Anglicans create new bloc of power
Stalemate on gays spurs rebellion
JERUSALEM - Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared yesterday they would defy historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the Communion led by a council predominantly of African archbishops.
The announcement came at the close of an unprecedented weeklong meeting in Jerusalem of Anglican conservatives who say they represent a majority of the 77 million members of the Anglican Communion.
They depicted their efforts as the culmination of an anticolonial struggle against the Communion's seat of power in Britain, from which missionaries first carried Anglican Christianity to the developing world. The conservatives say many of the descendants of those Anglican missionaries in Britain and North America are following a "false gospel" that allows a malleable view of Scripture.
The conservatives said they were not breaking away from the Communion or creating a schism. But their plans, if carried out, could create severe upheaval in the Communion, the world's third-largest grouping of churches.
After more than 1,000 delegates to the meeting at a hotel here affirmed their platform statement, Africans, Australians, South Americans, and Indians gathered for prayer, dancing and swaying 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, "It's quite clear we have been in turmoil." But he added, "With this decision we have a fresh beginning."
He was accompanied by the archbishops of Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sydney, as well as an American, the Right Rev. David C. Anderson Sr., who was made a bishop of the Church of Nigeria.
The statement the delegates released said it was time to create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church's consecration of an openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, in 2003 and the Canadian church's blessing of same-sex unions.
Anderson said a new province would unite believers in North America who had abandoned the Episcopal Church in recent decades because they disagreed with the ordination of women priests, its interpretation of Scripture or its acceptance of homosexuality.
Some liberal Episcopalians sought to play down the conservatives' actions.
Jim Naughton, canon for communications of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., said: "What the leaders of the Communion may decide to do is just slowly erode the credibility of this thing. Because even though they've presented it to the world as this large body of Anglicans, when push comes to shove it remains five angry provinces and their allies in the West."
