Once a decade, hundreds of bishops of the international Anglican Communion meet in Canterbury, England, for the Lambeth Conference. This summer, in the most tangible demonstration yet of the church’s division over homosexuality, hundreds of bishops are boycotting the Lambeth Conference and attending a rival meeting for conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem.
Setting the tone for their meeting, the conservatives released a strongly worded theological manifesto on Thursday in Jerusalem, declaring that they see no possibility for reconciliation with the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada, which have accepted a gay bishop and same-sex unions.
The conservatives say that after years of emergency meetings and ultimatums, they have been “ignored,” “demonized” and “marginalized.”
“There is no longer any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion,” the document said.
After five years of hinting at the possibility of schism, this is the most explicit threat that some conservatives are prepared to break from the Anglican Communion, the world’s third largest affiliation of Christian churches, with 77 million members.
They say they see a “parallel between contemporary events and events in England in the sixteenth century,” when the Church of England broke from the Roman Catholic church.
“Now after five centuries, a new fork in the road is appearing,” said the document, which is published as a book titled, “The Way, the Truth and the Life.”
But the document stops short of spelling out the next steps or declaring a new Reformation or a separate church. It is intended as a position paper for the conservatives, who are themselves not of one mind about the next steps, and it will be debated at their Jerusalem meeting.
About 280 bishops and 750 laypeople, including bishops’ spouses, are expected to meet in Jerusalem from June 22 to 29 for what they are calling the “Global Anglican Future Conference,” organizers said.
They include a majority of the bishops from Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya, and parts of Tanzania, who plan to boycott the Lambeth Conference this year.
The rest of those at the Jerusalem Conference are from England, the United States, Australia and some countries in Asia and Latin America.
The conservatives decided to hold their own meeting after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, announced last year that he would not send an invitation for the Lambeth Conference to a leading conservative leader, Bishop Martyn Minns, a rector in a Virginia church who was ordained a bishop in the Church of Nigeria.
The role of Bishop Minns is to minister to conservatives alienated from the Episcopal Church, but his ordination was seen by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a violation of established boundaries.
In a recent interview, Bishop Minns said of his exclusion by the Archbishop: “I didn’t’ feel it was a well-informed political move. Instead of removing the distraction, as he claimed to do, he’s actually created a massive distraction.”
The Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, declared that if Bishop Minns could not attend the Lambeth Conference, then none of his bishops would attend.
The conservatives themselves are divided about boycotting the Lambeth Conference, and whether holding the Jerusalem conference is a good idea. Some have said conservatives would be more effective if they all showed up at Lambeth and tried to steer events or staged a walk-out.
About 10 percent of the bishops at the Jerusalem conference will also be going to the Lambeth Conference, however, Bishop Minns said.
The only other bishop not invited to Lambeth by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who issues the invitations, is Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, whose consecration by the Episcopal Church inflamed the conservatives because he lives openly with his gay partner.
This month, Bishop Robinson and his partner of 20 years, Mark Andrew, celebrated a private civil union ceremony at a church in New Hampshire.
Bishop Robinson plans to appear at events on the sidelines of the Lambeth Conference, even though he cannot attend the formal sessions.
At the last Lambeth Conference, in 1998, the bishops overwhelmingly passed a resolution saying that homosexuality was “incompatible with Scripture,” and that homosexuals should not be ordained. The vote revealed the growing strength of the conservative bishops from Africa and the developing world.
To forestall conflict, the organizers of this year’s Lambeth Conference have planned for no resolutions, no proposals and no votes. Instead, the bishops will meet in small groups, on the theory that they will overcome their divisions by building personal relationships.
The Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., who served on the design committee for Lambeth, said in a news conference last month, “It’s fundamentally about the encounter, about conversations among the leaders all oriented to: what is God calling the Anglican Communion and the bishops to be about in the wider world?”
Bishop Minns said of the Lambeth Conference, “It’s unfortunate, at a time the church needs clear and strong leadership, it gets two weeks of conversation.”
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