Conger

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has taken to the internet releasing a videotaped address asking for prayers for the forthcoming Lambeth Conference.

The April 23 message posted on YouTube outlines Dr. Williams’ plans for Lambeth as a “spiritual encounter” rather than a legislative gathering of the Communion’s 887 serving bishops.

A spokesman for Dr. Williams stated the presentation entitled “Better bishops for the sake of a better church” was a pastoral tool and “not related” to his forthcoming letter to the bishops of the Communion. In that letter, Dr. Williams is expected to ask that bishops predicate their attendance at Lambeth upon their willingness to accept the Windsor Report and Anglican Covenant processes.

In his video address, Dr. Williams said he hoped Lambeth would not be “a time when we are being besieged by problems that need to be solved and statements that need to be finalised, but a time when people feel that they are growing in their ministry.”

Lambeth will be a place where “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.”

“At the heart of the whole Anglican Communion is relationship,” Dr. Williams said. “We have never been a body that is bound together by firm and precise rules and that is often, as it is at the moment, a matter of some real concern and some confusion in our life as a communion.”