Will a Fierce Battle Over Gay Rights Split the Anglican Church?

By Marcela Valente, IPS News. Posted December 27, 2008.

The crisis in the Anglican Communion was expressed on a number of occasions this year. In July and early August, more than 250 Anglican bishops out of a total of 850 boycotted the traditional Lambeth Conference, celebrated once every 10 years in Canterbury.

In an address to this year's conference, Williams reiterated the resolution calling for a moratorium on interventions across province boundaries, as well as a moratorium on ordaining gay bishops and performing same-sex marriages, adopted at the previous Lambeth Conference in 1998.

The 1998 resolution "remains where our Communion as a global community stands," said Williams.

The reason for the moratoria is that a healthy Church confronted by divisions needs "space for study and free discussion without pressure, pastoral patience and respect," he said, a process the bishops at Canterbury were engaged in furthering.

The dissidents, mostly from provinces of the South, held their own meeting, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem in June. "We grieve for the spiritual decline in the most economically developed nations, where the forces of militant secularism and pluralism are eating away the fabric of society and churches are compromised and enfeebled in their witness," their final statement said.

The Anglican bishops at Jerusalem criticized "the acceptance and promotion within the provinces of the Anglican Communion of a different 'gospel' which is contrary to the apostolic gospel," and the promotion of "a variety of sexual preferences and immoral behavior as a universal human right."

"In 2003 this false gospel led to the consecration of a bishop living in a homosexual relationship," the document states.

The GAFCON bishops described the "realignment" that is occurring as dissenting bishops leave their dioceses and join other Anglican provinces, and "the failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy." "We are a global Communion with a colonial structure," they said.

Venables attended both conferences, at Canterbury and Jerusalem. "The African bishops did not go to Lambeth because they feel frustrated," he said. "The Anglican Church in Africa has always been very traditionalist, and when the United States suddenly took a direction that many did not agree with, they found there was no room for dissenters."

This is the dilemma today in the Anglican Church, he said. There is a "serious crisis," according to Venables, but the decision to break apart or to settle the differences has been postponed. The next Anglican Communion Primates' Meeting, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, will be held in Alexandria, Egypt in February 2009.

The bishop of Argentina said he had persuaded the African primates to attend, but he admitted that they are skeptical about the results that can be expected.

"They say that it will just be more of the same. Their patience is running out. They feel that 'again, white people want to run everything their own way,'" he said.

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