The Archbishop's First Presidential Address

The Archbishop of Canterbury

In his Presidential Address to Lambeth Conference Dr Williams called for reflection and a focus on strengthening the Communion.

"You can all help shape fresh, more honest and more constructive ways of being a Conference – and being a Communion. The Conference seeks to build up a trustful community in this time together – one reason we began with a retreat, so that our common trust in God could be renewed."

"We must be honest about how deep some of the hurts and difficulties currently go; and we must refresh and reanimate our sense of what our Communion ought to be contributing to the whole ecumenical spectrum of Christian life."

"It's my conviction that the option to which we are being led is one whose keywords are of council and covenant. It is the vision of an Anglicanism whose diversity is limited not by centralised control but by consent".

Dr Williams stressed the enormous significance and importance of existing bonds of friendship and fellowship which were, he said, "valuable channels of grace, even if some want to give such bonds a more formal and demanding shape".

"I want to stress this partly because all those existing bonds are already being richly used by God for the service of his world. As we shall be reminded many times during these days, our own communion and unity are created and nourished by God for the sake of the Good News. 

"If our efforts at finding greater coherence for our Communion don't result in more transforming love for the needy, in greater awareness and compassion for those whose humanity is abused or denied, then this coherence is a hollow, self-serving thing, a matter of living 'religiously' rather than 'biblically'".

"We seek for clarity about what we must do in a suffering world because....we are at one in knowing what the Incarnate Lord requires of us".

Dr Williams reminded the Conference that "Our endings are in God's hand; the Word, through the Spirit, is transforming us into Christlikeness, so that we may pray trustfully and intimately to our Father. And in that process our relations with each other are transformed, and even our relations with the material world around us. At our roots and at our end is the Word, Jesus our Lord, embodying all that God wants to do first for us and then through us."

Archbishop Williams urged that this transformation should be one not only in word but in deed and in truth.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Full Presidential Address [35kb] (opens in a new window)