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Archbishop Carey:
The Rt. Rev. Carey came at the request of the Christian Formation Commission, the Youth Commission, the evangelism office, Canterbury Center at SMU, the Bishop James Stanton Center for Ministry Formation, All Saints Camp and Conference Center, and St. Matthew’s Cathedral as the first speaker in a lecture series that honors Bishop Stanton’s 15th year The Archbishop met with the clergy at All Saints Camp for a half-day retreat on Friday, Nov. 7, and then delivered the Stanton lecture on the morning and afternoon of Saturday, Nov. 8. Following that event, he met with the youth of the diocese at the newly rebuilt Canterbury House at Southern Methodist University. On Sunday, he preached at the 10:30 a.m. service at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. The theme of his Stanton Lecture was, “The Amazing Adventure of Following Christ in Exciting Times.” The history of the Christian Church, he noted, started out as a lay movement. Jesus was not a rabbi but an ordinary person from Nazareth, a traveling preacher who operated outside and against the religious establishment. However, within the first 300 years of its history, the church had developed popes, clerics, and politics. By the Middle Ages, the distance between clergy and laypeople had become its widest, with the clergy celebrating the Eucharistic mass alone within a closed choir while the laity looked on from afar. Clergy had forgotten that their role was to be servants, not power mongers. They had failed to remember that Jesus demonstrated His intent for the role of ministry when He washed His disciples’ feet. Luther brought back the biblical notion of the priesthood of believers, the Archbishop continued, and the Reformation promoted a better balance between clergy and laity. Tyndale translated Scripture into English so that ordinary laypeople could read it for themselves. He exclaimed, “I defy Pope and laws and if God spares me, the plow boy will know Scripture better than the Pope.” Today, Lord Carey declared, we in the Anglican Church still have some confusion in that we have a tendency to laicize the clergy and clericalize the laity. We need clergy who are both servants and leaders, and their responsibility is to involve laypeople in the work of the church because they are also heirs to the apostolicity of the church. If the church is to grow, he said, the clergy must deepen their own spirituality by immersing themselves in Scripture and the great classics of the Church. They must also bring biblical literacy to the people in the church by including the Bible in regular studies and getting parishioners to bring their own Bibles The Archbishop closed with the statements, “If the clergy has no initiative to lead, no desire to lead, no innate capacity to excite action, or no training in leadership, the result will be little change and no growth.” Clergy must lead the mission and disciple with confidence. “Hope is hearing the music of the future; faith is dancing to it today,” he said, quoting former Colorado bishop and seminary dean, William Frey. |
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he Diocese of Dallas had a rare treat the weekend of Nov. 7 – 9 with the visit of the Rt. Rev. George Carey, retired Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the Primate of England (the “first bishop” of England) and the original sign of unity within the Anglican Communion’s