Anglicans braced for - unity

Posted at TimesOnline by Ruth Gledhill on February 07, 2009 at 08:30 AM:

General Synod begins on Monday and the Bishop of Rochester Dr Michael Nazir-Ali will be leading the debate on the Covenant. This week I spoke to him and to Gregory Cameron who was with the Primates in Alexandria. He is about to become Bishop of St Asaph and is widely known to be the architect of the covenant. It'll be unity, perhaps, but not unity as we've known it. What has surprised me most are the strong signals I'm receiving that the new Anglican Church in North America is likely to be given some kind of recognition, perhaps as an extra-provincial entity. There are a number of precedents. Of the 44 churches of the Anglican Communion, just 38 are provinces. The rest are churches such as from India and China. And because of their large emigrant communities they operate parallel jurisdictions in Cyprus and the Gulf, for example. Then there are the two parallel dioceses of TEC and the CoE in Europe.

As for the Church of England itself, the focus next week will be on women bishops, on race as Vasantha Gnanadoss attempts to get the Church to adopt a policy similar to the police and ban clergy and lay staff from joining the British National Party, and on Paul Eddy's motion on the proselytism of other faiths. One of the worries on women bishops is that weeks, months and years of debate, of reports and of consultation will all be wasted when, in five years time, it falls at the two-thirds majority it will need for final approval. All the signs so far are that it will be as close as the vote over women priests. The mother church of the Anglican Communion would then, arguably, find itself in even worse trouble than its brothers and sisters on the other side of the Atlantic.