Anglicans 'need to practise forgiveness'
Taonga News
| 02 Jul 2009
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Anglicans need to access their God-given capacity for "forgiveness, compassion and reconciliation" instead of insisting that some people are "not worthy of full respect, dignity or inclusion".
This was the message of Dr Jenny Plane Te Paa, principal of St John the Evangelist Theological College in Auckland, who was speaking at USPG’s annual conference this week.
Dr Plane Te Paa suggested there was a tendency among Anglicans – especially some in leadership – for debating issues on impersonal committees rather than engaging in "vulnerable and intimate" dialogue.
She said: "There is a postmodern tendency for shifting moral responsibility away from the self towards socially-constructed agencies or by floating responsibility inside a bureaucratic rule of nobody (cf Volf). [As a consequence] the problems of the Communion are managed by disengagement and commitment-avoidance rather than by unseverable vulnerable intimacy and the struggle to understand the other as divinely, albeit differently, created."
She spoke with disappointment about meeting a very few bishops and archbishops who regarded some people as "not worthy of full respect, dignity or inclusion".
By contrast, in travelling the world, she had found "there is very little which radically differentiates the ways in which the ordinary every day Anglican people gather in abiding faith and witness".
The way forward was to concentrate on "finding our proper selves in God who is love".
She said: "It is only in our capacity and willingness to let go of outrage, despair and memories of hurt that we can act with grace. There, and only there, can we fully exercise our God-given capacity for forgiveness, compassion and reconciliation."
The theme of USPG’s Annual Conference was ‘Mission, reconciliation and hope’. Representatives from dioceses in Britain and Ireland met representatives from throughout the global Anglican Communion to consider how they could participate together in resolving conflicts, both on their doorsteps and in other countries.
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