NAVASOTA, Texas (ABP) — With a March 20 resolution, bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States rejected calls from their global counterparts to backtrack on gay rights — and the rebuff may endanger the U.S. church's role in the worldwide Anglican Communion.
The American bishops said demands from global Anglican leaders violated their consciences and the church's governing documents.
The denomination's House of Bishops, meeting at a retreat center near Houston, responded to an earlier communiqué from worldwide Anglican leaders who issued the document after a meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The leaders, called primates, are bishops of highest rank in a province or country.
U.S. leaders rejected the primates' calls to change the church's leadership structure and to pull back from full inclusion of gay and lesbian Episcopalians in the life of the church.
“With great hope that we will continue to be welcome in the councils of the family of churches we know as the Anglican Communion, we believe that to participate in the primates' pastoral scheme would be injurious to the Episcopal Church for many reasons,” a resolution passed by U.S. bishops said.
The primates' ultimatum had threatened the American church with a much-reduced role in the 77-million-member Anglican Communion. It set a Sept. 30 deadline for a moratorium on consecration of any more openly gay bishops in partnered relationships. It also demanded that the church stop giving local dioceses and congregations leeway in deciding whether to bless same-sex relationships among members.
Last year's election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as the Episcopal Church's first female presiding bishop was the most recent of several moves that deepened divisions between conservatives and moderates and progressives in the denomination. Schori supports inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church.
Her election served to exacerbate U.S. conservatives' ongoing discontent over the 2003 election of Gene Robinson as bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. Robinson is the first bishop in the Anglican Communion to be openly gay and publicly involved in a same-sex relationship.
Recently, 11 congregations in Virginia voted to leave their diocese and denomination for the authority of Archbishop Peter Akinola of the Anglican Church of Nigeria.
The communiqué also demanded that the American church allow an Anglican panel to create a separate “primatial vicar” to provide spiritual authority for those conservative U.S. dioceses and parishes.
But the American bishops flatly rejected the primates' demands, citing five reasons:
First, allowing groups to create a separate authority for a group of U.S. Episcopalians is “a delegation of primatial authority not permissible under our canons and a compromise of our autonomy as a church not permissible under our constitution.”
Second, the structure the primates demanded “fundamentally changes the character” of earlier worldwide attempts at reconciliation over these issues.
Third, the ultimatum “violates our founding principles as the Episcopal Church following our own liberation from colonialism and the beginning of a life independent of the Church of England” because it asks bishops to make changes without proper authority.
Fourth, the demands run counter to English Reformation heritage in that they sacrifice “the emancipation of the laity for the exclusive leadership of high-ranking bishops.”
Finally, the bishops concluded, the “pastoral scheme” of the communiqué “is spiritually unsound” because it “encourages one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them and be instruments of reconciliation.”
The bishops also — without naming him specifically — implicitly criticized Nigerian Archbishop Akinola's practice of inserting himself into the affairs of a sister Anglican Communion “province.”
“Other Anglican bishops, indeed including some primates, have violated our provincial boundaries and caused great suffering and contributed immeasurably to our difficulties in solving our problems and in attempting to communicate for ourselves with our Anglican brothers and sisters,” the resolution said.
The resolution also alluded to Akinola's opposition to women's ordination and support for proposed laws in Nigeria that would criminalize any advocacy for gay rights. Akinola has said he has supported the laws because opposing them would cause hardships for Anglicans in his conservative nation, where tensions between Christians and Muslims run high.
“We proclaim the gospel that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. We proclaim the gospel that in Christ all God's children, including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ's church,” the bishops' resolution said. “We proclaim the gospel that in Christ all God's children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ's church. … The Dar es Salaam Communiqué is distressingly silent on this subject.”
The bishops, in a separate move, also requested a meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican Communion's symbolic head.
According to the website VirtueOnline.org, conservative Episcopalians were highly critical of the bishops' resolutions.
“Without even addressing the deeper issues of belief and practice, the House of Bishops has answered the primates with a resounding 'no' to the question of whether or not the church is willing to abide by the mind of the Anglican Communion,” said David Anderson, head of the American Anglican Council. “If they cannot accommodate on the structural points of the primates' requests … I do not see how they will ever turn back on the theological points. The church's desire for complete power and autonomy goes hand-in-hand with its rebellion against Scriptural authority.”
John-David Schofield, who heads the first diocese that considered leaving the Episcopal Church, had harsher words.
“I think what the [bishops] did is arrogant, incredible, and they claim that they desire to be a part of the Anglican Communion, but what they are basically saying is, 'We want [to] do it in our way and in our time,'” said Schofield, bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin in California.
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