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Conservative Anglicans break from church over gay policies

by Rob Peters | June 30, 2008 at 01:47 pm | 98 views | add comment

There's been a handful of stories in the news about a potential split over gay policies within the Anglican church, but today the Guardian reports a definitive break. Ironically, this comes at the height of gay pride celebrations around the world.

Conservative evangelicals representing half of the world's Anglicans launched a new global church yesterday, challenging the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and vowing to rescue people from the forces of "militant secularism and pluralism" created by a "spiritual decline" in developing economies.

The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Foca, will sever ties with the main churches in the US and Canada, whose leaders they accuse of betraying biblical teaching. Foca architects will tomorrow go to the conservative evangelical church of All Souls, in central London, to discuss global Anglicanism and English orthodoxy.

Hundreds of disgruntled clergy, representing many Church of England parishes, will be in the audience and the speakers will include the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi.

Great swaths of Anglican provinces, including Africa, South America and Asia, are furious with their counterparts in the northern hemisphere, accusing them of being in thrall to contemporary culture, with the ordination and consecration of gay New Hampshire bishop Gene Robinson acting as a turning point. The creation of Foca is a schism in all but name.

Not surprisingly, those high up in the church fear united leadership will become an issue.

LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) - Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, battling to avoid an Anglican schism over the issue of gay clergy, warned conservatives on Monday of the risks in setting up an alternative council of bishops.

"How is effective discipline to be maintained in a situation of overlapping and competing jurisdictions?" asked the spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans.

At a meeting in Jerusalem, conservative Anglican leaders vowed on Sunday to stay in the worldwide Anglican Communion but form a council of bishops to provide an alternative to churches they say are preaching a "false gospel" of sexual immorality.

The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) said member churches would continue sponsoring breakaway conservative parishes in liberal western member countries and called for a separate conservative province in North America.

It also said Anglicanism, the third largest group of Christians after Roman Catholics and Orthodox, was not "determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury".