"Seeing with New Eyes" by Larry Benfield

At first, the experience of entering the Big Top at the University of Kent on Tuesday seemed like entering an American Protestant church in the early 18th century: men to the left and women to the right. We were arriving for a plenary session on violence, especially violence against women and children, and the meeting’s organizers wanted us sitting separately. It soon became clear why.

After a dramatic presentation of some of the stories of Jesus that focused on his reaching out to women, we began investigating one of the powerful but little-read stories in the Old Testament: the rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13). After a short break, we gathered in small groups of men or women to respond to the story. Our first bit of modern education: the ushers, primarily young people, reported that when it came to begin the Bible study discussion, about 100 men left the Big Top, while almost no women left. The second and more shocking learning: when one Western woman asked why we had to be segregated by sex to discuss the story, the facilitator said the reason was simple. There were people among us for whom this room was not a safe place to discuss the abuse of women and children. I later heard stories from the last Lambeth Conference about wives attending the conference whose husbands regularly beat them.

For three hours we talked about the abuse of power and how the church might become a place where such abuses do not take place. What we have to decide is how the church will become a place that people can turn to who suffer from abuse and feel comfortable that their cries are being heard. The message was clear and we learned much.

It seems a bit harder to understand the other messages developing at the Lambeth Conference. There seem to be two independent strands at work. On the one hand, there is the conversation among bishops about our individual situations. Operating separately from these conversations is the work of the committees that are preparing a potential covenant documents and some sort of ongoing response to the Windsor Report that dealt the boundary crossings and sexual ethics. The committees are not to make final reports at this conference, so it seems that our conversations—and our getting to know one another better—have little direct impact on the immediate work that is being coordinated by Lambeth Palace. Where it might have an impact is on the eventual reception of those reports.

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave another presidential address to the conference Tuesday, and he emphasized his belief that a covenant is the way to move forward. He wants a document around which we can agree how to be Anglicans in communion with one another. His question for us was what sort of generosity we each need to have in order to make a movement forward possible. How we are able in this conference setting to talk about that generosity remains to be seen.