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The Archbishop of Canterbury welcomed the bishops last week in words that many an Anglican will remember: "Our communion is no longer English or British or Anglo-Saxon . . . But it is still called the Anglican, the English Communion; and though the word is no longer altogether appropriate for this diverse family of autonomous churches, yet it bears witness to a truth of the past and to a truth of the present . . . Every one of the churches here represented traces its ancestry back to the church of these islands, and so to Canterbury and to St. Augustine ... To that tradition of Christian experience which by the circumstances of history has come to bear the name of Anglican, we are united in a common loyalty of gratitude and devotion ... By its nature it looks beyond itself to seek that visible unity of the Church of Christ which has been lost and is to be re-won."
*Dates of previous Lambeth Conferences: 1867, 1878, 1888, 1897, 1908, 1920, 1930.