bumper snicker sighting

"I think, therefore, I'm dangerous."

"Endaba"

At last summer’s Lambeth Conference, the gathered bishops of the Anglican Communion, minus the several dozen with noses too bent out of shape to hob-nob with anyone living in or near “error,” eschewed their customary western, Parliamentary style in favor of an African model of discourse called “Endaba.” They held something like a council of elders, divided into more workable-size sub-groups, so that everyone would have the opportunity to speak his (and the few hers’) piece on the present state of church and world, without the necessity of coming to any resolution or joint statement, or even necessarily swaying anyone else’s opinion (which would have been unlikely in any case.)

It is my understanding that, at a certain point, many of the bishops began to feel apprehensive. The conclusion of the conference was looming, and there was no pastoral statement in sight or even under construction. Their gathering unrest was conveyed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who declared that the process would continue without alteration, and asked the assembly rhetorically, “has the way we’ve been doing business together in the past worked well for us? No? Then we will persevere in doing it differently for this Conference.”

Good for him. At last, in the eighth inning and many, many runs behind, he exerts some leadership and swings his crozier.

The Endaba process was a useful one for this meeting, precisely because no statement or resolution was called for, desirable, or even possible without causing severe, probably fatal damage to our sickly communion. The bishops are nowhere near the kind of consensus among themselves to produce such a conclusion. We know we are polarized, and we know we must live that way until a new generation rises up that, armed with actual information rather than assumptions, can come to agreement. There are probably many meetings in which an Endaba process would be helpful. I’ve long thought that diocesan conventions are far too enamored of resolutions. Whatever comes of any of them? What do they usually accomplish other than to alienate the minority “losers?” Conversation without the need for immediate resolution has its attractions.

On the other hand, before we get too fixated on the endless verbiage of decision-less concourse, we ought to remember that, in its African origins, Endaba is intended to prepare the way for a decision to be made, bearing in mind the wise counsel of the elders, and the political lay of the land. At the end, one man, chief or king, would make the decision. I don’t think we in the west are really prepared to walk that far down the African cultural path.

Additionally, how many issues are there in which no decision is ever called for? At most, we might find that, if we talk long enough, circumstances may make our choice either obvious or irrelevant. Rarely would we ever reach unanimity, at least in a timely enough fashion to make it helpful at all.

Would Endaba have ended slavery? Probably, but after how many decades’ delay? Would it have brought about, or ended, Temperance? When would women have begun to vote in the U. S., if they had depended on the yammering of the old men to bring it about? Would a South that continues to cling to the Confederate Battle Flag have ended its segregated facilities without external force being applied? Endaba helps to prepare the way for a decision to be made, but decisions nevertheless must be made, some of them unpopular (at first), and some provoking strong, even violent, opposition.

When that point arrives, I throw in my lot with western constitutional democracy: majority rule, balanced by the systemic respect for majority human rights.