By: George Conger
Wednesday, 15th July 2009
Evangelical leaders in Britain and the US have denounced the Episcopal Church’s vote to end the ban on gay clergy, saying it represents a break with the Anglican Communion, a repudiation of the Windsor process and the proposed Anglican Covenant, and a snub of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
On July 13, the House of Bishops meeting at the 76th General Convention adopted resolution D025 its 2006 pledge banning the consecration to the episcopate of clergy in active same-sex relationships. On July 14 the House of Deputies ratified the bishops’ vote by a 72 to 28 per cent margin, formally adopting the resolution.
In a July 8 sermon to the General Convention, Dr Rowan Williams pleaded with the US church for restraint. He thanked them for their invitation to California and for the opportunity “to share something of my mind with you; and so thank you too for your continuing willingness to engage with the wider life of our Communion.”
He acknowledged that “this engagement has been and still is costly for different people in different ways: some feel impatient, some feel compromised, some feel harassed or undervalued, or that their good faith has been ungraciously received.”
“I’m sorry,” the archbishop said. “This has been hard and will not get much easier, I suspect. But it is something for which many of us genuinely are grateful to you and to God,” Dr Williams observed.
Dr Williams came to California with “hopes and anxieties,” adding “I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that could push us further apart. But if people elsewhere in the Communion are concerned about this, it’s because of a profound sense of what the Episcopal Church has given and can give to our fellowship worldwide.”
If the communion could “do perfectly well without you, there wouldn’t be a problem,” Dr Williams said. Nonetheless, “the bonds of relationship are deep, for me personally as for many others,” he said, as the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church needed each other.
Dr Williams was ignored by the Deputies, who on July 11 passed the first reading of D025. In response to a query from the Rev Canon Chris Sugden at question time during General Synod in York on July 13, Dr Williams urged the bishops to block D025.
“As for General Convention it remains to be seen I think whether the vote of the House of Deputies will be endorsed by the House of Bishops,” Dr Williams said. “If the House of Bishops chooses to block then the moratorium remains. I regret the fact that there is not the will to observe the moratorium in such a significant part of the Church in North America but I can't say more about that as I have no details,” he said.
Dr Williams’ concerns were read out to the House of Bishops on July 13 by Bishop William Love of Albany, however, the bishops voted to adopt D025 99 to 45 with two abstentions.
Speaking to a press conference after the vote, Bishop Stacy Sauls of Lexington, Kentucky said Dr Williams was “labouring under a misconception,” about D025 and had been misled by “sensational headlines.”
He said he could “not get into Archbishop of Canterbury’s head” but if Dr Williams believed D025 offered anything new, he was mistaken. It simply “states the reality of this church,” Bishop Sauls said.
In a letter to The Times published on July 15, Bishop NT Wright of Durham stated the “slow-moving train crash of international Anglicanism” had by D025 had “finally brought a large coach off the rails altogether,” marking a “clear break with the rest of the Anglican Communion.”
One of the few bishops known to an American audience apart from Dr Williams, due to his numerous books and lecture tours, Bishop Wright said General Convention was “ignoring” the pleas of the “instruments of Communion” for a “moratorium on consecrating practising homosexuals as bishops.”
General Convention had rejected the Windsor Report and the proposed Anglican Covenant, Bishop Wright said, and was “formalising the schism they initiated six years ago when they consecrated as bishop a divorced man in an active same-sex relationship,” New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson. The Episcopal Church had now “chosen to ‘walk apart’.”
The Episcopal Church was now distancing itself from the fellowship of the Anglican Communion, he argued, and raised the spectre of recognizing the ACNA, writing that he hoped that ways could be found “for all in America who want to be loyal to [the Anglican Communion], and to scripture, tradition and Jesus, [and] to have that loyalty recognised and affirmed at the highest level. On July 14, Anglican Mainstream encouraged Dr Williams to “consult with those primates able to sign the Ridley Covenant Draft together with the Communion Partners in The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America to address the way forward from here.” The group’s rival evangelical pressure group, Fulcrum, was even stronger in its response, saying the decision “represents a further determined walking apart by the American Church and must have significant consequences.”
The Toronto-based Anglican Communion Institute “deeply” regretted the House of Bishops’ decision, but said it was their expectation that “many [American] dioceses will not follow The Episcopal Church out of the Anglican Communion and the mainstream of apostolic Christianity. Instead, they will take immediate action to assure the Communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury of their continued commitment both to observe the Communion’s moratoria and to preserve and restore their structural bonds to the Communion.”
Prof Ian Douglas, a member of the Anglican Consultative Council for the Episcopal Church, and clergy deputy from Massachusetts to General Convention, told The Church of England Newspaper there had been communications between the highest levels of the Episcopal Church and the Church of England over D025 following Dr Williams’ remarks. Lambeth Palace told Church of England Newspaper that Dr Williams was unlikely to comment further and would let General Convention “take its course.”
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