Anglican Head Calls for Covenant to Resolve Gay Rift

The spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Dr Rowan Williams, yesterday has called for the Church’s members to create a structure in which they can all co-exist despite their differences on women bishops and gay clergy.

|PIC1|The Anglican Communion has reached new levels of tension this past week, after the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its first female leader, and she immediately promoted her personal views that go against traditional Church teachings on homosexuality.

Elected as the head of the 2.3-million member US Church, the 52-year-old Bishop told reporters that she felt homosexuality was not a sin.

Bishop Schori’s election was a sting for many conservatives in the Church who are suspicious of her liberal credentials on various issues — especially homosexuality.

It is now believed that if the newly elected presiding bishop continues with her liberal agenda, there will be no room for reconciliation with the majority of the Anglican Communion, who remain faithful to the Biblical tradition that condemns homosexuality as sin.

The ECUSA was the body that brought the worldwide Communion to crisis point in 2003, when it consecrated the Communion’s first ever openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson, as the Bishop of New Hampshire.

Most recently, last week, US Episcopalians rejected demands from conservatives in Africa and at home that they elect no more gay bishops. Episcopalians voted instead to call simply for “restraint” to be used with regards to the issue.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, attempting to guide the 77-million-member Communion, has written a letter to its 38 archbishops stating: “There is no way in which the Anglican Communion can remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment.”

|TOP|“Neither the liberal nor the conservative can simply appeal to a historic identity that doesn't correspond with where we now are,” Williams wrote.

As a potential first step to finding a solution to the ever-deepening crisis, Dr Williams recommended a covenant or agreement, as suggested in 2004, that called for the ECUSA to apologise for appointing a gay bishop without first fully consulting other members of the worldwide body.

Dr Williams stated, “Being an Anglican in the way I have sketched involves certain concessions and unclarities but provides at least for ways of sharing responsibility and making decisions that will hold and that will be mutually intelligible.”

“The reason Anglicanism is worth bothering with,” Williams said, “is because it has tried to find a way of being a Church that is neither tightly centralised nor just a loose federation of essentially independent bodies — a church that is seeking to be a coherent family of communities meeting to hear the Bible read, to break bread and share wine as guests of Jesus Christ, and to celebrate a unity in worldwide mission and ministry.”

|AD|One of the Anglican Communion’s most outspoken voices against homosexuality said the churches in Africa were "saddened" that delegates meeting for the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. seemed unable to embrace the essential recommendations necessary for the healing of divisions within the worldwide church network.

In a letter written on behalf of the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA), the Most Rev Peter Akinola told the Episcopal Church: “We have observed the commitment shown by your church to the full participation of people in same gender sexual relationships in civic life, church life and leadership.”

“As you know, our Churches cannot reconcile this with the teaching on marriage set out in the Holy Scriptures and repeatedly affirmed throughout the Anglican Communion,” he wrote.

In his letter, Akinola said the African primates “assure all those Scripturally faithful dioceses and congregations alienated and marginalised within [the ECUSA’s] Provincial structure that we have heard their cries.”

He said that they have committed themselves to “study very carefully” all of the ECUSA’s various actions and statements, and when they meet with other Primates from the Global South in September, they will present their “concerted pastoral and structural response.”