Anglicans Face Wider Split Over Policy Toward Gays

By DINA KRAFT and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: June 30, 2008
JERUSALEM — Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared on Sunday that they would defy the church’s historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the church led by a council of predominantly African archbishops.

The announcement came at the close of an unprecedented meeting of Anglican conservatives in Jerusalem, who contend that they represent a majority of the 77 million members of the Anglican Communion.

They depicted their efforts as the culmination of an anti-colonial struggle against the church’s seat of power in Great Britain, whose missionaries first brought Anglican Christianity to the developing world. The conservatives say many of the descendants of those Anglican missionaries in Britain and North America are now following what they call a “false gospel” that allows a malleable, liberal interpretation of Scripture.

They insisted that they were not breaking away from the Anglican Communion or creating a schism. But if carried out, their plans would create severe upheaval in the Communion, the world’s third largest grouping of churches after the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox churches. After more than 1,000 delegates to the meeting at a Jerusalem hotel affirmed their platform statement, African women, Australians, South Americans and Indians danced and swayed to a Swahili hymn and shouted full-throated hallelujahs.

Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who leads the largest province in the Communion, said at a news conference afterward, “It’s quite clear we have been in turmoil.”

“With this decision we have a fresh beginning,” he added.

He was accompanied by the archbishops of Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sydney, Australia, and a former American priest, the Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson Sr., whom Archbishop Akinola made a bishop of the Church of Nigeria.

A statement the delegates released in Jerusalem said that it was time to create a new province in the United States and Canada that would absorb the churches that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 1993 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions.

Bishop Anderson said the new province would unite believers in North America who had abandoned the Episcopal Church in the last few decades, over issues like women priests and bishops, the interpretation of Scripture and homosexuality.

“It brings them the hope now finally of regathering the portion of the church that scattered when heterodoxy just became untenable and many were driven out, not all at once, but over the years in different stages,” he said.

The conservatives also challenged the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The current archbishop, Rowan Williams, has been a disappointment to conservatives, because he did not discipline or engineer an eviction of the liberal North Americans. The Archbishop of Canterbury historically has not had the power to decree policy in the Communion, but in the past he determined which churches belonged to the Communion.

The conservatives’ statement said that while they acknowledged Canterbury’s historic position, they did not accept the idea “that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

They said that what would determine membership in their conservative alliance within the Communion is a manifesto they released on Sunday, called the “Jerusalem Declaration,” which contains 14 principles of theological orthodoxy.
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