The Forgotten Third Voice: Generosity Rebuffed by the West?

http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/the_forgotten_third_voice_generosity_rebuffed_by_the_west_michael_poon/

[Global South Anglican] 31 Jul 2008--Archbishop Rowan Williams’ second presidential address, delivered near the mid-point of the Lambeth Conference, is most disappointing and worrying. The Archbishop calls for acts of generous initiatives from both the traditionalists and innovationists in the Communion. He ended his address with this plea: “Having heard the other person, the other group, as fully and fairly as I can, what generous initiative can I take to break through into a new and transformed relation of communion in Christ?”

Whether he correctly expressed the feelings and perceptions of the traditionalists and innovationists can best be decided by their respective proponents. Quite aside from this, it is unclear whether the indaba group discussions have contributed to the Archbishop’s (and the bishops’) understanding of the ground realities and perceptions. Canterbury’s summary of the two positions could as well be read off web-blogs before the Conference. Nothing new is advanced; no fresh insight gained. That would be disastrous if genuine listening and sharing among the bishops did not take place in the much-vaunted indaba groups.

More seriously, this second Presidential Address showed a worrying misreading of the ground realities of the Communion. Together with many who come from churches outside the Anglo-American axis, I cannot identify myself with either side the Archbishop portrayed. It put me at a loss. What is the “generous initiative” am I supposed to take in the Communion? More poignantly, am I expected to take any generous initiative at all? Even more pointedly, has the Archbishop – with his best intents – completely ignored the realities outside the familiar Anglo-American perceptions? And so, the many generous acts of love from churches in the southern continents have been dismissed by the sense of “superiority and dependence” in the West, as Gregory Cameron has pointed out. This is to say, British academics and US financiers have the rest of the world all figured out and neatly configured from the vantage points of sanitised settings in the West.