of a former Empire. It has been about a change to international partnership and power-sharing in a vibrant and youthful church.

In case anyone is in any doubt leadership in the Anglican Communion of '98 is well and truly indigenised. The time has long gone since Third World bishops were token representatives. Theirs has been the voice that has prevailed on most of the agenda, whether in discussions on international debt or human sexuality. And that voice has been consistent, drawing the Church, day after day, into a re-embracing of biblical orthodoxy in areas both theological and moral.

Backing the Archbishop of Canterbury's call to scriptural faithfulness, Third World bishops have been forthright in their rejection of anything that looked like flabby First World self-indulgence. The pleas of the gay and lesbian Christian movement fell not so much on deaf ears as on ears more tuned into poverty and persecution than preferential sexual life-styles. The overwhelming vote for the Church's traditional sexual morality and against the "marriage" or ordination of practising homosexuals illustrated the Third World empowered.

Consequently, headline-seekers of the Western liberal variety have been persistently wrong-footed, and made to look not only hopelessly out of step, but tired and out of date. The much-publicised Bishop Spong arrived as the self-acclaimed champion of the disenfranchised. He left as the arch-racist, having made an extraordinary attack on the faith of the African bishops as being "one step away from witchcraft".

This change of voice is not just about the demise of white supremacy in the Anglican communion. It is about earning the moral right to speak. The Third World bishops represent provinces where the growth of the Church has been phenomenal, but where spiritual affluence has also been accompanied by material poverty. They have done their homework. They know how much the West is to blame, and their mastery of the facts on international debt showed.

What is more, the growth of their churches has not been without pain. All too often it has been at the cost of great suffering, for hostile regimes do not treat indigenous Christian leaders with the same deference they once offered to colonial representatives. Bishops told of their families being ambushed or tortured, their people going without food, their children blown up by landmines. The Bishop of Pakistan spelt out the dangers of Christian belief in an Islamic setting, for in Pakistan sectarian killings have reached new heights. When faithfulness to Christ costs everything you have, your voice is a legitimate one.

But there has been another important ingredient in the Lambeth Conference, women. The first women bishops - 11 of them - played a crucial part. Yet a more subtle, and probably more significant presence has been the spouses programme. The six bishops' husbands cheerfully joined ranks with the 600 bishops' wives and affected a shift in old attitudes.

The spouses' village itself was a brainwave. It became a place where women told their stories to each other, where lives were shared and experiences swapped. As the bishops debated, their spouses networked. Only time will tell which of these will have the greater long-term effect on the future of the Anglican Communion.

Elaine Storkey is the Director of the Institute of Contemporary Christianity