Archbishop Rowan Williams, who is one the Presidents of the Association of Interchurch Families, gave a thought-provoking and wide-ranging address to a public audience of around 250, including around 70 AIF members who had travelled from all over the country, and also from Canada, at the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street, London W1 on 20th March. The venue was chosen because of the long established association of the church in Mayfair with Father John Coventry, a founder of AIF after whom the annual lecture is named.  The invitation came from the parish priest, Fr William Pearsall, and members of the Jesuit Community there.

Dr Williams picked up on some of the threads of his address in Rome last November to the Willebrands Symposium but also addressed interchurch families and their particular situation. He said to them that inter-confessional marriage should be seen as something transformative. ‘The couple pledge themselves to be Christ to one another, a sign of unconditional covenanted love, but they also pledge themselves to be a sign to the whole church of the covenant of grace – we celebrate God’s capacity to raise up in a self wounding church signs of his self-healing and so inter-church families become a sign of a healing sacrament’, he said.

Reflecting on ‘the visual and verbal imagery of the Orthodox Church which sees the descent of Jesus into the baptismal water of Jordan as a descent into the chaos, into the unformed reality which swills around just below the surface of the ordinary world’, Dr Williams built on the thought that ‘Christ is simultaneously in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of the sin, the formlessness, the shapelessness and dissolution, the dis-integrity of creation.’
The full text of the lecture can be found below.

Earlier in the day, at the invitation of the priest in charge, Canon Mark Oakley, over 70 Interchurch Family members had met at the nearby Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street to worship, exchange news, and to lunch with Archbishop Williams and Rev David Coffey, who later chaired the John Coventry Memorial Address. Canon Oakley’s sermon to Interchurch Families can be found below.

Earlier on 10-13 March, following the eminent German theologian’s, Thomas Knieps, paper given at the AIF Conference at Swanwick in August 2008 on Interchurch Families as Domestic Church, some 30 interchurch family members from around the world, including 10 from the UK, attended an International Conference at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. A full report can be found below and more information can be found at www.intams.org/events-col10.htm.