In the midst of thinking about leadership and what it means in the Church, I've been lent Andrew Goddard's Rowan Williams: His Legacy by a member of the congregation. This same gentleman has also lent me one part of Pope Benedict's grand work on Jesus so he clearly feels I could do with some reading. Now revere Rowan Williams as I have a tendency to do, there are nevertheless some telling criticisms of his time as ABC in this generally supportive volume, the most insightful one being from an episcopal colleague, that Abp Rowan articulated so consistently the sense of pain and angst that arose from the divisions of the Anglican Communion that everyone else started to feel it as well, to a perhaps unnecessary degree.
One of the good things you get with this book is a meaty selection of quotations from Rowan's writings and speeches themselves, and criticisms aside they reveal the measure of the man. His absolute genius is a diplomatic one: the interpretation of differing points of view to one another, and the investigation of points of intersection in those views, as well as thinking about the deep patterns and movements which affect cultures - the uncovering of the true nature of things which is what the prophetic mission of the Church involves. Rowan's humility in dealing with a secular world, his refusal to engage with it via a metaphorical megaphone, and his consistent lack of concern about his own status and selfhood, speaks of the deepest kind of faith and, dare I say, the only sort of Church leadership the modern non-churched world can be expected to accord any respect. If only I could manage half as much.
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