Anglican Church will survive, says gay bishop
Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elevated to that rank in any major Christian denomination, said today that the church will survive the tumult surrounding his election.
But overseas Anglican leaders have already moved closer to a break with the denomination.
Robinson, consecrated at Bishop of New Hampshire on Sunday, acknowledged that some who oppose ordaining gays would leave the Episcopal Church, but held out hope they would return in the future.
“I think we’ll have a few bumpy years. It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Robinson said . “The church is always in some sort of crisis … this is a crisis that’s going to get us somewhere.”
Overseas bishops who said they represented 50 million of the world’s 77 million Anglicans jointly announced that they were in a “state of impaired communion” with the Episcopal Church – a step short of declaring a full schism. Episcopalians form the US branch of Anglicanism.
Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the 17.5 million-member Anglican Church of Nigeria, the largest Anglican province outside of England, went even further. He said he would boycott all meetings at the global level attended by the Episcopal Church.
“We can no longer claim to be in the same communion,” Akinola said. “We cannot go to them and they cannot come to us. We will not share communion. We have come to the end of the road.”
Anglican leaders in Asia, Africa and Latin America who believe gay sex violates Scripture have been warning for months that consecrating Robinson as bishop would fracture the Anglican Communion.
Robinson, who has lived openly with a male partner for 14 years, will take leadership of the New Hampshire diocese on March 7.
Robinson appeared on US TV today with his partner, Mark Andrew, and one of his daughters, Ella Robinson.
“I feel unbelievably blessed,” the bishop said.
Jim Naughton, a Robinson supporter and spokesman for the Diocese of Washington., said the phrase “impaired communion” had little significance for the US church or Anglicans worldwide. The communion is an association of autonomous provinces with almost no centralised authority.
“One could argue that we’ve been in impaired communion for 30 years with all of those provinces that don’t ordain women as priests or bishops,” Naughton said. “That impairment doesn’t seem to have troubled anyone a great deal.”
Canon Bill Atwood, general secretary of the Ekklesia Society, a Texas-based mission to evangelical Anglican bishops, said international church leaders will not announce a permanent break until a commission formed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the communion’s spiritual leader, reports next year on whether a split can be averted.
But, said Atwood, “functionally, we’re not together. Functionally, the Episcopal Church has created a separation. Relationally, it’s a disaster.”
