Anglicans face split over gay policies

JERUSALEM — Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared on Sunday that they would defy the church’s historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the church led by a council of predominantly African archbishops.

The announcement came at the close of an unprecedented week-long meeting of Anglican conservatives in Jerusalem, who contend that they represent a majority of the 77 million members of the Anglican Communion.

They depicted their efforts as the culmination of an anti-colonial struggle against the church’s seat of power in Great Britain, whose missionaries first brought Anglican Christianity to the developing world.

The conservatives say many of the descendants of those Anglican missionaries in Britain and North America are now following what they call a “false gospel” that allows a malleable, liberal interpretation of Scripture.

They insisted that they were not breaking away from the Anglican Communion or creating a schism. But if carried out, their plans would create severe upheaval in the Communion, the world’s third largest grouping of churches after the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox churches.After more than 1,000 delegates to the meeting at a Jerusalem hotel 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.

The statement the delegates released in Jerusalem said that it was time to create a new province in the United States and Canada that would absorb the churches that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions.

Bishop Anderson said a new province would unite believers in North America who had abandoned the Episcopal Church over the last few decades, because they disagreed with the ordination of women priests and bishops, the interpretation of Scripture or the acceptance of homosexuality.

“It brings them the hope now finally of regathering the portion of the church that scattered when heterodoxy just became untenable and many were driven out, not all at once, but over the years in different stages,” he said.