The Episcopal Church’s protestation that it has not ended the ban on gay bishops or blessings has not found support outside its borders.After strong international reaction against the decisions of the recent General Convention, US Church leaders moved quickly to claim that the Church had not changed its position.
But critics said that this was the inevitable outcome when the Episcopal Church opened the discernment process for new bishops to gay clergy and permitted dioceses to compile and develop rites for the blessings of same-sex unions.
None of the American church’s allies among the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion have publicly spoken up in support of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s claims that nothing has changed, while several sharp statements have been released by overseas provinces and dioceses charging that the Episcopal Church had walked away from the Anglican Communion.
On July 18 Bishop Jefferts Schori stated that “in 2009” there are “more and deeper relationships with parts of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion than five or 10 years ago.”
The votes taken at General Convention were a “truthful attempt to deepen relationships,” she said.
However, on July 30 the Standing Committee of the Anglican Church in Southeast Asia stated the adoption of resolutions D025 and CO56 by the US General Convention, “when on a plain and ordinary reading, constitutes an abrogation by [the Episcopal Church] of the agreed-to moratorium on the consecration of practising homosexual clergy as bishops and rites of blessing for same-sex unions.”
This “effectively moves” the US church “away from the orthodox position” of the wider communion and is a “repudiation of the listening and consultation processes put in place in an attempt to resolve these issues.”
The Rt Rev Bethlehem Nopece, Bishop of the South African diocese of Port Elizabeth, called the adoption of the two resolutions by the US church a “deliberate defiance of the wider Body of the Anglican Communion.”
“The blessings of the same-sex unions and the ordination of practicing gay clergy is inconsistent with the Word of God written; it is theologically uninformed, incoherent with the wider church, endorsing schism in the Anglican Communion and threatens ecumenical fellowship and relations,” he charged on July 31.
The Episcopal Church had chosen to “journey alone,” he said.
The South African church will “still uplift the Biblical standard of guidance in moral behaviour. We do not seek any political correctness, but call upon all people to repentance and change of life and patterns of behaviour for a new character in line with the demands of the Word of God,” Bishop Nopece said.
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