Anglican Rift

Drive to bar liberal from Church's crisis summit
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph

The Archbishop of Canterbury's efforts to defuse the bitter Anglican row over gays looked increasingly doomed last night after conservative leaders threatened to bar a leading liberal from a crisis meeting in Africa next week.

Dr Rowan Williams invited Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the new head of the liberal American Church, in the hope that the warring factions might reach a compromise if they could talk face-to-face.
The primates' meeting is regarded as a last-ditch attempt to avert a formal split over homosexuality, and Dr Williams has even asked conservative American bishops to fly in to appear even-handed.
But in a humiliating blow to the Archbishop's authority, senior conservative leaders privately wrote to him last month warning that he had no right to invite Bishop Schori to the summit without their consent.
In an atmosphere of growing distrust, they have now demanded a change to the agenda so they can decide whether to admit her at all.

A decision to slam the door on Bishop Schori, the first woman to lead an Anglican Church, would derail Dr Williams's efforts to achieve a compromise and spark a bitter civil war.
Conservative Global South leaders, who represent well over half the worldwide Church, are determined, however, to discipline the liberal Americans, who brought the Church to the brink of schism by consecrating Anglicanism's first openly gay bishop in 2003. A number of the African archbishops have indicated that they may not "sit at the same table" with Bishop Schori, who supported the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson and gay "marriages".
As part of a power struggle with Dr Williams, they also accused him of a "fait accompli" by deciding to include the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, at the primates' meeting for the first time.
Dr Williams argued that as he had to chair the meeting, Dr Sentamu was needed to represent the Church of England. But the conservative group, led by the Primate of Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, claimed that Dr Williams was adopting authoritarian powers rather than acting as "first among equals" among his fellow leaders.
They may try to bar Dr Sentamu from the five-day summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The conservatives refuse to attend Holy Communion with liberals at the summit.
The group, who make up more than 20 of the 38 primates, will finalise their strategy before the summit starts on February 15. They will present a blueprint for a "parallel" Church to accommodate a range of conservatives in America, but this is unlikely to be acceptable to the American Episcopal Church.
Dr Williams hopes to achieve a settlement that will appease the conservatives, while keeping the liberals on board, until a more formal separation can be arranged.
Tensions were heightened last week by a leaked email sent by the worldwide Church's senior official to an American gay rights activist, endorsing a scathing attack on Dr Williams by a liberal American bishop. Canon Kenneth Kearon, the secretary-general of the Anglican Communion, appeared to back criticisms of Dr Williams that he favoured conservatives and had chosen "a path that is not courageous or well-defined".

Challenge for the Church (editorial comment in The Telegraph)
The Anglican Communion has been "on the brink of schism" for so long now that this seems to have become its default position – forever poised to fall apart, though never quite taking the leap into formal disunity. But perhaps we should take a closer look at the arrangements for the meeting of Anglican primates in Tanzania next week.
As we report today, conservative archbishops are refusing to receive the Eucharist alongside liberal colleagues. Only in the strange world of Anglican ecclesiology could both parties be regarded as belonging to the same Communion. Arguably, the schism has already begun.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, does not accept the logic of that position. He is trying to stop conservative Third World primates from blocking the participation of Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the new head of the American Episcopal Church, which ordains gay bishops. If he succeeds, and Bishop Schori is allowed in, he will plough ahead with massively complicated plans to divide the 38 Anglican provinces into "constituent" and "associate" members of the Communion. Critics say that this scheme sounds as if it has been scribbled in desperation on the back of an envelope; the secretary-general of the Anglican Communion, no less, has endorsed the view that Dr Williams has chosen "a path that is not courageous or well defined".

The question now is how much damage the end of the Communion would do to the Church of England. That depends partly on Dr Williams. The Established Church is founded on an English pragmatism that finds space for Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative. Alas, that pragmatism cannot be exported.
The Anglican Communion is one of several supra-national bodies (such as the Commonwealth) whose ambitions no longer correspond to reality. Dr Williams should let it fade away, and instead apply his intellect to holding together our national Church.

My Comments
Responding to the obvious need for this summit meeting to be surrounded by prayer here at Dulverton Hall some of us have arranged a Novena of Prayer to the Holy Spirit to commence this Wednesday but to our surprise this has aroused a good deal of antagonism in the house, with personal attacks and questioning of our motives. All we are suggesting is 15 minutes of daily prayer in our chapel before lunch for anyone who cares to join in. It clearly illustrates a level of polarisation and distrust at all levels of the church from top to bottom. Surely prayer about the situation is where we should begin the process of finding a way through.