The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), in a narrow 30-28 vote, endorsed a request made by Anglican primates at a meeting in Northern Ireland earlier this year for Canada and the U.S. to “voluntarily withdraw” from the council until the next decennial meeting in 2008 of the Lambeth Conference, the communion’s highest advisory body.
Lay delegate Stanley Isaacs of South East Asia put forward the proposal, which was supported by 12 signatories, including Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who has strongly criticized moves by the North American churches to liberalize attitudes towards homosexuals.
The latest crisis to hit the 77-million-member Anglican Communion began two years ago, when ECUSA’s General Convention endorsed the election by the Diocese of New Hampshire of a practicing homosexual clergyman, Gene Robinson, as its new bishop. At the same time, Canada’s Diocese of Westminster had approved the use of rites for the blessing of same-sex unions, so-called “gay marriages.”
That prompted Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglicans’ spiritual leader, to call an urgent meeting of all the primates, which warned that consecrating Robinson would risk tearing the fabric of the communion, a euphemism for schism. Akinola and many other conservative primates threatened to break communion if that happened.
Robinson was “consecrated,” and the battle lines drawn.
Dr Williams also commissioned a panel to review the situation of authority in the Communion, which has no official policy-making body, and to make recommendations on how to respond to the American and Canadian actions. That panel issued what became known as the Windsor Report, which called for an explanation from the American church on the ordination. At the same time, the primates called on the US and Canadian churches to withdraw voluntarily from the ACC until 2008.
In his opening address to the ACC meeting, Dr Williams spoke of the American churches’ actions, saying that “on these matters, the Church is not persuaded that change is right. And where there is a strong scriptural presumption against change, a long consensus of teaching in Christian history, and a widespread ecumenical agreement, it may well be thought that change would need an exceptionally strong critical mass to justify it.
“That, I think, is where the Communion as a whole stands. That is why actions by some provinces have caused outrage and hurt. To invite, as does the Windsor document, those provinces to reconsider is not to say that there are no issues to be resolved, no prejudice to be repented of (because there unquestionably is much of this); it is not to reject the idea of an ‘inclusive’ Church or to canonise an unintelligent reading of the Bible. It is to say that actions taken in sensitive matters against the mind of the Church cannot go unchallenged while the Church’s overall discernment is as it is without injuring the delicate fabric of relations within the Church and so compromising its character.”
In a statement released through Episcopal Church communications officials, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold said, “The vote, which was contingent on the absence of the six votes of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, reveals a divide within the membership of the ACC.”
He added that “the work and mission of the Anglican Communion is carried out largely through international commissions and networks in which the Episcopal Church continues as a fully active and committed participant. It is through these means and our numerous other relationships focused on mission to our hurting world that we will, w
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