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on the enforced move will only increase, and the nations and churches of
Europe will have to be far more strategic, coordinated and compassionate in
their response to those in desperate need. I experienced this for myself in a
recent visit I was able to make to the migrant camp in Calais. Even in poverty
and dispossession, the nobility and strength of the faith of the Christians,
mainly Ethiopian Orthodox, who find themselves trapped there, was
profoundly moving. This is enforced diaspora of the twenty first century. As
Anglicans and Orthodox, we need to be ready to play our part in shaping this
coming church of the future. Openness to the Spirit will ensure that the life of
faith is strengthened for all by the mutual giving and receiving which will form
part of the reality of enforced diaspora. As Archbishop Michael Jackson of
Dublin has written, “In a world of enforced migration and fearful arrival, in a
world of accelerated movement, refugees are a gift of apostolicity in a world of
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war-torn fragmentation and courageous martyrdom.” Without
sentimentalising or romanticising the effects of war and poverty, we need to be
open to the gift which those who have been forced to flee may be to the
seemingly settled. This may be one of the more surprising effects of the
benefits of diaspora, but at the same time diaspora brings its own challenges,
principally in the tension between the center and the periphery, however we
define those terms.

Centrifugal & Centripetal Forces

In the situation of dispersed authority I have described, there are natural
organizational tensions between centrifugal and centripetal forces. While the
Church is authentically local through unity with the Bishop, at the same time
it is supra-national through the collegiate relationship between the Bishops.
This has been a tension which we can see from the earliest origins of the
Church until now. In Churches which do now have a central jurisdictional
authority, what are the limits of an agreed orthodoxy, what is authentically
local, and what are first and second order questions of faith? Anglicans
attempted to resolve this through successive Lambeth Conferences, but
especially that of 1888, which established the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral
with its four agreed points on what makes a church authentically Anglican. I
remind you what they are:

11 Michael Jackson, AOOIC, Hawarden, Wales, 8 October 2015

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