O gracious Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy Catholic church; that thou wouldest be pleased to fill it with all truth; in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purge it; where it is in error, direct it; where anything is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen and confirm it; where it is in want, furnish it; where it is divided, heal it and unite it in thy love; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury 1633-45

The traditional themes for Advent are pretty sobering: death, judgment, heaven and hell. These are the themes associated by the Church with the coming of Christ at the end of time. We reflect on them to prepare ourselves to celebrate the historic coming of Christ into the midst of the ambiguities, uncertainties, and conflicts of human history. Advent is a time for taking stock of where we are now in the light of where we would like to be when the clocks stop. How are we doing in the light of our ultimate hopes and expectation? Advent is a time to try to see things from God's perspective and to order our affairs accordingly. At the moment, this is something Anglican Christians are finding extraordinarily difficult to do.

My aim in these lectures is to try to engage in a kind of 'taking stock' of where the Anglican Communion is today. We know it is in difficulties. The nature of those difficulties I shall try to illuminate, because I want all of us (Anglican or not) to play our part as fully as we can in finding God's future for Anglicanism. To do that, we shall have to reflect on what Anglicanism is - whether it is a temporary and disposable form of Church life, or whether there is a deeper and enduring manifestation of the Christian Church in Anglicanism, which is perhaps in the process of finding new institutional expression. We shall have to look at the nature of the Anglican Communion. Has the Anglican Communion grown up accidentally, now to be replaced by other forms of communion, or should we see it as an enduring reality, which is currently passing through a difficult and perhaps creative patch? What holds Anglicans together? Whatever it is, is it sufficient to hold us together in the midst of the current pressures, or are we at an unavoidable parting of the ways? Are there things we can and should do to strengthen our unity, or have we to accept that the price of strengthening our unity would be so to constrain our diversity that some would leave and those who were left would not be the inheritors of the best of Anglicanism?

The questions at issue amongst Anglicans are not just about ministry, gender and sexuality, though they are indeed all about all three, and I shall be focusing on these in my next two lectures. They are also about authority: how do we decide issues when we disagree with one another, and what do we do when we disagree with what has been officially agreed amongst church leaders? What do we do when consensus breaks down? If at that point we appeal to 'provincial autonomy' what does that say about the strength or nature of our 'communion'? What kind of authority should church leaders have to insist upon certain teachings or practices as the authentic teaching or practice of the church? How do we identify the limits to our diversity? This question of the limits to our diversity takes us to the very heart of our authority to say anything at all as Christians. What are the sources for Christian teaching, and how can we be sure we are interpreting them correctly, or even responsibly? The current disputes in the Anglican Communion take us right back to the ways in which we read Scripture. At the moment we have different churches in different cultural situations reading Scripture in different ways - and being confronted with those differences as never before because of modern means of communication. The current debates in the Anglican Communion are all about how to be a Christian in the twenty-first century.

In saying that current debates are about how to be a Christian I am also saying that they are not peculiar to Anglicanism. In addressing these and similar questions so publicly and so forcefully Anglicans are bringing into the light questions for all Christians in a rapidly changing world, where issues of authority, gender and sexuality are handled very differently from the way they would have been handled even twenty years ago. None of the churches can remain isolated from these debates, and all of them have to assess their strategies for mission in the light of the very diverse ways in which people think and behave in the contemporary world. To use a Latin phrase, much used in the Middle Ages, these are quaestiones disputatae (disputed questions) and before attempting to make our mind up on them we have to listen to what is being said on both sides of the argument. Even then, we may not be able to come to an agreed conclusion. The poet John Keats spoke of 'negative capability... when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. [1] The phrase 'negative capability' captures the real challenge to the churches. People want positive teaching, but the churches are passing through a time when we are finding we have to live with the negative - 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts' and 'without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. Under this sort of pressure, we are forced to ask in a yet more searching way, 'What is it that really holds us together?'

This has been brought home to me by serving on two commissions within the Anglican Communion. The first is the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, which has been meeting for about five years. Our work has focused particularly on what we mean by communion. [2] We have studied how communion is understood within the Anglican Communion by asking dioceses and theological colleges and other Anglican institutions in many different countries what communion means to them, and we look forward to presenting the results of this study to the Lambeth Conference in 2008. What has been striking is that the Commission is composed of Anglican men and women from all round the world: South America, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. We have done our work in English, which means that some of our members are handling complex ideas in their third or fourth language. We have worked and worshipped together and delighted in sharing the eucharist, but it is clear that our members have very different perspectives on the 'disputed questions' that I shall be discussing and it may well be that before long we shall be divided from one another at the eucharist, something none of us want.

As a consultant to the Rochester Commission, which considered the arguments for and against the ordination of women to the episcopate in the Church of England, [3] I had a very similar experience. This was a commission serving the bishops of the Church of England, so we were not trying to understand one another over huge barriers of language or culture, but members nevertheless took very differing views of the issue. Our task was made much easier in that it was solely to lay out the arguments on both sides of the question, prior to a debate in General Synod and the possible preparation of legislation to permit women to be bishops - the situation we now have. As a Commission we were not being torn apart, but we were well aware that once the issue was debated and voted upon by General Synod some of us would find ourselves on opposite sides to each other. It was very likely some of our members would no longer be able to share eucharistic communion with others. Who was likely to be affected and in what way was not clear and was not discussed, but the phrase that kept coming into my mind was the phrase that Newman used as the title for his last sermon as an Anglican: 'The Parting of Friends'. [4]

In talking of 'The Parting of Friends', it is worth remembering the enormously important part that sharing in what has been called a 'common culture' played for Newman and the other leaders of the Oxford Movement. [5] The Oxford Movement sprung into being in 1833 when a group of bright young Oxford teachers together decided that the Church of England needed to be rescued from the overweening power of the state. They shared a common background in the culture of the university: they read the same texts, the Authorised Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Church Fathers, in a broadly similar way (they were all classically educated). They agreed about the importance of bishops for the church and the life of the early church as a model for the contemporary church. Only gradually did the differences among them emerge. Newman and Robert Wilberforce became Roman Catholics; Keble and Pusey remained Anglicans. They parted because they understood the nature of the Church and its authority differently. It may be that Anglicans, who once shared something of a common culture, but now do so less and less, have come to another such point of parting. I sincerely hope not, and many, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, are working extremely hard to avert a split in Anglicanism. My intention in these Advent lectures is to illuminate the issues, so that whichever side we find ourselves taking on the disputed questions, we better understand why others see these questions differently and we can make a better judgment as to how the Anglican Communion may come through what airline stewards might call 'a period of slight turbulence'.

The emergence of the Anglican Communion can be traced through the emergence of provincial (that is, national or regional) churches. [6] By far the largest of these and the earliest to operate independently was what was known until 1979 as the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. At a General Convention in 1789 it drew up a Constitution and Canons and adopted a revised Book of Common Prayer. The background of national independence from Britain is important in understanding how what is known today as The Episcopal Church in the United States differs from churches founded as Anglican provinces in India (1835), Australia (1847), South Africa (1853), New Zealand (1858), Canada (1860), the West Indies (1883), all of which only became fully independent of the Church of England after the Second World War. However, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had seen moves towards increasing autonomy for the provinces of the Anglican Church worldwide: indeed, the Church of Ireland was disestablished (and became autonomous) in 1869 and the Church of Wales in 1920.

Some other Anglican provinces were also developed through chaplaincies and through missionary work, especially mission from England and the United States. What held all the Anglican provinces together, as they became independent, was their historical roots in the Church of England (some via the United States), the consultative meetings of the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference every ten years from 1867, the meetings of the Anglican Consultative Council (which was founded in 1969), the regular meetings of primates (which have taken place since 1979) and the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury (whose jurisdiction outside the provinces of Canterbury and York is now extremely limited).

Though the term 'Anglican Communion' had been in use from the nineteenth century, [7] only in 1930 did the Lambeth Conference define what was meant by 'Anglican Communion' in terms similar to those we use today:

The Anglican Communion is a fellowship within the one holy catholic and apostolic church, of those duly constituted dioceses, provinces, or regional churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, which have the following characteristics in common:

They uphold and propagate the catholic and apostolic faith and order as they are generally put forth in the Book of Common Prayer as authorized in their several churches.

They are particular or national churches and as such, promote within each of their territories a national expression of Christian faith, life and worship; and

They are bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority but by natural loyalty sustained by the common counsel of the bishops in conference.

The problem with which the Anglican Communion is currently faced is that 'natural loyalty' (1930) has become severely strained, and there is no 'common counsel of the bishops in conference' or, such as it is, certain bishops are prepared to disregard it. In a rapidly changing situation, four points should be noted. First, most of the provinces of the Anglican Communion represent churches that have found their identity by gaining independence from Britain, so a great deal of emphasis has been placed upon provincial autonomy: what have come to be called the 'instruments of unity' within the Anglican Communion are instruments of consultation amongst autonomous provinces. The theological understanding of what it means to be a communion of churches - that is churches which are legally independent but mutually responsible - is being developed and explored throughout the present crisis. Secondly, the approach to issues in different provinces is influenced by their own theological histories. Where there has been a history of evangelisation by high church missionaries, associated with societies like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the approach reflects catholic emphases; where there has been a history of evangelisation by evangelical missionaries, associated with societies like the Church Missionary Society, the approach is more strongly Protestant. Thus, there is a marked diversity of approach amongst Anglican provinces (and sometimes within provinces). A third point to note is that with modern means of communication, clashes of approach become evident much more quickly. Actions taken in one part of the world are reported elsewhere (and possibly misunderstood) immediately. Fourthly, in our present situation, to speak of the Anglican Communion as 'a fellowship within the one holy, catholic and apostolic church' is precisely to beg the question as to what kind of fellowship the Anglican Communion is to be and how that fellowship is to be maintained. Is it to be an association of churches with a common origin in Anglicanism, or is to be a communion of churches whose members share the bread and the wine of the eucharist with each other, with each others' bishops and, ultimately, with the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Anglican ecclesiology is an ecclesiology of the 'one, holy, catholic church'. Anglicans recognise themselves to be one tradition within the universal church. We therefore claim our baptismal and our eschatological unity in Christ with Roman Catholic and with Eastern Orthodox Christians. But we are also a split-off part of the Western Christian tradition. In sketching an ecumenical Anglican ecclesiology I would like to make use of the dynamic ecclesiological description in The Gift of Authority, the third Joint Agreed Statement of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) on authority. [8] The Gift of Authority builds on the earlier Church as Communion [9] and it is by no means a complete ecclesiology, [10] but it has particular value because it sketches an understanding of the Church, and of the working of authority within the Church, which is intended to be acceptable both to Anglicans and to Roman Catholics (that is, to Western Christians). It has been criticised for not showing how issues of conflict are handled. But that is not the point of the document. The Gift of Authority gives a dynamic account of the working of authority within the church in the service of unity and mission. It sketches for us a norm as to how such authority, including the authority of the Bishop of Rome, could work for the good of the whole church - but we know that our actual situation is far from this ideal. Still, it is better to start with some vision of a church that is at unity with itself than a church which experiences only a fractured communion.

Strikingly, The Gift of Authority begins from the 'Amen' of the individual to the Gospel, placing that 'Amen' within the 'Amen' of the life of the local church. It describes the life of believers in their local church:

Believers follow Christ in communion with other Christians in their local church (cf. Authority in the Church I, 8, where it is explained that "the unity of local communities under one bishop constitutes what is commonly meant in our two communions by 'a local church'"). In the local church they share Christian life, together finding guidance for the formation of their conscience and strength to face their difficulties. They are sustained by the means of grace which God provides for his people: the Holy Scriptures, expounded in preaching, catechesis and creeds; the sacraments; the service of the ordained ministry; the life of prayer and common worship; the witness of holy persons. The believer is incorporated into an "Amen" of faith, older, deeper, broader, richer than the individual's "Amen" to the Gospel. Ö Every baptised person shares the rich experience of the Church which, even when it struggles with contemporary questions, continues to proclaim what Christ is for his Body. (GA 13)

The starting point for an understanding of authority within the Church is thus seen as the living of the Christian life by the believer who accepts the authority of Christ which is mediated within the life of the local church. The Gift of Authority then goes on to explore the identity of the local Church as it remains faithful to the apostolic Tradition which it has received from Christians of former generations (a prime example of this being its fidelity to holy Scripture). It examines the place of the local church within the diversity of local churches worldwide. The catholicity of the Church, it maintains, requires both the diachronic ('unity through time') and the synchronic ('contemporaneous unity') dimensions to communion. The exercise of authority within the church is for the sake of its unity in both dimensions: unity with the past and unity in the present.

The Gift of Authority deliberately talks of authority in dynamic terms. It focuses less on the structures of authority than on the ministries through which authority is exercised. Thus it discusses synodality before it discusses synods - beginning its discussion of synodality with a reminder that the origin of the term synod lies in the Greek 'syn-hodos', meaning 'common way'. The approach through the life of the believer in the local church to the 'synodality' of the whole church ensures the foundational place of the laity in the Church. It is only when the place of the laity has been discussed that the collegiality of the bishops in sustaining the life of the local churches comes into focus. Let me quote the description of Anglican synodality as this captures well the dynamic nature of Anglican ecclesiology:

In the Anglican Communion, new forms of synods came into being during the nineteenth century and the role of the laity in decision making has increased since that time. Although bishops, clergy, and lay persons consult with each other and legislate together, the responsibility of the bishops remains distinct and crucial. In every part of the Anglican Communion, the bishops bear a unique responsibility of oversight. For example, a diocesan synod can be called only by the bishop, and its decisions can stand only with the bishop's consent. At provincial or national levels, Houses of Bishops exercise a distinctive and unique ministry in relation to matters of doctrine, worship and moral life.... Furthermore, each bishop has not only the episcope of the local church but participates in the care of all the churches.... In the Anglican Communion as a whole the Primates' Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council, the Lambeth Conference and the Archbishop of Canterbury serve as instruments of synodality. (GA 39)

Within The Gift of Authority hard questions are raised both for Anglicans and for Catholics. The issues facing Anglicans are identified as follows: [11]

We have seen that instruments for oversight and decision making are necessary at all levels to support communion. With this in view the Anglican Communion is exploring the development of structures of authority among its provinces. Is the Communion also open to the acceptance of instruments of oversight which would allow decisions to be reached that, in certain circumstances, would bind the whole Church? When major new questions arise which, in fidelity to Scripture and Tradition, require a united response, will these structures assist Anglicans to participate in the sensus fideliumwith all Christians? To what extent does unilateral action by provinces or dioceses in matters concerning the whole Church, even after consultation has taken place, weaken koinonia? (GA 56)

These are precisely the questions raised by recent events in the Anglican Communion. The Gift of Authority offers only a sketch of the context in which they might be approached. Anglicans have had to dig deeper onto their ecclesiological understanding to see how current conflicts within the Anglican Communion can be resolved.

The Anglican approach to ecumenical unity is to seek out the unity that already exists between baptized Christians and to build upon it. This is best expressed by the so-called Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888, [12] which identifies four characteristics of the Church as the indispensable basis for reunion, that is to say as the basis on which participation in a common tradition can already be discerned. These are: the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as 'containing all things necessary to salvation' and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith; the Apostles' Creed as the Baptismal Symbol and the Nicene Creed as 'the sufficient statement of the Christian faith'; the two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself - Baptism and the Supper of the Lord; and 'the historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of his Church'.

Nevertheless, Anglicans have always recognised that, even within the common practice of the Christian faith identified by these four characteristics of historic Christianity, there may well be sufficient diversity for Christians to regard one another as not in the fullest sense Christian. The Quadrilateral does not, for instance, distinguish between adult and infant baptism; nor between views of the eucharistic presence; nor does it take a position on whether episcopal ministry is distinct from or a function of presbyteral ministry; nor on the origins of episcopal ministry. On each of these Reformation 'disputed questions' it embraces diversity. This is not to say that Anglican teaching and practice has remained open to all possible views in these areas; merely, that in the search for ecumenical unity it has sought to remain open to the diversity that was present in the early Church and can be expected to be present within a comprehensive Church today. The Lambeth Quadrilateral does not then, sketch an ecclesiology. It indicates the conditions for eucharistic unity, for shared communion. In this sense it is typical of Anglicans: Anglicans ask not, 'what is the ideal (or divinely willed) form of the Church?' but 'What forms of Church can be included within a reconciled communion?' This is why Anglicans have been prominent in the ecumenical movement generally, and have played a prominent part in the formation of United Churches like those in South and North India.

In the light of the new questions that have been raised for us, I would like to make some comments on the Lambeth Quadrilateral and the extent to which it can serve as a framework for the maintenance of eucharistic communion. I am struck by the way what was developed as a way of indicating a basis for unity between separated churches may now help us to see the basis of unity between churches that are united but in danger of separation. This brief discussion of the Lambeth Quadrilateral as it applies to our current situation is intended to show that the Lambeth Quadrilateral does not by itself provide an adequate basis for unity, and since that is the case, where we currently have unity, and benefit from those other factors which hold us together and are so hard to define, we need to do all we can to maintain it.

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as 'containing all things necessary to salvation' and as being the ultimate rule and standard of faith. Anglicans continue to read Scripture prominently in their public worship precisely so that there will be a general familiarity with Scripture. Nevertheless it is clear that people reading the same Scriptures can come to very different conclusions about what they say on certain questions. In the early church, creeds were adopted by Councils as a way of guiding the reading of Scripture, particularly with respect to what it says about Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In eighteenth century debates about the morality of the slave trade both sides appealed to Scripture. Only gradually did a consensus emerge that the slave trade as it was then practised by Great Britain could not be legitimated from Scripture. Again, the consensus that Scripture cannot be used to legitimate teaching and practice that discriminates against women has only emerged slowly. The raising of new questions about how to read Scripture in a new context is something that has gone on and continues to go on throughout the life of the Church. It would be profoundly unhealthy if it did not. For Anglican Christians debates about what the Church can or cannot do or be, whatever other aspects of the question come into play, must always at a foundational level be debates about how to read Scripture. What Anglicans cannot say, if we are to remain true to our tradition is, 'Scripture says one thing but we can or we must agree to teach and practise another.'

2. The Apostles' Creed as the Baptismal Symbol and the Nicene Creed as 'the sufficient statement of the Christian faith'. Perhaps what is most striking to us today is that both these classic statements of the Christian faith concentrate entirely on theological doctrine; they say nothing about moral and ethical behaviour. Were the early Christians so united on moral questions that there was no need to take counsel about disputed moral questions and to come to some agreed teaching? Or was it that moral questions were regarded as questions which could be decided at the local level? Certainly, there were profound ethical questions which threatened to divide the early Church - such as whether a Christian could offer a pinch of incense before the image of the emperor, or whether Christians could serve in the military. The extraordinary thing to us is that, once Christianity had become the privileged religion of the Roman Empire, there was sufficient of a common culture amongst the Christians of the Empire for moral questions never to be a matter of ongoing debate in the way that doctrinal questions were. [13] This must, of course, raise the question as to whether, if Christians can conscientiously say the creed together, there need be any further boundary drawn around the church (that is to say whether there need be any breach of communion) on questions of ethics.

3. The two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself - Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. We have seen already that Anglican Christians claim their baptismal unity with Christians of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. We then have to ask whether it matters that we should be separated at the eucharist. Perhaps some form of 'reconciled diversity' is all that can be expected of Christians, and if we truly love one another separation at the eucharist won't really matter. I would argue strongly that it does: the goal of 'visible unity' amongst Christians can and should be argued strongly in terms of the unity of Christ's body and the importance of that unity as a witness to the world (Jn 17: 20-21). However, I also think the issue of eucharistic unity and eucharistic division is vital because of what it says about the nature of truth. Christians may not agree about the truth of certain doctrines, and may have provisionally to live with disagreement (this is Keats' 'negative capability'). We should certainly have learnt not to kill or hate one another because we believe differently - but to give up on the notion of truth and falsehood in Christian teaching and practice, and to say that what we believe and how we believe is a matter of choice rather than conviction is ultimately to give up on the conviction that there is truth in the world and that God has made that truth known to us. For me, that would be to give up on what Paul calls 'the hope of our calling' (Eph 4:4). The ecumenical movement was born out of the conviction that God's will for the Church was and is 'visible unity', which means unity not only in baptism but at the eucharist as well.

4. 'The historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church '. This will be the nub of the issue for us in the next two weeks. For Anglicans the question of 'comprehensiveness', that is whether the Church of England could include or 'comprehend' non-episcopally ordained clergy, was raised by the large number of non-episcopal ordinations in the mid-seventeenth century, and effectively resolved in favour of episcopacy by the Act of Uniformity (1662). [14] There survived, however, in the Church of England, a concern for 'comprehensiveness', which was a concern for an inclusive national church, something that in many parts of the Anglican Communion remains part of the Anglican psyche (though not in the United States). Anglicans have traditionally looked for forms of church which are inclusive and embedded within the national culture (both of which concerns are very strong within the United States). Anglicans have therefore looked for forms of episcopacy which can be faithful to the tradition which has been received from the past but which can also meet the needs of contemporary society. Increasingly, these two concerns have come into tension. Central to that tension is the extent to which it is possible to adapt the received understanding of the episcopate (male and, if married, married to one living wife) to the conditions of contemporary society. We shall have a great deal more to say about this: here we need only note that speaking of 'the historic episcopate, locally adapted' precisely begs the questions both as to the marks of 'the historic episcopate' and the limits of adaptation. Who is to decide on the legitimacy of adaptation - and on what principles?

5. Though the Lambeth Quadrilateral may provide a necessary condition for church unity, it does not provide a sufficient one. We are left with the question as to what it is that, in addition to the broad factors indicated by the Lambeth Quadrilateral, makes for unity (however strained) amongst Anglicans. We may say it is a matter of a residual 'common culture' (of Englishness); or loyalty to the Archbishop of Canterbury; or a tradition of worship and practice ('lex orandi lex credendi: 'the law of worship is the law of belief'); or a way of doing theology which holds Scripture, tradition and reason in some sort of balance - or something of all of these. It may also be a shared belief in making decisions through consensus rather than through centralised authority structures. Whatever the extra factors that make for Anglicanism are, and they are certainly different in different parts of the world, they are barely proving enough to hold us together now. The proposal has been made that we should spell out our commitment to one another in a covenant which might hold us together in the future. [15] I see real problems with this.

Anglicans are already, by virtue of their communion, implicitly in a covenanted relationship. Any newly written covenant would make explicit the commitment that already exists. [16] Some would argue for a covenant that would be more juridical in nature, so that there would be clear penalties for future non-compliance. Others would argue for a 'motivational' covenant that focused more on our relations with one another as committed Anglican Christians and our commitment to remain in dialogue with one another, whatever disagreements may arise in the future. My personal view is that a more juridically drafted covenant could not be made to work - because there would have to be a body that judged whether or not the terms of the covenant had, in certain circumstances, been kept. The appointment and empowerment of that body would be a church-political nightmare! I do not, however, see how a more 'motivational' covenant, which did not have that disciplinary element, could help us in the difficulties we presently face. On the issue of sexual discipline there will continue to be deep divisions, despite the desire of Anglican Christians to stay together. I cannot see how it will be possible for Christians of opposite views on homosexuality to see each other's positions as within the range of legitimate Christian diversity. This can only mean that in the future, whatever goodwill we express towards one another in a written covenant, we shall have to move to something more like an Anglican Federation than an Anglican Communion.

I profoundly hope I am wrong. I ask myself whether it is mere sentimentality that makes me want to see the continuance of the Anglican Communion that I have known and loved and served through my lifetime. I think not. I believe that Anglicans have something distinctive to offer to all Christians from our Anglican tradition, and that the difficulties we are now experiencing come precisely from the Anglican openness to facing new questions, the Anglican sense of loyalty to received tradition, and the Anglican commitment to sustain a church that ministers to all in our societies. I also observe how little appetite there is for a split in many parts of the Anglican Communion even though in some quarters it seems to have already begun. Quite why the questions facing the Anglican Communion have proved so divisive I hope to explore in the coming two weeks. But please note that when Newman spoke of 'The Parting of Friends', he was talking about something he saw as inevitable; for us, 'The Parting of Friends' must as yet be followed by a question mark.