Anglican Primates - no venturing outside the city walls for them

Towards the end of his book Strangers and friends¹, the late Michael Vasey, writing as tutor in Christian liturgy at the University of Durham, called the portrait of Jesus to be found in the letter to the Hebrews ‘one of the tenderest in scripture’.

The people addressed in the letter, Michael wrote, were undergoing a harrowing experience of exclusion, trapped between two identities, that of being both Jew and Christian. They were in danger of giving up altogether on Jesus. But the writer of Hebrews points them to Jesus as the one who shares with them their experience of exclusion:

Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp, and bear the abuse that he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. (Hebrews 13.12,13)

Michael ended his book with a prophetic word for both LGBT people and the wider church:

Gay people, in their experience of exclusion, need to know that they have in Jesus one who shares with them the same flesh and blood and is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. The wider church of Christ needs to ask itself whether it is willing to follow his example.

I have taken a couple of days to let the Anglican Primates’ communiqué from Dar es salaam sink in, and take in the various reactions from around the church. I would now say that the leaders of the Anglican Churches at the beginning of the 21^st century have given their answer to Michael Vasey’s final question. In relation to those LGBT people, who identify with Christ in their struggle to be true to themselves and to where Christ calls them to be, the Anglican Communion of Churches has officially said ‘NO, we will not follow the way of Christ, nor stand alongside our gay brothers and sisters and share the abuse they suffer, but rather we will add to it.’

On the part of some Primates (called in the communiqué “some of us ”, though they do presume to speak for all the Primates), who are unhappy with the Episcopal Church’s response to the Windsor Report, there is no stated commitment to continue the listening process and the dialogue with LGBT Christians as the Report demands. In the name of the whole meeting, that minority of unhappy Primates demand that those Churches which wish not only to continue listening but to go further and follow a broader and more inclusive approach to human sexuality, should stop doing so. On the other hand, some Primates (probably the same ones who are referred to as “some of us”) will continue to intervene in the affairs of other Provinces, and no one is to stop them.

There is in their communiqué a clear refusal from the leaders of our Churches to follow the way of Christ and go outside the city, where He is to be found, suffering in his gay brothers and sisters. Unlike some of the commentators I have read in the many blogs published, though, I will not give up on Him, or the Church. I will stay the course, as He did. I may be officially excluded from their ‘city’, but I am not going to be put off yearning (and struggling) for a place in the city of the living God that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews describes so beautifully (in 12.22-24), where Jesus is to be found - the mediator of a new covenant.