“I ask you to go back to your countries and I ask you to ask your governments and I ask you to ask all of civil society to tell people that on September 25 we have got to make good the promises that have been made, redeem the pledges that have been promised, make good the Millennium Development Goals that are not being met.”

So said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the Anglican Communion bishops and others who participated in the Walk of Witness during this summer’s Lambeth Conference, according to an article in Episcopal Life Online. The Walk was a way to draw attention to the issue of extreme poverty around the world, and to remind the media and all who were following the Conference about the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and our church’s commitment to them.

If you don’t know about the Millennium Development Goals, by all means click…

The Irish Times is reporting that “a conciliatory statement is expected at the end of the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury,”which concludes today. Others are predicting that the whole endeavor will have been a waste or even a sham, a kind of desperate stall for time. The British paper the Telegraph has a particularly depressing article out today, found here, about bishops pressuring “the Archbishop of Canterbury to declare a split in the Anglican Communion for the sake of orthodox Christianity.”

For my own part, I am sure only that it will take time, perhaps a very long time, to understand with any clarity the actual results of the Lambeth Conference. It is almost unAmerican to spend two weeks following an event and not have some definite sense of resolution or closure when it is over. Who won? Who lost? What was the score? Can we give it “two thumbs up”? Our usual…

We’re falling apart at the seams. That would be the general impression I get of the Anglican Communion in most media reports of the last several years.

Not that I’m blaming the media, mind you. The conflicts within the Anglican Communion are real, painful, and profound. And of course priests and bishops and lay people who are all storming around and slamming doors behind them like one big dysfunctional family make good press. So be it.

The war drums (or death knells, depending upon whom you read) seemed to get louder and louder in the weeks leading up to the Lambeth Conference. Lambeth is a once-a-decade gathering of Anglican leaders (archbishops, bishops, and presiding bishops from around the globe), and the conference received oodles of press attention from the moment it was announced. The stories that streamed forth about the fractious, potentially schismatic state of the third largest Christian group in the world…