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Anglicans Await Report on Gay Issue

Posted on: Monday, 18 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

LONDON - Anglicans hope a long-awaited report will resolve divisions within the church that have intensified with the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the United States.

The ordination last November of Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire angered conservatives within the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, whose roots lie in the Church of England. They consider such changes a direct attack on the Bible and 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

"Every organization needs rules about what is and is not acceptable behavior amongst its members," said the Rev. David Phillips, general secretary of the Church Society, a small but vocal conservative evangelical group in the Church of England.

"The Anglican Communion is being asked to decide what to do when some members deliberately break the agreed rules."

An emergency panel called the Lambeth Commission, set up by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, was to issue recommendations Monday on how the Anglican Communion can resolve its divisions.

The report was to address unity in general within the Communion, whose roots lie in the Church of England. But it was expected to be dominated by the debate over homosexuality.

British media have speculated that the commission, headed by Irish primate Robin Eames, will chart a middle course, keeping Robinson in place but seeking a promise from churches not to ordain other openly gay bishops.

"What Eames will have to do is find a way of sustaining trust between the different parties while at the same time ensuring that they are responsible to each other," said the Rev. Timothy Jenkins, a member of the General Synod, the Church of England's governing body. "It's more a matter of a process than it will be of producing a solution I think.

But liberal sections of the international communion believe their faith has oppressed gays and lesbians in the past. They welcomed the decision by the Episcopal Church, Anglicanism's U.S. branch, to consecrate Robinson, who lives with his partner.

"We are not in crisis. It is those people who find homosexuality unacceptable who are in crisis," said the Rev. Martin Reynolds, a spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.

"We hope this report is the beginning of a long discussion, not the last word."

Worldwide, Anglican conservatives are heavily in the majority. A 1998 conference of all Anglican bishops declared gay practices "incompatible with Scripture" and opposed gay ordinations and same-sex blessings in a 526-70 vote with 45 abstentions.

The Times of London said the report would ask the 38 churches to sign an agreement not to ordain openly gay bishops. The newspaper also said the report would allow conservative American parishes unable to accept Robinson's ordination to opt for "alternative episcopal oversight."

The Daily Telegraph said the report was not expected to ask for Robinson's resignation or call for the expulsion of the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church from the global communion.

Other explosive matters being considered by the report include increasing ordinations of openly gay priests in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada, and same-sex blessing ceremonies.

The 17-member Lambeth Commission consists of senior church figures and theologians headed by Irish primate Robin Eames.

Last month Eames said the panel would probably "recommend radical changes in the ways Anglicanism relates to its different constituencies," but details of the report's recommendations have been kept tightly under wraps.

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On the Net:

Eames' panel: www.anglicancommunion.org/ecumenical/commissions/lambeth/

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