11 - Ministerial offices – homosexuality and the public life of the church

Summary

As the bishops went home from the 1988 Lambeth Conference they could have been forgiven for thinking that it had all gone fairly well. New steps had been initiated to approach the crisis over the ordination of women in a way that could avoid serious division. The general tone of the conference was positive and friendly, and it seemed to finish on a high note. But the ordination of women was being overtaken by another divisive question: how do homosexuals fit into the public life of the church? Even before the conference there had been stirrings on this issue. The section of the conference concerned with Christianity and Social Order produced a report of 195 paragraphs, of which three were devoted to homosexuality. The conference passed one resolution on the subject calling for more study. In fact the conference was preoccupied with other things, not least the international political tensions associated with the death throes of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall came down the year following the conference, precipitating the biggest international reconfiguration in fifty years. The conference also called for a Decade of Evangelism in the 1990s and for the church to move from maintenance to mission. This Decade of Evangelism was to become a central theme of the work of George Carey, the new Archbishop of Canterbury.