The Last Lambeth and other endings. . .

Usually every ten years since 1867, the bishops of the “Anglican Communion” gathered for a kind of convention.  It's origins came from the great missionary expansion that literally planted Anglican churches planted around the globe -- though mainly in countries of the Commonwealth better known as the former colonies.  It was said that they met to consult and express visually the fellowship of the Anglican Communion.  In the end, it often did much more.  It became a sort of high council whose resolutions were seen as significant expressions of truth and their life together.  For a while it prospered the unity of the Anglicans of various places.  In the end, it has been more or less a joke.  By the end of the 1990s, the  Lambeth Conference nearly imploded over the issues of sex, mainly homosexuality, and the West became the enemy of the missionary quarters intent upon retaining the traditional and Scriptural view of sex and marriage.  It was also sandbagged by the American deterioration that spent more money and energy on buildings than it had on the faith for a long time.  The last Lambeth Conference may indeed be the last but not many will miss what it had become -- a symbol of all that had gone wrong in Anglicanism.  Poor Archbishop Welby had to beg, borrow, and steal to get those who attended to go and then it all came to a climax as they saw their irreconcilable differences and seemed to agree to all go their own ways.  It became the communion not in communion.

On the heels of the Anglicans, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America seemed intent upon using its own Churchwide Assembly to ditch the last vestiges of their former selves and to finish the job of being nearly everything but Lutheran.  Supposedly it is not about sex but it began that way.  When the dust cleared, Ohio left the ELCA without much need to honor bound conscience, to tolerate traditional beliefs among the candidates for the pastoral office, to retain on the payroll professors who disagree with the party line, to feign the idea that a congregation could reject a LGBTQIA+ pastor, or for such a traditional pastor to find a new call other than the one he (or she) is in (traditional being a somewhat relative term here).  Watching a presiding bishop apologize for insensitivity to a marginal congregation in the wake of many questionable decisions by the first trans bishop made it painfully obvious that the ELCA would apologize for anything except deviating from Scripture, the Confessions, and traditional and orthodox Christianity.  You can practice some sort of native spiritism along side Christian rituals but you cannot be pro-life in this church body.  You are called to embody the Word but apparently you can do that without believing it.  Who knows how many pastors and professors and bishops actually believe the words of the creed anymore?  It will not hurt your advancement in this church body not to believe them but it is nice to say them anyway.  The Last Lambeth may soon be followed by the Law Churchwide Assembly at the rate the ELCA is bleeding off members.

My point is simple.  Churches that got on the bandwagon of culture in order to stay relevant are dying and their unity is a fragile concoction of papered over woke phrases and not the solid voices of we believe, we teach, and we confess.  I thought that making yourself more like your surroundings would make you more attractive to the folks in the world.  What really happened is that making yourself look more like the landscape around you has camouflaged you so that nobody notices you anymore.  We are surrounded with the Titanics of church bodies who have been brought down by a small crack (at least in the beginning) and who chose to stay the course rather than repair the breech.  Perhaps there was nothing anyone could do but there were plenty of voices warning of what was to come.  Those not quite there yet ought to pay attention.  There is no quicker path to irrelevance than to abandon the Scriptures and the living tradition of faith for a faint echo of yesterday's news.  And that is where Lambeth and Ohio were this year.  Yesterday's pitiful news.