Archbishops Hold Canterbury Summit Over Threat of Schism

From TIMESONLINE
By Ruth Gledhill

Anglican archbishops will hold an emergency meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury today to discuss the unfolding schism in the Church in America.

The meeting between Dr Rowan Williams and the primates of Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and the Southern Cone comes two days after conservatives in the US unveiled the constitution and canons of the new Anglican Church in North America.

With a membership of 100,000, drawn from disaffected members of the Episcopal Church of the US and from churches that broke away over the women’s ordination dispute, leaders of the new “province” claim they are not splitting from the 75 million-strong Anglican Communion.

A formal proposal arguing for recognition as the 39th province of the Anglican Communion will be put before the primates at their meeting in Alexandria, Egypt, at the end of January.

However, a statement from Lambeth Palace last night made it clear that no request for recognition as a province had been made and seemed to indicate that this was unlikely.

The Palace said there are “clear guidelines” set out for the creation of new provinces. “Once begun, any of these processes will take years to complete,” it said, making it clear that in the case of the US conservatives no such process had begun.

The new church remains relatively small compared to the 2.2 million members of the Episcopal Church, which sparked the crisis in 2003 with the consecration of the openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire, the Right Rev Gene Robinson.

Today Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Bishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone (South American states), Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya, Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda and Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda will discuss the crisis with Dr Williams at The Old Palace, his home in Canterbury, in a meeting arranged at their initiative.

Bishop Venables said the meeting had been in the diary for some time. He said the founders of the new province wanted to maintain unity. He said: “It would be unthinkable if those who believe in original Anglicanism found there was no place for them in the new Anglicanism.”

However, Jim Naughton, of the Episcopal Church denied charges of unorthodoxy. He said: “There are small antigay Christian denominations all over the US and we have existed in the midst of these denominations for ages. At this point, this is just another of those small antigay Christian denominations. They are distinguished from other small antigay churches in the US by their global pretensions, but the relationships they have cultivated with a handful of like-minded leaders in Africa do not really change the dynamic here in the US.”