The Archbishop of Canterbury has agreed to execute a letter stating the official position of the Anglican Communion on human sexuality is given in the 1998 Lambeth Conference resolution 1.10. The letter is the fruit of on-going negotiations between the Most Rev. Justin Welby and the primates representing the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans, who comprise approximately 257 of the 650 bishops present at the 2022 Lambeth Conference meeting at the University of Kent in Canterbury..
The Lambeth Calls process as it is currently structured does not permit debate or ammendment. The bishops are to discuss the call document and associated questions in small table groups. The substance of their conversation is recorded by a secretary-bishop at each table. A sampling of the table summaries will be shared with the wider conference, while each table summary will be shared in the post-conference discussions.
At their meeting with Archbishop Welby, the GSFA primates asked for a five minute break in the Anglican Identity call on 1 Aug 2022 to present their case to the conference as to why Lambeth 1.10 should be reaffirmed. The Most Rev. Justin Badi Arama, chairman of the GSFA, told a press conference on Friday: “Our decision to [offer] our own Lambeth 1.10 resolution comes after extensive requests to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a stand-alone resolution.”
The presenting issue was not homosexuality, sex or marriage “but fundamentally about the authority of the Bible which Anglicans believe to be central to faith and order,” the South Sudanese archbishop told reporters.
Archbishop Welby told the primates it was not necessary to reaffirm Lambeth 1.10 and offered instead to prepare a document the GSFA primates could take back to their churches that said Lambeth 1.10 was the “official” teaching of the Anglican Communion. Left unsaid by Archbishop Welby was whether he too believed Lambeth 1.10 to be the right and proper expression of Anglican sexual ethics.
The primates thanked the archbishop for his offer and accepted the gift of the letter, but requested that they still be allowed to present their case to the conference. They further asked that a list of all those registered and present at the conference be published, and that the results of the voting by each participant be made public.
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