Some Reflections offered to the House of Bishops of ECUSA
29 March 2006
From the Bishop of Exeter: The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America invited the Archbishop of Canterbury to send an English Bishop to attend the Episcopal Church House of Bishops meeting at Kanuga in North Carolina.

I was invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to attend and was asked by the Presiding Bishop to spend a week listening to the assembled Bishops, and then to offer some reflections setting what I had heard and experienced within an Anglican Communion context and offering a personal perspective of a Bishop of the Church of England.

In consultation with the Presiding Bishop's office, I am making public what I said as follows:

Some Reflections offered to the House of Bishops of ECUSA
Kanuga N.C.
22nd March 2006

It has been really good to be with you this week and I do thank you for your invitation. This is my first visit to the USA, and so means a great deal to me. Visiting here has been on my ‘to do’ list for years now and I have felt increasingly disabled by having no direct experience of American culture so dominant an influence is it in the world today. I do wonder to what extent Americans recognise and understand just how great this dominance and influence really is.

So thank you, thank you for your warm hospitality and for the generous way you have taken me into your life corporately and opened your hearts to me individually. That has been a great privilege.

May I also bring you greetings most especially from the Archbishop of Canterbury who specifically asked me to bring you this message and assure you of his own prayers for you this week and in the run up to General convention. I also bring you the greetings and prayers of my own Diocese of Exeter.

Although this is my first trip across the pond, I have travelled extensively in other directions and know a number of other parts of the Anglican Communion very well. I worked for three years in Nigeria; My own Diocese has strong companion links with the Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf, and Thika in Kenya; As a Trustee of Christian Aid I have travelled frequently in the Middle East, and as Chairman of the Melanesian Mission in the UK I have over the past 10-12 years come to have a very good knowledge of the Church in Australasia and the South Pacific. Inevitably this experience gives me a particular set of filters, and contexts, through which I view a number of the issues facing our communion at the present time. the rest