Anglicanism at risk

It’s  the “Summer of Schism” in Anglicanism worldwide, says Christianity Today.  “It’s all over but the lawsuits,” a west suburban Chicago-area priest told the magazine, which commented, “She may just be right.”

“The 400-year-old Anglican project appears over” to “evangelical” bishops attending the decennial Lambeth Conference, its correspondent, George Conger, wrote.

At issue is primarily the ordination in 2003 of the gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who was asked not to attend the decennial Lambeth Conference, a 20–day affair that began July 16.

So were disinvited a Zimbabwean bishop, for his ties to Robert Mugabe, and American bishops who have been ordained for breakaway conservative U.S. jurisdictions overseen by Africans, such as the Anglican Mission in the Americas, led by Rwanda, and the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), led by Nigerians,

American and Canadian bishops who ordained Robinson have not been banned, however; and bishops from four African countries will not be attending in protest.  Neither will the bishops of Sydney, the largest diocese in Australia, and other evangelical bishops — all in protest of these exclusions and inclusions, for a total of 200 to 250 recusants, of 880 bishops in all.

“Humanely speaking [sic], there is little hope for even a peaceful separation” between the liberal and evangelical Anglican wings, Bishop Gregory Venables from Argentina told the magazine.

The conference will not attempt to settle disputes, however.  Rather, it will try to encourage “the building of relationships” with a view to coming to terms with each other eventually, Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury told the conference.

But Bishop Venables’s telephone has not been ringing, he said.  “[N]o one has called me to say, ‘Let’s talk this over.'”

What has worked in the past for Archbishop Williams, asking conservative bishops to hold back in honor of the union, has been turned on its head this time, when Williams will be asking pro-gay Americans to hold back, says Conger.  But they are not willing to do so.

Nor were Williams’s own English bishops, who this month In their General Synod rejected his pleas to provide “legal safeguards for opponents of women bishops,” said Conger.