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DiggThe Visitor File: Rowan Williams
As Archbishop of Canterbury, you travel extensively. Where have you been particularly struck by how people are doing the mission and ministry of the Church?
Sudan, certainly. Melanesia, Burundi. Those three have a very particular place in my mind. Melanesia, in dealing with the reconciliation in the aftermath of civil war there; Sudan for obvious reasons—long-term heroism of the church in the south; and Burundi, where the church is in the wake of years and years of genocidal violence, actually stepping up to the plate in terms of reconstructing education, and care for women, and education for women, particularly.
What would you most want people to know about the Anglican Communion, as you’ve experienced it?
I think in many contexts, it achieves more than you might expect, because the international networks that support it are able—even in small churches in vulnerable situations—to put a great deal of resource and prayer into that. I think that mutuality, internationally, remains crucial to its life.
Canon Ogé Beauvoir, a missionary from this diocese in Haiti, in a letter thanking the Church for all it’s doing in Haiti, wrote, “What a great family we are.” What do you see as the Church’s role in that country following the earthquake?
In any context like that, I think it’s crucial that the Church give the message: we’re not going away. The local support, the local faithfulness, and the international faithfulness are there. The Church can always say: whatever the circumstances, there is some difference you can make. That’s part of the Gospel; God makes a difference and allows us to join in making the difference.
This conference is about “building an ethical economy.” Where have you seen the Church or members of the Church doing just that?
In the way that the Church works with microcredit and microfinance across the world, which is a way of creating economic habits that are about giving people confidence and trust in one another, as well as in their own capacity. It remains at the human scale; it doesn’t dehumanize by growing too big too fast. I’ve seen that as a crucial part of the Church’s witness. We need to keep economics human. Part of the problem is a lot of transactions, a lot of policies, are made on the more-than-human scale, and that’s not good for human beings.
What do you like best about your job?
Variety, I suppose. Variety: the constantly shifting communities, even within the UK, that I’m ministering with. But if I had to say what, specifically and materially, I like best about my job, it’s getting to spend several weeks every year living next door to Canterbury Cathedral.
—Interview by Nicole Seiferth
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