Full text: Archbishop of Canterbury's presidential speech

From the Guardian -Full text at link at bottom-

In the last few weeks we've seen a number of topics coming up in public discussion, all centring on one set of questions – a set of questions which I think reflects painfully accurately some of the problems we face in our church, locally and internationally. The heated debates around the equality bill brought this out in one way, some of the renewed flurries of pressure and anxiety about euthanasia and assisted dying in other ways. And as we look forward to our own debates later in the year on women bishops and on the Anglican Covenant, we may see the parallels. And in the middle of all the frustration that many feel about deferring the debate on women bishops, perhaps we can at least ask how we can spend the intervening time constructively, looking again at whether we might learn anything from the way our culture is moving that will help us maintain some level of health or maturity in our church. That is the task I'm going to attempt, with some trepidation, today .

(snip)

But when the affirmation of that good takes the form of pre-empting the discernment of the wider Anglican (and a lot of the non-Anglican) fellowship, and of acting in ways that negate the general understanding of the limits set by Bible and tradition, there is a conflict with another undoubted good, which is the capacity of the Anglican family to affirm and support one another in diverse contexts. The freedom claimed, for example, by the Episcopal church to ordain a partnered homosexual bishop is, simply as a matter of fact, something that has a devastating impact on the freedom of, say, the Malaysian Christian to proclaim the faith without being cast as an enemy of public morality and risking both credibility and personal safety. It hardly needs to be added that the freedom that might be claimed by an African Anglican to support anti-gay legislation likewise has a serious impact on the credibility of the gospel in our setting.

Its all here-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/09/full-text-archbishop-canterbury-speech