The Lambeth Conference

The Lambeth Conference is a decennial assembly of bishops of the Anglican Communion convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the first such conference taking place in 1867.

The fourteenth conference ran from 16 July to 4 August 2008 at the University of Kent‘s Canterbury campus, presided over by Rowan Williams and attended by around 670 bishops.

I covered the conference for the Anglican Communion press office but took a series of pictures that didn’t fit the press brief and so were never published.

Williams intended for the emphasis of the conference to be on training for mission rather than reopening of the controversial resolution 1.10 on human sexuality from the previous Lambeth Conference. He did allows for a “listening process” in which diverse views and experiences of human sexuality were being collected and collated in accordance with that resolution and said it “will be important to allow time for this to be presented and reflected upon in 2008”.

Absent from the list of those invited were Gene Robinson and Martyn Minns. Robinson was the first Anglican bishop to exercise the office while in an acknowledged same-sex relationship. Minns was the former rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, and was the head of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a splinter group of American Anglicans.

In 2008, four Anglican primates announced that they intended to boycott the Lambeth conference because of their opposition to the actions of Episcopal Church in the USA (the American province of the Anglican Communion) in favour of homosexual clergy and same-sex unions. These primates represent the Anglican provinces of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. In addition, Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia and Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, among others announced their intentions not to attend.

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