Anglican Leaders: Conservatives, Liberals 'Cannot Go Together'

By Lillian Kwon, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Talks should continue within the divided Anglican Communion over homosexuality, a conservative Anglican bishop said this week, but the dissenting groups "can't necessarily walk in the same direction."

"I think a division is inevitable," the Rt. Rev. John H. Rodgers, a bishop with the conservative Anglican Mission in America, told The Christian Post. "I think the division is already there, but it will be expressed institutionally."

Rodgers, also chairman of the Society for the Propagation of Reformed Evangelical Anglican Doctrine (SPREAD), recently helped draft and sign a petition letter addressed to the Global South Primates to clarify the current state of the Anglican Communion and to advise what actions are needed to defend the Anglican faith. The letter was released on Aug. 30 and is currently being sent out to all bishops in the worldwide communion.

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At the request of the Rt. Rev. John K. Rucyahana, bishop of the Diocese of Shyira in Rwanda, Rodgers and other conservative Anglican leaders including Rucyahana wrote the 44-page document in efforts to preserve the Anglican faith and uphold the sovereignty of Scripture amid increasing liberal stances on homosexuality taken by the Episcopal Church, USA – which represents Anglicanism in the United States.

Unless a leadership team led by the Most Rev. Peter Akinola, primate of the Church of Nigeria, is set up, "the Anglican faith will ultimately either be extinguished or rendered ineffective in the Communion and all of its churches; those persons who still hold on to the Anglican faith will be reduced to scattered flocks struggling to survive and greatly weakened in their efforts to take the Gospel to the world; and that millions of persons who might otherwise be saved will be lost," stated the petition letter.

Congregations in the Global South and Southeast Asia, which comprise over half of the worldwide Anglican body in terms of the number of people, agree with the conservative stance, according to Rodgers.

"We are aware that the burden of preserving the Anglican faith has necessarily fallen upon churches in Africa and Asia," said the letter. "Western churches once carried the faith to Africa and Asia, and now churches in Africa and Asia are needed to carry it back to the Western countries, much as the grapevines of Europe were carried to America and back again to Europe."

The bishops divided the Anglican Communion into three groups based on their research: the "Anglican group," led by Akinola; the "revisionist group," led by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; and the "traditionalist/pragmatist group," led by George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

The first group of churches and bishops holds that the Church is subordinate to the sovereign authority of Scripture and thus is compelled to oppose the Church's approval of same gender sexual relations. The "revisionist group" is composed of churches and bishops which teach that the Church should approve of same gender sexual relations and that the Church is not subordinate to Scripture’s sovereign authority.

According to Rodgers, the petition letter was written before Williams' surprising reversal on homosexuality. Dismaying liberals and pleasing conservatives, Williams said homosexual practice is incompatible with the Bible and that they need to change their behavior.

"We were very pleased to hear that," said Rodgers, who pointed out that it was "a strange place for Williams to make such a major policy statement. Williams had made his comment in an interview with a Dutch journalist.

Carey's group of churches and bishops, meanwhile, hold that the Church is not subordinate to the sovereign authority of Scripture and therefore may approve of homosexual relations, but presently teaches that the Church should not do so for traditional and pragmatic reasons.

The letter made clear that the issue of whether the Church should propound a doctrine such as the approval of homosexual relations is "a defining [matter] for the continued unity of the churches and bishops in the Anglican Communion."

Recalling Akinola's letter in August 2005, the conservative leaders repeated that the persons who hold Scripture as the sovereign authority over the Church "cannot go together" with those who hold otherwise.

Time is of the essence, the letter indicated, and to delay resolving the issue would undermine the teaching of the Global South and weaken the Church.

"Waiting to act until the 2008 Lambeth Conference or the 2007 Primates' Meeting is very dangerous," the bishops wrote in the letter. "Most importantly, every day that goes by, more souls will be lost."

Conservative U.S. churches are looking to form a whole new Orthodox Anglican province as an alternative to the Episcopal Church, said Rodgers. He said "it's a very real possibility and maybe even a real likelihood" that the Episcopal Church will be asked to leave the Anglican Communion.

"It's what we think if they're (Episcopal Church) not going to be faithful to Scripture," he added.

"While these things are somewhat sad, we certainly don't have to be unkind to each other," Rodgers commented. "We need to show Christian love to each other. We do have to agree on the basics...it's a problem when we differ around the basics."

Episcopal and Anglican leaders are scheduled to meet on Sept. 11-13 in New York for an urgent meeting to resolve the divide over homosexuality. Around the same time, Global South Primates will hold a meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, where leaders are expected to also address the divide as they have concern for the unity of the worldwide Anglican body.