General Synod Debate on Europe

Click here for Bishop Geoffrey's speech

Diana Webster:
Mr Chairman, I am speaking now on behalf of all the General Synod members of the Diocese in Europe. We are delighted to have a debate on Europe and we are also grateful for the Report. However, we find the Motion itself very tame. It affirms (twice), commends, welcomes and endorses. It doesn't even "urge", which Synod Motions of this kind sometimes do.

So we would like to do some urging of our own. We urge the Church of England to make more use of our Diocese. A sentence in the Report says that "through its clergy and laity, the Diocese is attuned to the way in Mainland Europe is fast developing and changing." Exactly. We are not Little England Abroad. Mostly we live and work there. We know the culture, the political climate, the prejudices and sensitivities and a lot else about the countries we live in. Some of us even speak the language. And yet we are seldom consulted by any of the many delegations, sometimes not even informed. Indeed it has happened that the priest of an Anglican Church has only learnt of the presence of a delegation or a Church dignitary from a local friend or the newspapers.

What a waste! What a waste of local expertise which might, for instance, help to smooth difficulties and explain the origins of particular problems! So we have some concrete suggestions.

We urge all delegations and the many ecumenical bodies to appoint Consultants from the various countries, on whom they can call when needed. Such people - clergy and lay - should of course have lived long enough in that country to acquire the requisite knowledge and should also be reasonably fluent in the language, not for reasons of interpreting the language but of interpreting the country.

Next we urge that all visits, unless of course for purely personal reasons, should publicly involve the local Anglican Church. It does not exactly enhance the position of a minority church in a country - and we always are a minority church - if their visiting dignitaries are seen to have ignored their local representative. If we are being encouraged to extend our ecumenical relations, we should be seen to have support at the highest level.

Lastly, we urge that more significance should be attached to getting the laity of the churches interacting with each other. I have been the lay representative of the Diocese on the Provincial Consultations since they began. From the very first meeting, the four laity members of its four churches were of one mind: that in any movement forward to a working common witness, the laity had to interact with each other, that the laity had to want ecumenical relations. Some movement has been made in that direction, but it needs more, much more encouragement and support.

For you can make as many Ecumenical Agreements as you like, but in the end it is up to the ordinary clergy and laity of the churches to implement them - or not. Others can talk; we must live it. The clergy and laity of the Diocese in Europe are the daily face of this Church in Mainland Europe. They are the daily ecumenical representatives.

So, on behalf of the Diocese in Europe, we urge you - use us, include us, encourage us, support us. Please.

Bishop Geoffrey:
As Bishop in Europe I welcome this debate and the opportunity that it gives to Synod to affirm our part, together with both ecumenical partners and the Churches with which we are in communion, in contributing in the fullest possible way to the future of Europe. Europe is where we belong, and the Church of England is a European Church, though it does not always recognise its belonging.

Let me remind you of Archbishops of Canterbury who came from Europe: Augustine, Theodore from Tarsus, and then Anselm, perhaps the greatest Archbishop, from Northern Italy. From the time that the British bishops attended the Council of Arles until the Reformation, we were clearly a European Church; and even the Reformation in its early stages saw England as part of a European network. Yet the character of the English Reformation and the shaping of our Anglican tradition, so valued and important, did in important respects make us less European than in the first millennium or more of our Christian life. The rhetoric of national Churches framed in the 16th century and the identification of Church and nation cut us off from much of our earlier heritage and left us with the concept that has bedded down into a provincial autonomy that pulls against a true and wide catholicity, as the ecclesiological problems with which we are currently wrestling in the Anglican Communion make clear. They have a long ancestry.

The diocese in Europe, serving some 260 chaplaincies and congregations in that widest of all Europes between Madeira and Vladivostock and Casablanca and Trondheim is a perpetual reminder to the Church of England of that European dimension. As a bishop consecrated as a priest and later enthroned on All Saints Day, in which the collect speaks of God 'knitting together his elect in one communion and fellowship', I use this metaphor of knitting as a description of my own ministry, which led to my being welcomed a week ago in a chaplaincy in the Netherlands: 'He wants to be known not as the chief pastor but as the great nit'!

Next year we celebrate the silver jubilee of the diocese in Europe in its present form. We are a growing diocese. Our strategic planning is not how to regroup parishes into ever larger benefices but were to plant new chaplaincies and service new congregations. We are a diocese in which chaplaincies serve not just English expatriates but a wide variety of English-speaking Christians. Before I became bishop I would not have expected to confirm eight Nigerians in Kiev, and so you could go on. Our chaplains are drawn from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ghana and America, and we have just appointed a Guatemalan-New Zealander to be chaplain in Madrid. We are a diocese of enormous opportunity. In many places our chaplaincies engage with and support those working in responsible jobs which shape our world, whether it be in non-governmental organisations, the European institutions or, to give a new and recent example, such things as a new chaplaincy venture at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. In The Hague last year I confirmed two adults whose work as lawyers in the Milosevic trial and all the catalogue of human horror and evil that they had listened to day after day had led to conversations with those from our congregation in The Hague as to where grace and good might be found, and led them to a commitment to Christ.

English-speaking workers are moving further and further afield, as oil and gas operations in Russia and the Caspian remind us; ministry is needed there. Our chaplaincy in Athens is shouldering immense responsibilities in sustaining a major part of the chaplaincy to next month's Olympic games. Then there are many other tourist ministries. In Istanbul our chaplain was remarkable in his ministry after the bombing. There are many ecumenical opportunities throughout Europe. Chaplains serve in many places as representatives of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Orthodox Churches. In Bucharest there are 800 studying in the theological faculty who will go on to serve the Orthodox Church in various ministries; in Belgrade there are 600. There are many other places of which I could tell Synod.

In the map produced for the proposed regions of the Hind Report, Europe was represented as an off-shore oblong. The dioceses of England were centre-stage, clearly the centre of the universe. Such a perspective is too often that of our Church and this Synod, but we belong to Europe in the widest sense. As a minority Church we have rightly learnt the lessons of humility, and yet we have so much to contribute as well as to learn for there is an attractiveness of Anglicanism in the European context and a bridge-building rôle in places of ancient hostility and polarisation. Let us welcome this motion wholeheartedly.