David Ould: Portents, Prophecy and Predictions - What Will Happen at the Primates’ Meeting?

January 8, 2016
Stand Firm

As many readers will be aware, next week sees the much-awaited Primates’ Meeting/Gathering called by Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. The crisis that the Anglican Communion is in has not gone away (who would have thought?!) and the time has perhaps come for a clear decision on the path forward.

As one might expect, the net has been awash with various prognostications (yes, alliteration can’t be avoided) as to what will happen and as the day has approached I’ve had more and more people ask me what’s going to happen. Well, grab a cup of something and sit down because I’m going to give it my best shot.

As I can best see, there have been essentially 2 major dynamics at work in the lead-up to this coming week which can be broadly characterised as the “save the family” party and the “restore Biblical order” party. Now even as I write that I realise that I am potentially characterising one side as not being Biblical - that’s not my intention in the labels but I’m not going to pretend that by the time you get to the end of this piece I won’t have made my best effort to persuade you that the “family” party really don’t get what the Bible has to say about this whole thing.

But, for now, let’s just spend a bit of time thinking about this “family” approach. The line basically goes like this, “we have much that unites us; a common identity forged from a common history. This is an expression of Christian unity and we would be very foolish to let it go”.... the rest