At Tense Anglican Meeting, a Call for Humility

By Sharon LaFraniere

Facing a possible church fracture over the issue of homosexuality, the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion reminded bishops of the need for humility as church leaders gathered for services on the island of Zanzibar.

“There was a great saint who said God was evident when bishops are silent,” the Most Reverend Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, told hundreds who packed a 173-year-old stone cathedral on Sunday. “There is one thing a bishop should say to another bishop: that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior.”

Nearly three dozen leaders of the world’s 77 million Anglicans have gathered in Tanzania in an attempt to resolve the long- simmering conflict over homosexuality. The most conservative archbishops, led by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, are demanding that the group take firm action against the Episcopal Church of the United States, which consecrated a gay bishop in 2003 and has not banned blessings of same-sex unions.

On Friday, Akinola and six other archbishops refused to celebrate the Holy Eucharist with Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of 2.3 million members of the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion. To celebrate communion with Jefferts Schori, who supports gay clergy and church blessings of same-sex unions, “would be a violation of Scriptural teaching and the traditional Anglican understanding,” said a statement on the Nigerian church Web site.

Some observers interpreted Williams’s sermon as an implicit rebuke of those archbishops. If so, though, Akinola was not there to hear it. He was the only archbishop who did not show up for the Sunday service, according to James Rosenthal, a spokesman for the Anglican Communion. “No one has told me any particular reason,” he said by telephone from Zanzibar.

Rosenthal portrayed a joyous service, with archbishops pitching in to serve communion to a congregation that overflowed into tents outside the church. The archbishops were expected to return to the mainland of Tanzania and, when their conclave ended Monday, issue a communique that deals, in part, with how to react to the Episcopal Church.

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