Conservatives to split -- but only from Episcopal Church

Sunday, 29th June 2008. 6:36am

By: George Conger.

Jerusalem: Conservatives will declare a split from the Episcopal Church but will stop short of schism with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“There will be permanent division, one way or the other,” Dr. Peter Jensen (pictured), the archbishop of Sydney told the media, as the decision by the Episcopal Church to consecrate a practicing homosexual as a bishop in 2003 was “an extraordinary strategic blunder” that had divided the church.

However, the Anglican Communion will continue, the Primate of the Southern Cone, Bishop Gregory Venables of Argentina said. “This is not a shutting of doors. We are not walking away,” he said, but were forming a movement that would reform and renew the Anglican Churches.

An “awful lot of people are waiting for a bit of light,” he said, and Gafcon will provide that light. The church was ripe for the message of Gafcon as “there is still an intact fellowship of believing Christians” who will be drawn to this confessing movement, Bishop Venables said.

In a statement to be released on June 29 at the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) in Jerusalem conservatives representing the majority of members of the Anglican Communion are expected to form a confessing movement, akin to a “church within a church” that breaks with the liberal bishops of the US and Canada who have authorized the blessing of same-sex unions and backed the consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire.

Final touches to the communiqué were being applied on June 28 by the drafting committee, chaired by the Archbishop of Kenya Benjamin Nzimbi, including a clarification of relations with the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The crisis could have been avoided, the Gafcon leaders argued, had the Episcopal Church not turned its back on “dialogue” with the rest of the Communion, and gone its own way. “If only they would have come and talked to us and listen to us,” this could have been avoided, Bishop Venables said.

He announced that he would attend next month’s Lambeth Conference as “I personally believe there is room to manoeuvre” and work through the crisis of doctrine and discipline that has divided the Anglican Communion. He would go to Lambeth to “listen, to share with others” and keep the dialogue alive.

Dr. Jensen noted that if the Episcopal Church “did not believe that there would be consequences” for consecrating a “gay” priest as Bishop of New Hampshire, “that was an arrogant thing,” as its “consequences have been unfolding over the last five years, now their church is divided.”

He added that “all around the world the sleeping giant that is evangelical Anglicanism and orthodox Anglicanism has been aroused” and will break with the liberal wings of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada.

Dr. Jensen, one of the conference organizers, said that he expected there would be “long term consequences flowing from the conference” that will see “concrete results” that will change the Anglican Communion.

Past meetings of archbishops and bishops had proved fruitless in resolving the disputes, Bishop Venables said. “We got frustrated. We talked and talked, but where did we go?”

The Sydney archbishop, leader of the largest group of Anglicans in Australia, said that he had been unsure at the start of the conference whether it would succeed. Gafcon resembled a “ramshackle aeroplane, and I was never sure it was going to land.” However, it had turned out to be one of the most “extraordinary spiritual experiences I have ever had.”

The Gafcon meeting of over 1,200 Anglican bishops, clergy and lay leaders at the Renaissance Hotel in Jerusalem from churches that make up the majority of the 80-million member Anglican will announce new structures for conservative churches in the US and Canada.

It will also put forward a declaration of common doctrinal principles and lay out plans for a new Book of Common Prayer and catechism based upon the historic Church of England 1662 prayer book, as well as pursue a common way of reading and interpreting the Bible, Nigerian Bishop John Akao said.