Archbishop of Canterbury faces calls to stop American clergy defecting

The way this works: pecusa defies Scripture, church tradition, all four instruments of Anglican unity plus the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, creates a crisis of historic proportions, then seeks to tell the Communion how the crisis should be handled. And the pecusa presiding bish has the nerve to talk about church tradition. Isn't the Angican Communion a wonderful construct? ed.

From The Telegraph (UK):

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Last Updated: 12:50PM BST 18/07/2008

The Archbishop of Canterbury will be told this week to stop conservative clergy leaving their national churches and becoming bishops in other countries.

Dr Rowan Williams is to be lobbied by liberals who are dominating the ten-yearly Lambeth Conference, because more than 200 traditionalist bishops have boycotted the gathering as a result of divisions on gay clergy and women bishops.

He will be told that the process of conservative American clergy opting out of their national body and becoming bishops in African and South American churches goes against tradition and must be stopped.

Dr Williams will also be urged to prevent orthodox Anglicans, who believe the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, from setting up a new province in North America to rival the Episcopal Church of the USA, which triggered the current crisis by electing the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Communion.

The Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has vowed to ask Dr Williams "to encourage other parts of the Communion to cease their incursions" while they are together at Lambeth.

She said: "It's totally opposed to a traditional Christian understanding of how bishops relate to each other. That's the biggest difficulty. They're setting up as something else in the same geographical territory."

Since the Rt Rev Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, several conservative American clergy have become bishops in Nigerian, Kenyan, Ugandan and South American churches while remaining living in their dioceses in the US.

Dozens of Episcopal parishes have now voted to split from the national church, triggering bitter legal battles over the rightful ownership of their church buildings.

At the Gafcon meeting of orthodox Anglicans in Jerusalem last month, leaders from the "Global South" nations of Africa and South America vowed to continue bringing Americans into their churches.

The conference then ended with a call for the creation of a new North American province which would be separate from the Episcopal Church.

Dr Williams has already described the solutions offered by Gafcon as "problematic".

But conservatives say they intend to remain within the Anglican Communion regardless of what Dr Williams and Dr Jefferts Schori say about their new structures and the adoption of American parishes by Global South churches.

The Rev Canon Chris Sugden, one of the organisers of Gafcon, said: "The liberals are obviously taking the opportunity to advance their agenda at Lambeth. I think they want to take over the Communion and they want orthodox Anglicans out. They talk about diversity but it's so obviously contradictory."