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children of the eighteenth century, armed now with iPhones and Facebook
Pages and Twitter Feeds, and yet with unacknowledged debts of derivation to
rationalism and deism respectively.

So, as we gather as Porvoo people to plan under God for the future years
of our Communion, we are rightly invited to grasp those challenging words:
unity and friendship. Uniformity is not unity on this side of the eschaton. Diver-
sity is not self-explanatory or self-authenticating nor is it necessarily expressive
of coherence or cohesion. Too much diversity can, however, put signi?cant
strain on friendship. Using our local autonomy and the considerable freedom
which it grants us, I would encourage us to proof our inherited traditions over
against the realities and the questions of our age – and to share this new wis-
dom with one another; to move away from our long-standing concern of re?n-
ing the de?nitions of various ministries in each of our church families over
against one another; and to take the other model of friendship so powerfully
lived out in the Gospels as our guide: friendship as accompaniment, as it is ex-
pressed in the walk to Emmaus (St Luke 24). This is an encounter through the
?lter of The Resurrection; it follows so beautifully and so lovingly from The
Passion. In this encounter, we see the inter-relation of human and divine, per-
sonality and Scripture and the greater unity of Master and disciples in the real-
ity of closer Eucharistic friendship. Friendship and Eucharist bind us together
in a Trinitarian communion of faith, hope and love. All of these components
we, as Porvoo people, already have in a structured and living way through our
very public Communion.

How might it look?

As things are developing, we are already moving in the direction of more and
more expression of such instincts - and we need to do more of it. I have just
returned from The Anglican-Lutheran Society Conference on the shores of
Lake Balaton, Hungary where the theme was: Fear Not Little Flock: The Voca-
tion of Minority Churches Today. It was very clear that a burning issue is the
capacity which a minority has to contribute to and to drive from within the
de?nition of a majority culture in a caritative and an altruistic direction; it may
not have numbers – that is self-evident – but it has capacity through its lived
witness, its presence and its engagement, its ideas and its identity and most of
all perhaps its courage – all of these are essential to the totality of the society
of which it is part. A majority needs a minority to respect, in order to be able
to respect itself and others as a way of unity and of friendship. The other im-
portant insight that I took away from the Conference was the striking one to

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