Conservatives announce plan to break from Episcopal Church

Move culminates rift over naming of gay bishop

WHEATON, Ill. - Conservatives alienated from the Episcopal Church announced yesterday that they were founding their own rival church denomination, the biggest challenge yet to the authority of the Episcopal Church since it ordained an openly gay bishop five years ago.

The move threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest Christian body, made up of 38 provinces around the world that trace their roots to the Church of England and its spiritual leader, the archbishop of Canterbury.

The conservatives intend to seek the approval of leaders in the global Anglican Communion for the province they plan to form. If they receive broad approval, their effort could lead to new defections from the Episcopal Church, the American branch of Anglicanism.

In the last few years, Episcopalians who wanted to leave the church but remain in the Anglican Communion put themselves under the authority of bishops in Africa and Latin America. A new American province would give them a homegrown alternative.

It would also result in two competing provinces on the same soil, each claiming the mantle of historical Anglican Christianity. The conservatives have named theirs the Anglican Church in North America. And for the first time, a province would be defined not by geography, but by theological orientation.

"We're going through Reformation times, and in Reformation times things aren't neat and clean," Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, a conservative who led his diocese out of the Episcopal Church in October, said in an interview. "In Reformation times, new structures are emerging."

Duncan will be named the archbishop and primate of the North American church, which says it would have 100,000 members, compared with 2.3 million in the Episcopal Church.

The conservatives contend that the American and Canadian churches have broken with traditional Christianity in many ways, but their resolve to form a unified breakaway church was precipitated by the decision to ordain an openly gay bishop and to bless gay unions.

The Rev. Charles Robertson, canon for the Episcopal Church's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said yesterday, "There is room within the Episcopal Church for people of different views, and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ."

He added that the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, and La Iglesia Anglicana de Mexico will continue to be "the official, recognized presence of the Anglican Communion in North America."

At a news conference last night, the conservative group unveiled its constitution and canons at a large evangelical church.

The proposed new province would unite nine groups that have left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. Those groups include four Episcopal dioceses and umbrella groups for dozens of individual parishes in the United States and Canada.