By now, many of you will have at least heard of Tom Friedman’s #1 bestseller, The World is Flat, the title being Friedman’s metaphor for how technology has not only made the world much smaller, but also “leveled the playing field” in the global economic market. According to his analysis, since the year 2000, we have been living in “Globalization 3.0,” where the Internet, fiber optics, and wireless technologies now link together more of the world than ever before, opening the door to incredible possibilities for both international collaboration and competition.

            We’ve all experienced the fruits of this, whether we’ve spoken with “Bob” or “Carol” in India when calling Dell’s customer support, or made airline reservations on JetBlue with Dolly as she works from her home in Salt Lake City. The blackberries and the wirelessly linked laptops now make it possible to do more things in more places with more people than ever before.

            This really struck home with me about two years ago. When visiting the Taizé community in France, I providentially ran into the in-laws of a Swedish scholar I had met at a conference back in 2001. About a month later, he and another scholar invited me to work with them on an academic reference book. One of us lived in Sweden, one in Canada, one in the USA, and our publisher was located in the Netherlands! We met face-to-face only one time - at a conference in DC in 2006 to close the deal. Otherwise, we did everything by email. Indeed, I wrote most of my sections on my laptop while watching either Sunday Night Football or the World Series! Yet it all came together and the book was published at the end of 2007.

            I mention all this because it forms a useful context for the upcoming Lambeth Conference being held July 16 through August 3. Normally consisting of all active bishops within the 38 international provinces of the Anglican Communion, the gathering takes place every ten years. Yet this is the first time it will be meeting during this new era of the high-speed Internet, and some of Friedman’s more general musings provide insight into this year’s enclave.

            To begin with, Friedman has noted how these technologies have begun to empower more of the developing world, allowing them to challenge the West’s centuries-old economic dominance (and so leading to Friedman’s “flattened world” analogy). Within Anglicanism, this has certainly been the case, at least to some degree. The so-called “Global South” (Africa, S. Asia, South America) now contains more active Anglicans than any other segment of the Communion. Yet the representative structures have continued to favor the disproportionally smaller Western Provinces (Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Canada, USA).

            Over the last decade, high-speed technologies have made such inequities all too apparent to the leaders of the Global South. Dissatisfaction with the pace of change in the representative structures, particularly in their addressing of North American innovations, led earlier in the summer to a counter conference in Jordan and Jerusalem: the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). Attended by nearly 300 bishops and 800 others, mostly from the Global South (though with a conservative representation from the Western Provinces), the Conference stopped short of declaring independence from the Anglican Communion. Yet it served notice that it would initiate a major Reform movement within Anglicanism, operating both within and beyond the present representative structures. Indeed, most of the GAFCON bishops will not be attending the Lambeth Conference in protest, even though they represent a quarter of the invited members (and a majority of the Communion’s active constituents).

            Another of Friedman’s major points concerns the extent to which the Western world appears oblivious to the changing global playing field. So long used to being in a dominant position, Westerners only very slowly are beginning to realize that developing countries are more and more in a situation where they can compete in the global market.

            Arguably, something similar can be said for Anglicanism in the 21st Century. Recent comments by Western bishops about GAFCON, for example, have been dismissive of its import. While it remains to be seen how the GAFCON movement will evolve, I would apply Friedman’s more general conclusions to our situation in the Anglican Communion and state that we ignore such global developments at our own peril.

            In making this judgment, I am not suggesting that we take a defensive position, as seems to be the case in many dioceses in the Episcopal Church. Rather, I am hopeful that this year’s Lambeth Conference will successfully challenge our leaders to reengage with the Global South, to respectfully address their grievances so that in the very near future their leaders will feel able, in good conscience, to participate in the larger councils of the church. To do otherwise, it seems to me, risks further fragmenting the Anglican Communion and so diminishing our Christian witness to the World.

           And so I ask your prayers for our bishops as they convene in England this summer: that a spirit of charity and humility will prevail, paving the way for healing and reconciliation within our battered Church.