Every 10 years, the Bishops of the Anglican Communion worldwide meet for the Lambeth Conference. They have been doing it like this for over a century now. It was an idea that one of the Archbishops of Canterbury in the 19th century had as he recognized that what had begun simply as the Church of England and the Church in other bits of the British Isles and in Ireland; that Church had become something rather different. It had become an international body drawing in people of many, many different languages and cultures, and it was growing very rapidly in Asia and, above all, in Africa because of the efforts of heroic missionaries.

The Archbishop who began the Lambeth Conference, Charles Longley, was somebody who had a vision of the Anglican identity, the Anglican way of being Christian, as something that was no longer just confined in the British Isles or to North America but that was in principle becoming a universal reality, and he wanted Bishops speaking for those new communities, those different Anglican communities across the world, to be able to share with one another what their priorities were, their concerns and their hopes, and that has always been at the very heart of the Lambeth Conference.

 

It has never been a legislative body, thought it has made decisions and recommendations.  It has never just been a talking shop.  It has been a place where Bishop's come to pray together, to read the Bible together and quite simply, to help one another be Bishops.

 

This year's Lambeth Conference, scheduled for July, has a very special focus on just that.  We want to see this year's conference as an occasion when Bishops learn how to be better Bishops; and because of what we believe about the Church overall, we believe that Bishops learn to be better Bishops when they are learning from one another- learning from people working in very different contexts with very different ideas and challenges to deal with.

 

We've focused this year's planning on equipping Bishops for their mission, and that means that we've had to think quite seriously about the way we do our business this year.  That is why we have created a number of different levels at which Bishops will be able to meet; the small Bible study groups where people will, we hope, feel safe enough to share some of the most intimate things about their faith and their situation, the middle-sized groups for discussion of larger issues.

 

-Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury