BOB ABERNETHY, Anchor: After decades of debate and division, the US Episcopal Church this week said overwhelmingly that gays and lesbians are eligible to become bishops or serve in any other ordained ministry of the church. At their General Convention, Episcopal leaders also moved toward developing an official rite for blessing same-sex unions. These decisions are likely to widen the divide between Episcopalians and the worldwide 77-million-member Anglican Communion of which they are a part. Kim Lawton has our special report from Anaheim, California.

KIM LAWTON: At their meeting in Anaheim this week, Episcopal bishops, clergy, and lay representatives tackled a host of social issues, from global poverty to justice for Disneyland hotel workers. But the most divisive topic, once again, was homosexuality.

REV. IAN DOUGLAS (Episcopal Divinity School): It wouldn’t be a meeting of the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion if we didn’t somehow engage matters of human sexuality.

LAWTON: Despite concerns from many global Anglican partners, convention delegates overwhelmingly voted to move ahead on two of the most contentious questions: whether to ordain gay bishops and whether to bless same-sex unions. On the issue of gay bishops, the delegates asserted that “God has called and may call gays and lesbians to any ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church.” The vote effectively ends a de facto moratorium that was approved three years ago, although it does not guarantee that more gay bishops will be consecrated.

Separately, the delegates also voted to move forward in developing liturgies for blessing same-sex relationships. The issue will be taken up again at the next General Convention in 2012. In the meantime, the measure allows local clergy leeway in blessing same-gender relationships, especially in states where gay marriage is legal.

Reverend Susan Russell is the outgoing president of Integrity, a group that works for the full inclusion of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people in the Episcopal Church.

REV. SUSAN RUSSELL (Integrity): I think the overwhelming message coming out of this convention, not only for LGBT people but for all who are looking for a community that that embraces peace, justice, tolerance, compassion, and the good news of God in Christ Jesus, is that the Episcopal Church welcomes you.

LAWTON: The measures passed in part because many conservative Episcopalians have left the denomination. Those remaining feel increasingly isolated.

BISHOP WILLIAM LOVE (Diocese of Albany, at press conference): It is very sad for me because I am a lifelong Episcopalian, I’m a lifelong Anglican, but first and foremost I am a lifelong Christian, and it is breaking my heart to see the church destroying itself in the manner in which we seem to be doing.

LAWTON: Many delegates here said they voted for the direction they believe God is calling their church to go in. But those votes pose new challenges for a global Communion that has already been strained close to a breaking point. There’s a lot riding on how what happened here gets interpreted around the world.

Many Anglicans, especially in Africa, Asia, and South America, were outraged in 2003 when the Episcopal Church approved the consecration of New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, the church’s first openly gay bishop. An emergency Communion report called on the US to ban on any future consecrations of gay bishops until an international consensus emerges.

The Communion’s spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, attended this meeting before the controversial votes took place.

ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: Along with many in the Communion, I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that could push us further apart.

LAWTON: Much of this week’s debate centered on balancing Communion concerns with a desire to move forward.

BISHOP GENE ROBINSON: I believe with my whole heart that we all know where this is going to wind up. It is going to wind up with the full inclusion of all of God’s children in God’s church.

BISHOP PETER BECKWITH: I would concede that if indeed that it is the right thing to do, we should do it now. I do not believe it is the right thing to do.

BISHOP NATHAN BAXTER: While I am very, very much concerned about our covenant with the Communion and our mission, I am also concerned about our covenant with our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

BISHOP SHANNON JOHNSTON: The Communion, for me, is too much to lose. There is too much at stake with mission and our ability to apprehend larger, wider truths that go way beyond our own small church and setting in the Western world.

LAWTON: Shannon Johnston, coadjutor bishop in the Diocese of Virginia, said he personally supported the gay ordination resolution, but voted against it because he didn’t want to further divide the Communion.

JOHNSTON (Diocese of Virginia): It was quite wrenching, because it took two of the core values of the church and juxtaposed them against each other, mission and inclusivity on the one hand and then the unity of the church on the other, which is no less a core value of the Gospel.

LAWTON: Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said her church is not fomenting division.

BISHOP KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI: Schism is not a Christian act.

LAWTON: The approved resolutions reasserted the Episcopal Church’s desire to remain an active member of the Anglican Communion. But Bishop Jon Bruno of the Diocese of Los Angeles says that doesn’t mean total agreement with overseas churches about homosexuality.

BISHOP JON BRUNO (Diocese of Los Angeles): I think I would explain it to them that the context that we live in is totally different and that they have to be tolerant of our context as well as we are tolerant of their context. I still want to be in relationship with them fully.

LAWTON: Reverend Ian Douglas, a representative from Massachusetts, described the votes as being honest with the rest of the world about what the Episcopal Church stands for.

DOUGLAS: There’s no Communion without genuine relationship, and there’s no genuine relationship without truth-telling. So I see commitments to being in Communion and telling the truth about who we are as being of a whole.

LAWTON: Conservative Anglicans already don’t like what they’re hearing.

BISHOP DAVID ANDERSON (American Anglican Council): I think it signals to the rest of the Communion, the Anglican Communion, that the Episcopal Church wants to be a member only on its own terms, and that if terms are applied to it, then they will go their own way and have things the way they wish, and others can be with them or not.

LAWTON: David Anderson is among the Episcopalians who left the denomination over theological issues. He was ordained a bishop in the Anglican Church of Kenya. Disaffected Episcopalians, including four breakaway dioceses, have formed a rival jurisdiction called the Anglican Church in North America. They’re seeking recognition from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

ANDERSON: I see that as The Episcopal Church continues to go through these earthquakes of adopting things there is going to be a constant stream of both people and churches, perhaps more dioceses, that wind up leaving and coming over into the rest of the Anglican Communion.

LAWTON: But at the same time, many Episcopalians believe their actions here will help bring in other people who may have felt alienated in the past. Both sides say they’re anxious to focus on mission rather than division. I’m Kim Lawton in Anaheim, California.

TIM O’BRIEN, anchor: The issue of gay marriage is on the agenda as the US Episcopal Church holds its once-every-three-years General Convention in Anaheim, California.  For years, Episcopalians have been deeply divided over homosexuality.  One proposal being debated at this meeting would allow Episcopal churches to conduct same-sex weddings in the six states that have legalized gay marriage.  Currently, most mainline denominations do not officially allow same-sex weddings.  But the changing legal environment is adding new pressure.  Kim Lawton has our report.

KIM LAWTON: Boston’s historic Church of the Covenant has been an important place for Anne Crane and Sarah Perreault. The lesbian couple had their first date there in the late 1970s, and by the time Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage the two had been active members for more than 25 years, so a church wedding seemed the obvious choice.

SARAH PERREAULT: In particular we wanted to be married at our home church with our community and our family and friends.

LAWTON: But it was complicated. Church of the Covenant is dually aligned with two mainline denominations: the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church (USA).  And while the UCC has no problem marrying same-sex couples, it’s against national Presbyterian policy.

ANNE CRANE: Well, it’s painful to know that the church that I’ve been a part of all my life does not recognize our relationship and our marriage as being a legitimate marriage.

LAWTON:  Church of the Covenant worked it out so that a retired UCC minister conducted the ceremony, and the Presbyterian side of the church officially stayed out of it.  Crane and Perreault say their wedding was beautiful and meaningful, but not quite everything they would have planned.

PERREAULT:  I felt badly because there were people that we would have liked to include in our ceremony who could not participate because they were ordained Presbyterian clergy. There was a real loss there.

Man at Protest:  “We are a couple…”

LAWTON:  For decades, mainline denominations have been wrestling over issues surrounding homosexuality: whether to ordain gay clergy and whether to recognize–and bless same-sex unions. Now that six states have legalized gay marriage, those battles are taking on a new urgency. Some church members are pushing the denominations to reassess their policies, while others are fighting to hold the line.

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an advocacy group that supports conservative positions within mainline denominations.

MARK TOOLEY:  The church shouldn’t just go along with what the wider society demands of it. But the church is ideally supposed to be faithful to timeless teachings that have been presented to the church through its Scripture and through its traditions.

Minister:  “To have and to hold…”

LAWTON: Currently, while the Unitarians and the UCC conduct gay marriages, mainline Protestant denominations as a rule don’t officially allow it. Clergy who participate in same-sex weddings could face church trials and even risk being defrocked.

Minister:  “I hereby pronounce you husband and husband…”

TOOLEY:  Traditionalists within those churches will strive to help to ensure there is as much fidelity as possible, by the clergy to the official teachings.

LAWTON: In the United Methodist Church, 83-year-old Richard Harding has a long history of activism for gay rights. He helped found Reconciling Retired Clergy, a network of retired pastors willing to perform gay marriages.

REV. RICHARD HARDING: There’s not a whole lot that they can do to we retired clergy, and there’s a whole lot that they can do to active clergy that they can’t do to us. And that’s why we’re stepping in.

LAWTON: Harding says he believes what he’s doing is the right thing, so he’s willing to risk any repercussions.

HARDING: We could be defrocked. I would be now sitting here as Mr. Harding instead of Reverend Harding. And in Massachusetts, a lay person can go for a day to the state house and get permission to officiate at a marriage. So I’d still be able to do it, only I just wouldn’t be a pastor anymore.

LAWTON: At Church of the Covenant, interim minister Jennifer Wegter-McNelly is an ordained Presbyterian pastor. She says her congregation has been put in a difficult position of trying to maintain support for gay members while still respecting the national denomination.

REV. JENNIFER WEGTER-MCNELLY: We have a long history and we’re very active, and so I think there is a lot of really thoughtful hard conversation about how do we be prophetic and remain faithful and connected to the churches that are our larger community?

LAWTON: So far, they’ve been able to do that by keeping same-sex weddings solely under the jurisdiction of the UCC part of their church. Other congregations don’t have that option. Episcopal clergy also can’t conduct gay marriages. In an effort to be even-handed, many Massachusetts Episcopal churches aren’t doing any weddings, gay or straight. Instead, Reverend Pam Werntz at Boston’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church says they provide a blessing for couples who are married by the state.

REV. PAM WERNTZ:  That could happen separately, it could happen at the courthouse and then a couple comes here for the ceremony, or it can happen in the same ceremony where a Justice of the Peace presides over the first part of the service and the priest presides over the blessing and often a Eucharist celebration.

LAWTON: The compromise may have helped circumvent some of the denominational difficulties, but Werntz says it was still painful for many members.

WERNTZ:  There were people that left the church in feeling a lot of sorrow and betrayal that the Episcopal Church couldn’t move as fast as I think it needed to move when same-sex marriage was legalized.

LAWTON: UCC minister Reine Abele, who does perform gay weddings, say churches need to be better at addressing social concerns.

REV. REINE ABELE: Churches generally are not the leading edge of cultural change in our society. They are often not the engine but the caboose.

LAWTON: But despite the new activism, mainline clergy continue to be conflicted over the issue, and those who support gay marriages still appear to be in the minority.

LAWTON: According to a recent survey by Public Religion Research, mainline clergy are generally more supportive of gay rights than Americans as a whole. But that doesn’t hold true when it comes to same-sex marriage. Only a third of mainline clergy support gay marriage. That number is just about the same for Americans overall.

TOOLEY: Often people in wider society are very surprised to learn that the mainline churches don’t already accept same sex marriage, because typically these churches, at least for the last 50, 60 years or more have been on the liberal side of social issues. But they have hung back on the marriage issue.

LAWTON: For many, it’s an issue of basic theology.

TOOLEY: Typically for Jews and Christians, marriage is a metaphor for faithfulness between God and his people and once you begin to redefine what marriage is you ultimately start to redefine who God is and that obviously and understandably is difficult for Christians and Jews.

LAWTON: In the Presbyterian Church (USA), Reverend Mary Holder Naegeli is among those urging the denomination to maintain its stand.

REV. MARY HOLDER NAEGELI: Homosexual practice is not God’s design for humanity. Not being God’s design for humanity, having these clear prohibitions in the Scripture make homosexual practice a sin. Homosexual marriage makes permanent a situation that God wants to redeem.

LAWTON: But others advocate a different interpretation of the Bible.

WEGTER-MCNELLY: Our call to be inclusive of all people comes from scripture.  It comes from faithfulness to God, it comes from understanding that all people are made in the image of God and it’s essential to support people in their relationships, to bless them and support them and nurture them.

LAWTON: For Wegter-McNelly, the issue also comes down to her pastoral responsibilities to the people in her pews.

WEGTER-MCNELLY:  Here gay marriage isn’t an abstract issue. It’s not a political issue.  It’s very much an issue of the people of the congregation being in community together. To tell people that this community that is the compass for your life is not going to bless and support you in your intimate relationship is kind of an impossibility.

LAWTON: But supporters of traditional marriage say pastors also have a responsibility to their faith and to the wider church.

HOLDER NAEGELI: Why would I, a representative of God, help people make permanent with a vow, I take marriage vows very seriously, but with a vow to make permanent then, seal something that God wouldn’t agree with?

LAWTON: As they celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, Anne Crane and Sarah Perreault are glad their church wedding worked out.

CRANE: It’s a liberating feeling, and it’s enabled me and us to just, to live our lives honestly and openly, and many people don’t have that opportunity and have to continue living a lie. And that’s the sad thing.

Minister: Those whom God has joined together, let no one put asunder.  Amen.

LAWTON: But given the conflicts within the mainline churches, the situation is not likely to change any time soon.

I’m Kim Lawton in Boston.

Presiding Bishop KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI (U.S Episcopal Church): We got quite quickly into very significant and deep conversations. We certainly didn’t all agree with each other about various issues, but we listened respectfully.

Kim Lawton

ABERNETHY: About 650 Anglican bishops from around the world were at the meeting, but more than 230 others stayed away. The bishops didn’t vote on any resolutions, but instead held a series of small group discussions about the many issues that divide them. Our managing editor Kim Lawton covered the meeting. Kim, welcome home. What happened, or perhaps, didn’t happen?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): Well, I think the big news from the meeting was that there wasn’t any big news. A lot of people feared that there might be some kind of an actual split at this meeting. That didn’t happen. About a third of the bishops boycotted. That did have an impact, but there wasn’t any big explosion. They’re still hanging together, but this sort of uneasy stalemate continues.

ABERNETHY: And what does the stalemate mean for the typical American Episcopal parish?

LAWTON: Well, not much in the short term. There are — the majority of the worldwide Anglican Communion is upset that the U.S. elected a gay bishop, that same-sex blessings occur inside some Episcopal churches. The Communion would like that to stop. But the bishops that are doing that in the U.S. say, “We’re not going to stop.” The majority of the Communion is not happy that some Americans have said, “We don’t want to be part of the Episcopal Church,” and so they’re affiliating with these African churches in some cases. The Communion says well, we don’t like that, that isn’t done in the Anglican Communion. That should stop. But it probably will continue. And so the question is, can all of this still happen within one Anglican umbrella?

Bob Abernethy

ABERNETHY: You had the feeling, I think, one had the feeling that the American Episcopal Church was very much in the minority. You felt that sense of it’s being in a minority, at least I did from here.

LAWTON: Well, indeed, the U.S. — and there are a few other member churches, Canada, some places in England that would agree with the U.S. But by and large many of the members are concerned with what’s happening here in the U.S.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

Q: What has been your impression here at Lambeth, in the midst of so much diversity?

A: I think my impression overall so far is that, unlike the last Lambeth when I was here, there’s been a tremendous opportunity for people to talk and to share their theological views, their views about mission, and the people have been listening to one another, in some pretty deep ways, on the work that we do together.

Q: The format was different this year — no legislation, no voting, and all of that. How did that change the tone or the content of the meeting?

A: I think it’s changed the meeting in that people seem much more willing to listen to each other than they were in the past when there was legislation that we had to face and you were either for it or you were against it. This one seems to allow for more dialogue so far.

Q: We know some tough issues have been on the table, and some controversial subjects have been raised, especially about the US Church. How is the rest of the Communion seeing some of the things that are happening in the US?

Bishop Tom Shaw

A: I think up until a certain point I was encouraged because of the conversation, the way people were listening to one another. I think when the hearings on the Windsor Report have come up in the conference, that’s not going to help the conversation, and it feels to me as though we’re getting back into a juridical understanding of how we’re going to be one Communion, and I think that that’s the wrong way for us to be examining the kinds of issues that we face.

Q: What kinds of things are you hearing? What are some of those tough issues that are really causing tensions?

A: Well, I think the toughest issue is human sexuality and I think that that’s — there are lots of other issues that are around that issue, but that’s the one that seems to be the hot point for everybody.

Q: And what are you hearing from your fellow bishops on that issue?

A: Well, you hear the whole spectrum, from people that basically agree with the role that the American church has taken in examining this issue, and people that disagree with us but still want to work together in mission and still want to be in Communion, and then there are those parts of the Communion who feel that the Episcopal Church has gone too far, and they want us to leave the Communion or be part of it in a different way.

Q: How is that working out in the dialogue? Is it frustrating relationships?

A: Well, for me whenever we move into that place where we’re talking about the juridical aspects of this, it makes me think that we’re not going to move forward as a Communion and that we’re not going to be able to be patient with one another, we’re not listening to one another and really taking an issue that’s a huge issue, that represents a whole lot of other issues, and try and talk them through.

Q: It does seem like there’s almost a stalemate. Do you see any forward motion, or does it feel like the same arguments over and over again?

A: Well, it depends on the day you talk to me. On some days I’ve had really significant conversations with individual bishops and groups, and I get a sense that we really are listening to one another and trying to find a path forward, and then on other days it doesn’t seem like really talking to one another, and it’s hard for me to see how we can go forward.

Q: How much is the Anglican identity at stake, what it really means to be an Anglican today?

A: I think part of being an Anglican is not being a confessing church but being a catholic and a community church, and I think that if we were to become a confessing church, by not allowing for the breadth of opinion and the breadth of interpretation of Scripture, that that would really threaten our Anglican identity.

Q: Do you get a sense here of great diversity, not just ethnically but also theologically or ideologically? With your fellow bishops do you get that sense of the bigness of the Anglican Church?

A: Oh, yeah. I’m in a fascinating Bible study, studying the Bible with people of Africa and from New Zealand and from Great Britain and from the United States and from Japan, so I do every day, and in going over Scripture I get of sense of the breadth of the Anglican Communion, and it’s exciting, and it’s challenging.

Q: And in a global, fast-changing world is that difficult, then, to work out under the Anglican umbrella?

A: Well, I think that’s the challenge that we’re facing, ultimately, is how are we going to be this Anglican Communion, how are we going to be this Anglican Communion in the 21st century? That’s the real question behind all the disagreement over Scripture and about human sexuality and all the rest of it is how are we going to do this in the future with the challenges that we have in the 21st century?

Q: A lot of people aren’t here. A significant group of bishops aren’t here. Some are boycotting, some weren’t invited. What does that say about the challenges?

A: Well, I think that the most unfortunate thing is that we miss their voices. We miss something of the breadth of the Anglican Communion, whether it’s Gene Robinson who hasn’t been invited or whether it’s members of GAFCON [Global Anglican Future Conference] who decided not to come. Those voices would be tremendously important to this conversation that we’re trying to have. But I also have to say that the conversation goes on, and it’s still very, very fruitful.

Q: Overall, have there been new relationships built here, as the organizers suggest?

A: Oh, yes, this Lambeth Conference is all about the building of relationships. Everybody wants to know are we going to split, is there going to be schism. Anybody who knows the answer to that is fooling you if they say they do, but it’s just a classic situation of only two options. On the one hand, there are those who believe the big issue before us of homosexuality is a sin, and then on the other side there are those who believe as a justice issue that homosexual persons are loved by God and need all the rights and privileges as everyone else, even in the church. How do you reconcile those two? That’s the issue before us.

Q: Can they be reconciled?

Bishop Eugene Sutton

A: I don’t think the issues can be reconciled, but people can be reconciled. There’s an old proverb that goes this way: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. And that applies whether or not you are the Diocese of New Hampshire or if you are with those bishops who decided not to come. It is much easier and quicker to do things alone. But if we want to go far in making a difference in the world, then we need all of us. We need to take others with us, and that means that things are going to go a bit slower than people on both sides would want. In Jesus’ day, the religious leaders had a conference maybe similar to this, not as large, where one of the Pharisees said do not be too quick to decide on whether or not this man Jesus is of God. If he is of God, the Spirit will reveal that to us over time. And if not, it will also be revealed to us. What we need to do here at Lambeth is take a deep breath together and don’t come too quickly to decisions and resolutions. If what we are doing, and the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church, if that is of God, the Holy Spirit will reveal it to us over time.

Q: Have you been hearing from your fellow bishops from other parts of the world that they are still troubled by what the US has done?

A: Oh, yes. I’ve asked some of the bishops in countries where Christians are a persecuted minority, and I’ve asked them, have the actions of the Episcopal Church in 2003 caused problems for you and your people? One bishop said to me, “Of course, my brother, it’s caused tremendous problems.” They are persecuted every day by a Muslim majority. But he said to me, “I’m not asking you to make my life easier. I just want you to know what it has done here.” He is willing to bear the cross. If standing up for the least in his society, the voiceless who are people of homosexual orientation, if that is the price he must pay, he is willing to bear that cross. But he wants you to know that it’s a cross for him in a way that Americans do not have to bear.

Q: Americans have been the subject of quite a bit of discussion, and some of the proposals are pretty restrictive. Obviously, they are still proposals, but do you sense a movement toward some more punitive measures coming out of Lambeth?

A: There is some movement. Some want to use the language of judgment and of punitive actions and of bans. But there is something about banning people, banning actions of people who believe they are led by the Holy Spirit, there’s something about that that is very difficult for other Christians to do. I don’t believe there will be any bans coming out of this Lambeth Conference. Why? Because we’ve prayed together, we’ve studied the Scriptures together. We’ve argued together forcefully. How then can you ban your brother or your sister because they disagree with you on some fundamental things about ethics and morality? But Jesus, in one of his great parables, when he’s talking about who is to enter the kingdom of heaven, those who are entering the kingdom of heaven are entering not because of anything around sexual ethics or what they believe about women or views about interpretation of Scripture. Jesus said those who enter the kingdom are those who have fed hungry people. They are housing those who have no home. They are visiting people in prison and in hospitals. They are giving a cup of water to those who are thirsty. When we get back to these issues, I think it would be a wonderful thing if, when people think of the Anglican Communion, they think of oh, how they love each other and how they are feeding a hungry world, not oh, those are the ones who are bickering about sex.

Q: This was the first Lambeth meeting for Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is here not only as a bishop but as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. How has she been received, and how do you perceive that issue is being dealt with here?

A: Her presence, of course, is pushing the edge for a number of people. They are in societies and cultures where women do not take leadership. I think it’s a marvelous work of the Holy Spirit. But, of course, I’m African American. I’m the first African-American bishop of Maryland. The first bishop of Maryland owned slaves, as did most of the Episcopal clergy, and they used the Bible to justify it. For hundreds of years, my people have been subjugated, abused, and scapegoated by use of Scripture. For many, many years people have used Scripture to build boundaries and bans around the reach, the scope of God. It’s no accident that the African-American bishops in the American Episcopal Church all have a full-inclusion agenda, because we see this as a justice issue, people using the Bible to build a fence and to limit those who are not like them. What we want to say is, before you make decisions about whether or not women should take leadership in churches, consult with women. Before you make decisions about whether gay and lesbian people are called by God to be in communion with other Christians, talk to people of homosexual orientation and include them. One is for sure in my diocese, whatever decisions we make, it won’t be the decisions made by a relatively small number of men sitting in a room deciding for everybody. All of us will be there. We dare to believe that the Holy Spirit speaks even through the uneducated, even through people who normally are not at the corridors of power. We are going to include the voices of everybody. Maybe one other thing: Some hundreds of years ago, slave owners said to my people God wants you to be a slave, and they were educated, they were erudite, and they had the Bible. My forebears, my mothers, fathers of my race and my church said you’re wrong, and they could not even read. The question we need to ask ourselves is, how did they know, how did they know that despite the Scriptures that people were pointing at for them saying that slavery was justified, how did they know that God didn’t want them to be that, that God wanted them to be free? That is an issue for us today. Before we so quickly exclude others we need to say, could the Holy Spirit be speaking to us through them? And maybe we are only interpreting Scriptures based on our own comfortablity, rather than what God wants.

Q: You spoke earlier about the spiritual discipline of patience. A lot of people come to these conferences and it sounds like arguments we heard five years ago, ten years ago, and I’m picking up some sense of frustration in some quarters that we’ve had these conversations and we’ve had these conversations. How do you respond?

A: Yes, we’ve had these conversations for several years now. But Christians always need to take the long view. It took the church 300 years to come to an acceptable formulation of the divinity of Christ, the Nicene Creed. What did Christians do for 300 years? They talked with each other, they gathered. Some believed this, some believed that. It took the world hundreds of years to come to a conclusion that slavery everywhere was wrong. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s taken the church hundreds, millennia of years to discover that God is calling women to leadership in the church. So just because we’ve talked about issues of human sexuality for the last 20, 30 years, that doesn’t mean much in the life of the church. Our children and children’s children will judge us by what we’ve done today, and I want to be on the right side of history here, and history is a long time. So people may be tired of talking, but when we’re tired of talking about these issues, we are no longer being faithful. We’re just doing what we want to do, and we’re believing, “I’ll just hang out with those who agree with me.” That may be easy, and it may cause you to move off of these issues very quickly. But it’s not being faithful. We need all of us.

Q: Anything else you want to add?

A: Maybe this: The Archbishop of Canterbury said in his last presidential address that the two sides of this issue need to come to the center, which is Christ. But, of course, if the center is a political compromise, that hardly looks like the Gospel. If Jesus is the center, Jesus is also the one who is before us and in front of us, and Jesus is also at the margins. If we are going to follow the center who is Jesus, that means along the way we may have to make some uncomfortable changes in the status quo. So I believe that the Holy Spirit is calling us in this conference to take some bold steps toward inclusion of all people, even though it causes pain among some, because a lot of us believe that’s where Jesus is.

Q: What has your Lambeth experience been like?

A: It’s been a little bit surreal, both disappointing and uplifting, so it’s been a little bit of a roller coaster for me. Actually, being excluded from the conference has been harder than I expected. I thought I was going to be emotionally and spiritually prepared for it, but it’s been harder than I thought to be separated, especially from my own House of Bishops, and the schedule is so jam-packed that the bishops who are invited to the conference have so much to do and so little free time that it has made it very difficult for me to be in touch with many of them, and I can’t go near the venues where they are, so that’s been hard. The level of anxiety here is enormously high, and suspicion of me is very high, and I’ve done everything I can do to play by the rules. On Sunday for the opening service I told the Archbishop of Canterbury’s staff three times that I would not make any attempt to attend the service or be a distraction in any way, yet I understand that there were large photographs of me at every security checkpoint, and I’m sure that if I showed up I was not allowed in, and it’s just that kind of suspicion that’s very difficult. On a positive note, out here in the marketplace and around the edges of the conference, there’s just so much ministering to be done, and people want to talk, especially young people. There are hundreds of people here from all over the Anglican Communion who are serving as stewards, and I swear it’s almost impossible to pass any of them without them wanting to stop and offer their words of encouragement and support to me and see how I’m doing, and I’m loving those conversations, and also I am getting to talk to some people through conversations that are privately arranged, and they’ve been confidential, so nobody sees them meeting with me, because there would be a pretty big price to pay amongst their peers if they were seen to be meeting with me. There have been bishops who really have taken a risk to talk to me, and that’s been really rewarding.

Q: Have you had an opportunity, behind the spotlight, to talk to some people and make some plans?

A: Yes, I have. I can’t really tell you very much because it’s hard to talk about any of those situations without giving away enough of the details that if anybody wanted to figure out any of the details they could. What I take from those is this feeling that “we may not understand your context, and we may not agree on the issue of homosexuality, but we want to hold this Communion together, we don’t want to be separated from the American church, we really, we just want and need time,” and reflecting my own sentiments, “let’s just hold onto each other while we try to figure this out.” And yet forces seem to be afoot that want to force something, that seem to want a split, whether that split be by someone leaving or by someone being thrown out. I’m not a part of the meetings and that’s all discussed, but what we’re seeing coming out of those meeting are some proposals for a way of creating a more centralized authority within the Episcopal, within the Anglican Communion, and although sometimes that’s talked about in terms of facilitating reconciliation, if you read over those documents it just sounds like a way of punishing anyone who colors outside the lines, and that sounds like the Episcopal Church, the Canadian Church, and those of us who are working for the fuller inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the life of, the leadership of the church.

Q: How do you characterize where this process is moving? Is it moving at all or is it a stalemate?

A: I think it depends on what your expectations are. There are people who want this all tied up into a neat and tidy little package as of yesterday, and there are other people who feel that the longer we take doing this the better off we’ll be, because there will just be that much more time for people to converse with one another, understand where each other is coming from, and so on, so it probably depends on who you ask. I personally don’t think this Communion is broken, and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and there are all kinds of people trying to fix this. So as a person in the American church, I think we’re doing what is best in the Anglican tradition. We have always been a church that said you figure out what is appropriate for your local context, and you figure out what God is telling you to do there and do it. So the American church did that with my election and consenting with my election, and now people are suddenly saying, oh no, we didn’t really mean that at all, and we have to, we have to bring about more order. Well, you know, this is a church that was founded resisting such a centralized bureaucracy in Rome, so how odd for people who call themselves traditionalists to be trying to take us to a place that has never been our tradition, to be some kind of centralized authority that rules on whether or not something is too far out of step or whatever. So to those of us who don’t think it’s broken, it’s taken a long time [and] that’s just fine. But my fear is that there are people who are working to bring this to a close, a point of departure, I don’t know how you describe it, but someplace that will make everybody choose.

Q: What’s at risk with this meeting?

A: The reason I’m so committed to the Anglican Communion is, especially as an American and an American Christian, there are things I need to hear from people in the developing world, like the ramifications of our racism, our colonialism, American hegemony in terms of our military prowess, of economic clout, and so on, and I think we have done some pretty terrible things in the world, and if we don’t have brothers and sisters in Christ in the developing world who can tell us what will not be comfortable to hear, but speak the truth in love, as we’re commanded to do, I don’t know who’s going to tell us those things, and so I think we need each other, and the Communion, as it has been, is this quite loose confederation of churches, each doing ministry in its own context but, through a variety of ways, talking to each other. If we lose that we’ve lost a great opportunity, so I would really lament that. I don’t think it is worth completely giving up who we are, either as the American church or giving up our 500 years of tradition as an Anglican Communion, and changing ourselves radically to preserve it.

Q: Even though you weren’t invited to this meeting and even though some of this debate has been fairly intense, gay and lesbian people have had a presence here. Do you think this has been an opportunity for some awareness, in that there’s a bigger voice and presence?

A: You know, it’s always difficult to know how you’re affecting someone else, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that you have to try to make a faithful witness, and what gets heard or not heard, what God does with it, that’s not your concern. The question is, are you making a faithful witness? And the fact of the matter is there have been a whole lot of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people here from literally all around the world, and we’re all here for one purpose, which is to remind the bishops who are meeting that in every one of their congregations, whether they know it or not, there are gay and lesbian people, and we are here to remind them that we’re not going to go away, we’ve always been here, we will always be here, and, you know, they took a vow as a bishop to serve all of their flock, not just some of them, so I think we’ve done that. I think our presence here, regardless of what words we’ve spoken or what events we’ve had, just our presence here has been that kind of constant reminder.

Q: The next General Convention of the Episcopal Church is in 2009. What do you expect to happen there?

A: We often hear that the next meeting, the next gathering of whatever group, is going to be the donnybrook, we’re going to choose here who we will serve. Before the GAFCON [Global Anglican Future] conference in Jerusalem we heard this is it, the road is going to divide right here, and then it never turns out to be that kind of decision or point, and immediately it’s the next gathering that’s going to decide. Although I must say that for this next General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2009 I think it might be that kind of a dramatic moment in this way: I think the American church has done its very, very best to be a part of this listening process, although I must say that I don’t see much of a listening process going on in most of the Communion. Some places, yes, but not in a lot of places, and I think we have tried patiently to articulate why we have done what we have done, but I think that in 2009 in our General Convention the Episcopal Church will stand up and declare itself and say, you know what, this is where we really do feel God is calling us to be, and we will never leave the Anglican Communion, and we’ll do everything we can to stay in it, but we have to be who we are, and then you the Communion are going to have to decide what you’re going to do with us. But we have to be who we are, and I think we’re going to see a quite explicit lifting of any understood moratorium on same-sex blessings and on the election of gay partnered bishops. So, in that sense, this is the first time I’m saying that I think this will be a really important moment.

Q: What is your overall impression of the type of conversation that’s been taking place here?

A: Oh my, well, I would say it, you know, we’re in a process, and a process like the one we’re in always includes a need for prudence and guidance, prudence because you don’t want to interrupt the process as it unfolds. You want to be patient, you want to participate, you want to let something emerge. [But] if one senses that we’re on a wrong trajectory, if we don’t think we’re getting where we need to get, then we may need to say something or say wait a minute, I think that unless we correct the path we’re on we may get up [at] the end of the day having nothing accomplished — structured superficiality, and in that structured superficiality we may have produced nothing in the end of the day, though involved ourselves in a lot of time, effort, money, and personal sacrifice. So I’m still testing to see if this is going to produce what we need at the end of the day, and the answer’s not there yet.

Bishop Mark Lawrence

Q: We’ve been hearing a lot that this time around Lambeth is a conversation. Do you feel people are really listening to each other and are taking in different points of view?

A: Oh, I think so, at different levels, and I think there’s a tendency to kind of peel off, like the layers of an onion, the concerns that each of us brings to the conversation, and then there’s a tendency to back off. It’s like we’ve entered into the pain that divides us, and now we don’t know if we want to continue this or not. It’s getting too tense, it’s — so there is that ebb and flow in this conversation. I would say also that from my standpoint as a bishop, as a new bishop underneath this whole church, the conversations with my brother bishops from Sudan and their wives from Sudan, from Ghana and places of great hardship has broken my heart on more than one occasion and suggested that, though I already have as much weight as I need to have, as many responsibilities as I need to have, do I really need their burdens placed upon me? And yet as God deepens our responsibilities I trust that he enables our shoulders to bear that responsibility as the need is placed upon us, so I’ve found myself making links with people that I want to continue. How can I forget their problems, how can I forget their sufferings when I return back home? And I need their clarity, their connection, their courage in the midst of persecution, in the midst of difficulties, in the midst of the overwhelming demands that pale — causes the mind paleness.

Q: Are you getting a sense of the diversity within the Communion?

A: Oh, the cultural context from which people come — it boggles the mind and expands the heart, and so absolutely.

Q: There has been a lot of talk about Anglican identity and what is it that truly makes an Anglican. Is that up for debate?

A: I honestly have to say that my sense of being an Anglican hasn’t changed at all. I would say my grasp — the breadth has deepened, and the depth of the need for our relationship to continue and to go to that next level of fellowship, but my understanding of Anglican identity hasn’t changed.

Q: Do you think it’s changing around you, though?

A: I haven’t the slightest idea. I would hope that it is, but maybe that’s presumptuous. Maybe they have as good a grasp of what they think Anglican identity is.

Q: You’re in a diocese that’s been uncomfortable with some of the things that have been going on in the US church. How has that placed you here in the conference? How are you fitting into the conversations?

A: Well, it’s an interesting experience because on a local level, that is, within the Episcopal Church USA, I’m in a minority position. In a conference like this I find myself in a majority, although not all, when they are introduced to me and then I say I’m from the Episcopal Church — sometimes they’re a little cautious as to where I am. They don’t know how quite to deal with me, and as we begin to talk, certain things are said in the conversation that enables them to understand that I’m not with the majority opinion, and then there is an equal level of fellowship that follows.

KIM LAWTON: They came from all over the world and walked into the historic Canterbury Cathedral together, a visible celebration of their common Anglican heritage. But there is sharp disagreement about what it means to be an Anglican today, and the more than 650 bishops at this Lambeth Conference struggled to find a way to hold the Anglican Communion together, despite b divisions about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture.

Bishop EUGENE SUTTON (Diocese of Maryland): Our children and children’s children will judge us by what we’ve done today. People may be tired of talking, but when we’re tired of talking about these issues, we are no longer being faithful.

LAWTON: Anglican bishops meet for the Lambeth Conference once every 10 years. In contrast to previous years, organizers of this meeting decided not to hold any policy votes.

Anglican Bishops

Bishop MARC ANDRUS (Diocese of California): Legislation, report writing, voting — all those things, if you will, are things that we can use to avoid encountering one another.

LAWTON: Instead, they held a series of discussions, many in small groups and Bible studies, as a way to promote dialogue. Tensions were still high. Nearly all the sessions were private, with heavy security all around the circus tent where the main events occurred.

In one speech inside the tent that the media was not allowed to record, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams challenged both liberals and conservatives to work harder at finding resolutions. He said, “At the moment, we seem often threatening death to each other, not offering life.”

The Anglican Communion is made up of 38 regional bodies or provinces, including the Episcopal Church in the U.S. All those provinces are all autonomous. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual leader of the Communion but doesn’t have the authority to dictate what happens inside the regional churches. Relationships have been severely strained since the US Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, and local parishes began blessing same-sex unions. Leaders of more conservative Anglican churches in Africa, Asia, and South America accused the Episcopal Church of violating Scripture and disregarding centuries of church teachings. About 230 of those leaders boycotted this Lambeth meeting.

Mark Lawrence is a conservative Episcopal bishop from South Carolina.

Bishop MARK LAWRENCE (Diocese of South Carolina): I wish Nigeria was here, Uganda was here, Kenya was here, Rwanda was here, but in a way they are. Their silence speaks volumes, if we’ll only quiet ourselves long enough to recognize their voices here in their absence.

LAWTON: Bishop Gene Robinson was also absent from the official sessions; he wasn’t invited because of the controversy. Nonetheless, he came here to participate in non-official meetings.

Bishop GENE ROBINSON (Diocese of New Hampshire): Actually, being excluded from the conference has been harder than I expected. I thought I was going to be emotionally and spiritually prepared for it, but it’s been harder than I thought to be separated, especially from my own House of Bishops.

LAWTON: Robinson was discussed at numerous points during the meeting, and one Sudanese bishop urged that he resign. Still, Robinson said he was able to quietly meet with several international bishops to introduce himself and tell his story.

Bishop ROBINSON: We’re all here for one purpose, which is to remind the bishops who are meeting that in every one of their congregations, whether they know it or not, there are gay and lesbian people, and we are here to remind them that we’re not going to go away.

LAWTON: This was the first Lambeth Conference where gays and lesbians had a visible presence in events surrounding the meeting, such as this demonstration of traditional African dancing.

This was the first Lambeth meeting for another controversial American figure, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who attended not only as a bishop, but as the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Only four of the 38 provinces consecrate female bishops.

Bishop Eugene Sutton

Bishop SUTTON: Her presence, of course, is pushing the edge for a number of people. They are in societies and cultures where women do not take leadership. I think it’s a marvelous work of the Holy Spirit.

LAWTON: Even with the boycott, the growing influence of leaders from Africa, Asia and South America was clear. Some of the largest and most vibrant Anglican churches are in these so-called Global South regions. American conservatives welcomed their support.

Bishop Mark Lawrence

Bishop LAWRENCE: In the United States I’m in the extreme minority when I gather in the House of Bishops. But here among bishops from all over the world, I’m in that odd position of being in the majority opinion, and that’s different for me, and I kind of like it, actually.

LAWTON: The bishops discussed a variety of topics and did agree a lot. Last week, they marched through the streets of London urging that global poverty be cut in half by the year 2015. They saved the topics of gender, sexuality, and the Bible for the end of the conference when there was intense debate yet again over how to respond to the Episcopal Church’s actions.

Bishop PETER BECKWITH (Diocese of Springfield, IL): The American Church has gone ahead on its own with the idea that that, “We’re going to go ahead with this because we think it’s appropriate and if you have a problem with it, that’s your problem.” That doesn’t sound like communion to me.

LAWTON: An official crisis working group released a proposal renewing previous calls for a ban on more gay bishops and same-sex blessings. It also called for an end to cross-jurisdictional relationships where conservative US parishes are affiliating with Anglican churches in places like Africa and South America.

Bishop CLIVE HANDFORD (Anglican Communion, speaking at press conference): To pull back, to draw breath, take stock and to better dialogue together as we go forward from here.

LAWTON: The proposal won’t be voted on until 2009, but people on both sides have already said it won’t work. Bishop Marc Andrus from the San Francisco area told the bishops he would not stop blessing same-sex unions.

Bishop Marc Andrus

Bishop ANDRUS: I wanted them to know that while I have sought to be transparent, that if they didn’t understand that we were continuing to do blessings in the diocese of California, that is the fact and will continue to be the fact, and that I was available to them to tell them why I consider that essential and that it would continue to go on.

LAWTON: Conservatives expect the cross-jurisdictional relationships to continue as well.

Bishop BECKWITH: There’s precedence in the church to cross geographical boundaries when theological boundaries are being crossed, and theological boundaries are being crossed.

LAWTON: There was also intense debate about changing some of the ways the Communion operates. Some bishops are pushing for a broad statement of agreement that would help define who Anglicans are.

Bishop LAWRENCE: There is a limit as to what diversity can allow for in the midst of a family, a community that has to trust one another.

LAWTON: Many bishops are increasingly frustrated by the seeming stalemate, and not surprisingly, there are differing opinions about whether schism can ultimately be avoided.

Bishop BECKWITH: If we don’t change is that Communion going to continue? That remains to be seen, but I would say it’s very questionable.

Bishop Tom Shaw

Bishop TOM SHAW (Diocese of Massachusetts): On some days I have really significant conversations with individual bishops and in groups, and I get a sense that we really are listening to one another and trying to find a path forward. And then on other days it doesn’t seem like we’re really talking to one another and it’s hard for me to see how we’ll be able to go forward.

Bishop ANDRUS: There will be a Communion. It may look different than the Communion we have today. I think most of the people here will stick with each other.

How can we improve our program or Web site?

LAWTON: Organizers hope this Lambeth Conference has helped the bishops build the relationships needed to hold the Communion together. Many here say they will also need some divine intervention to make that happen.

I’m Kim Lawton in Canterbury, England.

The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, and parishes here continue to wrestle with the issues on the table at Lambeth. Kim Lawton has our look at three very distinct congregations.

KIM LAWTON: Anglicans have been a contentious crowd since the tradition was founded under King Henry VIII nearly 500 years ago. Anglicanism has long stressed unity in the midst of diversity. But now, diversity may be stretching the Anglican Communion to a breaking point.

At one end of the spectrum is All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, which has been at the forefront of advocacy for more inclusion of gays and lesbians.

Reverend ED BACON (All Saints Episcopal Church, at wedding): Dearly beloved, we are gathered together by the grace of God …

Ed Bacon

LAWTON: When California legalized gay marriage earlier this year, congregational leaders at All Saints immediately voted to offer the rite of marriage to same-sex couples.

Rev. BACON: We believe that God’s love is not discriminatory. It’s not bigoted. There are no second class citizens, and so the graces of the church should extend to everyone, regardless of who they are.

(at wedding): If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now or else forever hold your peace.

LAWTON: Many Anglican churches around the world, especially in Africa, Asia and South America, are strongly opposed to gay rights. The last Lambeth Conference in 1998 approved a resolution asserting that homosexual practice is “incompatible with Scripture.” International Anglican leaders had asked the U.S. Episcopal Church to exercise caution in moving ahead with gay issues. But Bacon says as a priest he must minister to the people in his pews.

Rev. BACON: By the authority of the Holy Spirit, and the state of California I pronounce that you are married.

So we have a responsibility here on the ground, at the grassroots level to move forward with justice, inclusion, love and compassion. And the bishops can talk about it, but we think the bishops will come around and see that we are exercising great pastoral responsibility.

Gene Robinson

LAWTON: All Saints also actively supports Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. Robinson’s 2003 consecration in the Diocese of New Hampshire set off a firestorm of controversy across the global Communion. Because of the turmoil, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Communion, asked Robinson not to attend the Lambeth meeting. But Robinson has gone to Canterbury anyway to advocate for gay issues outside the official meeting.

Bishop GENE ROBINSON (Diocese of New Hampshire): I go with a greater sense of focus on gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender people around the world. In an odd sort of way, not being included in the official meetings gives me that greater opportunity to focus on that.

Rev. BACON: The entire New Testament is about inclusion, about bringing more and more people in and understanding that there’s nothing God created which is inherently evil. And so the Bible itself moves toward inclusion.

LAWTON: But at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Tallahassee, Florida, Reverend Eric Dudley reads the Bible very differently. Dudley had been rector at nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church for 10 years, but was upset at what he saw as the increasingly liberal theological direction of the national denomination, especially on gay issues.

Reverend ERIC DUDLEY (St. Peter’s Anglican Church): When we moved to the place that it was no longer the occasional priest, bishop here or there, but it became the official stance of the Church itself under whose umbrella I stand as a priest, then I couldn’t do it anymore.

LAWTON: In 2005, Dudley announced he was leaving the Episcopal Church to start a new Anglican congregation. Rather than launching a lawsuit to keep the historic building, Dudley acquired an unused church building from another denomination. On the first Sunday, 800 people showed up. St. Peter’s still averages about 650 people every week and gets the help of local police for traffic and crowd control. They have numerous thriving programs, such as Vacation Bible School.

Eric Dudley

Rev. DUDLEY: I’d much rather pour my energies out into building some strong new church that’s still faithful to Anglicanism, but that’s strongly unapologetically orthodox. A church where I don’t have to be continually fighting battles for things that I think should be givens.

LAWTON: Because Dudley wanted to stay within the Anglican Communion, he placed St. Peter’s under the authority of the Anglican Church of Uganda.

Rev. DUDLEY: I think it’s wonderfully ironic that you’ve got a bunch of wealthy, white mostly, Americans who’ve found their salvation, so to speak, in a bunch of poor Africans. I mean, you know God smiles at that.

LAWTON: The Episcopal Church sees the Ugandan role as an unethical incursion into its jurisdiction. St. Peter’s bishop is John Guernsey, an American who was consecrated as a bishop for the Anglican Church of Uganda.

Archbishop HENRY OROMBI (Anglican Church of Uganda): John Guernsey has been duly consecrated as a bishop.

LAWTON: Guernsey and other American bishops for African churches have also been excluded from Lambeth, just like Gene Robinson. Uganda’s Archbishop Henry Orombi and more than 200 other conservative bishops are boycotting Lambeth. They held their own gathering in Jerusalem last month and called for a new North American church body that would officially be part of the Anglican Communion, but would not be affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

Rev. DUDLEY: They’re seeking to create a fellowship of confessing Anglicans, that is, those who want to be clear in their commitments to orthodox faith.

Reverend SAMUEL COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: My brothers and sisters, the Lord be with you

CONGREGATION: And also with you.

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: Let us pray.

LAWTON: In Danville, Virginia, leaders at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany say they’ve been trying hard not to let church battles interfere with their local ministry.

Samuel Colley-Toothaker

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: My personal opinions about the theological matters which are currently plaguing the Episcopal Church really are not so much of import if I keep my eye on the ball, which is to lead this congregation in the work that Christ is calling us to.

LAWTON: Epiphany has been in Danville since the 1800s and claims that Confederate leader Jefferson Davis is among those who’ve worshipped there. The church has struggled to maintain a strong Episcopal witness in a community hard hit by the demise of tobacco and textile industries.

Reverend COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: Mission is actually doing the work that Christ gives us to do. Because the parish is endowed and has resources, we would be able to establish an Episcopal school that is not geared solely to those privileged few who can afford the tuition. And nobody will be priced out of the education that we’re able to give here.

LAWTON: Although many mainline churches have been losing members, Epiphany has been growing.

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: We decided that if we were going to be able to grow this church and continue to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then we needed to get people into the door however we could get them through the door.

LAWTON: The pastor says many members deeply value Anglicanism’s balance between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: We really do try to find the middle way in that we really are a bridge between the Roman tradition and sort of the more evangelical reform tradition.

LAWTON: The congregation tries to accommodate all people, including gays and lesbians. But Colley-Toothaker admits there might be some limits.

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: If the Episcopal Church of the United States decided that it was going to tell us that we needed to begin to bless same sex unions using the sacrament of marriage that might be a line that I would draw in the sand.

Canterbury Cathedral

LAWTON: Anglicans around the world hope the bishops meeting under the shadow of Canterbury’s historic cathedral will find a way to hold all these disparate points of view together. But the structure of this year’s Lambeth conference makes decisive solutions unlikely.

Bishop KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI (Episcopal Presiding Bishop at press conference): It’s a global conversation. It’s not going to legislate. It’s not going to make final decisions about anything.

LAWTON: Still, even as they move forward with their own local ministries, U.S. churches recognize those Lambeth conversations could have important implications for their futures.

Rev. BACON: My message for the bishops who are meeting in Lambeth is to open the depths of their being to the movement of the Holy Spirit that leads them into all truth, and then to have the courage of the convictions that come from listening to the Holy Spirit.

Rev. DUDLEY: The overwhelming majority of Anglicans stand where I do on these issues. Go back and look through the last several hundred years of Anglicanism and where we stand is where they stood.

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: Throughout the history of the hurch we have always found something to fight about, and those fights generally become so raucous that they lead to schism. I believe that is not in keeping in the teaching and the modeling of ministry of Jesus Christ himself gave to us.

LAWTON: The question for the bishops at Lambeth is whether it is still possible to hold all that diversity together.

I’m Kim LAWTON reporting.

by J. Peter Pham

Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism. By Miranda K. Hassett. Princeton University Press, 2007.

The bishops and other leaders gathering this month in Canterbury for the fourteenth Lambeth Conference will be considering the future of the Anglican Communion. The last meeting ten years ago is best remembered for the major role which the bishops from the “global South” played, especially in the 526-70 (with 45 abstentions) passage of a resolution upholding as the “teaching of Scripture” the ideal of “faithfulness in marriage is between a man and a woman in a lifelong union” and abstinence “for those not called to marriage” as well as “rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture,” while calling for pastoral ministry and sensitivity to “persons who experience themselves as having a homosexual orientation.”

Far from putting the matter to rest, the tensions raised during the often acrimonious debate leading to the declaration have only been exacerbated over the course of the ensuing decade. In fact, nearly one-quarter of the more than 800 bishops invited are snubbing this year’s conference in protest over the presence of prelates whom they accuse of sanctioning same-sex unions and ordaining non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy. In June, the boycotters held a separate summit in Jerusalem, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), where they were also joined by sympathizers who are nonetheless attending Lambeth.

As Philip Jenkins has argued in his recently completed trilogy of studies, a great deal of this theological contretemps can be explained by the fact that “the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa and Latin America,” where the approach to theological and moral issues is more traditional than in that found among more progressive believers in Europe and North America. Certainly there has been a decisive shift in the demographic center of the Anglican world in the last one hundred years. The fifth Lambeth Conference, which met under Archbishop Randall Davidson in 1908, represented a church 80 percent of whose communicants lived in the British Isles. In fact, the principal concern of that meeting was foreign missions to places like Africa, where less than 1 percent of Anglicans were then to be found. Today, the situation is the reverse: more than 55 percent of the world’s Anglicans live in Africa, while only 33 percent reside in the United Kingdom (the latter figure is somewhat deceptive, however, since, according to the Church of England’s statistics, only about 1 million of the 26 million nominal Anglicans attend church). The U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church, counts some 2 million members, a decline of more than one-third since the 1960s, who account for approximately 3 percent of the worldwide body. In fact, just between themselves, five of the archbishops not present in Canterbury–the primates of the Anglican churches of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and the Southern Cone of the Americas–represent nearly one-half the Anglicans in the world.

As simple and elegant as this demographic explanation is, it did not completely satisfy Miranda K. Hassett, who made the tensions in Anglican family the subject of her research as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of North Carolina. Anglican Communion in Crisis is distilled from her 2004 doctoral dissertation. Hassett has a personal stake in the object of her study: not only is she admirably forthright in disclosing that her “personal sympathies were with the liberal side,” but she was recently ordained a transitional deacon by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina and has taken up the position of assistant rectors at a parish in the Diocese of New Hampshire, a jurisdiction whose choice of a gay man living in a partnered relationship, V. Gene Robinson, as its bishop in 2003 her own book notes “drew an intense outcry from Anglican leaders around the world” and led several Anglican provinces to downgrade relations with the Episcopal Church. These factors render all the more laudable Hassett’s treatment of the subject which, within its limits, is generally balanced and, unlike many other recent works, free from rancor. The volume’s subtitle–How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism–hints at her conclusion: “The Episcopal Church’s [conservative] dissidents and their Southern allies are not merely carried along by global trends, but have actively shaped the character and impact of globalization on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.”

Hassett’s research opens in the period after the 1998 Lambeth Conference and focuses on the transnational alliances which were forged between some seemingly unlikely partners, “American social conservatives, commonly stereotyped as having little interest in including the marginalized, and Southern church leaders, whose demands for greater influence threaten the Northern-dominated status quo.” Her key insight is her appreciation that globalization is not an inexorable and impersonal force, but a dynamic process which can be shaped by human agents. Thus her research included extensive time with a congregation in the southeastern United States she pseudonymously calls “St. Timothy’s,” which had left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) under the jurisdiction of the Church of the Province of Rwanda, as well as six months in central Africa, where she focused her efforts on the Uganda Christian University, an Anglican university and seminary with close ties to a number of more conservative U.S. parishes and organizations. (In accordance with the conventions of her discipline, Hassett protects the anonymity of her sources. While the discretion, especially in the case of laypeople, is understandable given the nature of some of the issues with which she grapples, it also makes impossible any independent assessment of the ecclesiastical weight to give to pronouncements she attributes to bishops and other prominent church leaders.)

From the narrative of the fieldwork as well as Hassett’s nuanced analysis of her observations, it is clear that she is a dispassionate scholar, willing to challenge widely held stereotypes about conservative Anglicans in both the United States and Africa.

While the members of St. Timothy’s originally joined AMiA as what Hassett describe as “a lifeboat” away from an Episcopal Church they perceived to be increasingly errant in its leftward drift while still maintaining their connection to the larger Anglican Communion through the archbishop of Rwanda, she found that the new relationship had a profound impact on both parish and parishioners that went far beyond canonical formalities to forge “a transnational relationship of significant local meaning.” Describing the congregation’s efforts to “think more seriously about what their connection to Rwanda might mean”–which ranged from a display and sale of African handicrafts to assisting an African priest raising money for AIDS orphans to a trip to visit their new provincial see by several congregants–Hassett notes that the “congregation’s experience of finding an alliance with an African church first thinkable, then desirable, involved more and more members’ coming to see African Christianity as a positive model.” As a result, members of St. Timothy’s “were coming not only to think about Africa in new and positive ways but also to look more critically on their own way of life as Americans.”

If “conservative dissidents point to the orthodoxy, zeal, and other desirable traits they perceive as characterizing the churches of the global South, and seek to bring that moral force to bear in transforming the Episcopal Church,” the Anglicans Hassett encountered in Uganda–the heirs of a colonial church if ever there was one, as Danish Africanist Holger Bernt Hansen’s monumental study Mission, Church, and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda, 1890-1925, authoritatively documented–have been excited by the discovery that “Africans have something to teach American Christians.” According to Hassett, African Christians see this as an exchange not unlike that of economic globalization whereby “each region is envisioned exporting what it has in plenty, trading those goods for what another region can readily provide”–in this case, spiritual aid in return for material assistance. Consequently, Hassett posits broadly: This collective and individual rethinking demonstrates that globalization, as represented by the transnational Anglican dissident movement, is not simply Westernization, a one-way process in which the Southern partners take on the culture and ideas of Northerners. Instead the people of St. Timothy’s were influenced by their Rwandan allies to adopt new ways of thinking and talking, indicating that such global relationships have effects in both directions. While she cautions conservatives that an idealization of African Christianity “invokes concepts ultimately derived from older and negative views of Africans as childlike, primitive, and uncivilized,” Hassett reserves a stronger criticism for liberals who, long presuming on the solidarity of the developing world due to “the bias toward the Left in the scholarly literature on global movements,” have reacted angrily to the unexpectedly strong doctrinal stances of Southern bishops by describing them as “superstitious, ignorant, and opportunist.” In contrast to scholars like Ian Douglas, subsequently her professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a member of the design group for this year’s Lambeth Conference, who propose a vision of globalization which she describes as “diversity globalism”–that is, “characterized by the affirmation of cultural and experiential diversity” and “nothing more clearly defined than general mutual good will”–Hassett writes that conservative Northerners and Southerners have together built various networks into the interconnected structure she labels “accountability globalism”: This is no veiled anti-globalism or reactionary vision, in which older authority structures of white male Euro-American dominance are reestablished to maintain order in an increasingly complex worldwide organization. Instead, this conservative vision embraces the diversity and complexity of the contemporary world…call[ing] for power to shift away from traditional centers and to locate instead in a worldwide network of church leaders united in their commitment to Anglican orthodoxy. New, global patterns of discipline are envisioned in the service of correction, help, and, above all, accountability among Anglican churches around the globe. While Anglicans, like Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, have historically organized their ecclesiastical polities around local bishops whose jurisdiction is largely defined by territorial boundaries, Hassett sees the potential of the nascent affinity networks which are manifestations of accountability globalism to radically transform relationships within the church: [P]articular connections between individuals, parishes, dioceses, and provinces…bypass and even subvert the centralized, nested geographical authority structure of the Communion. It remains to be seen whether the total “realignment” of the Communion into networked clusters of Anglican bodies defined by affinity rather than geographical proximity will come to pass…Today many believe that such networks will become, functionally if not officially, the new organizing structure of the whole Anglican Communion. Certainly there have been moves towards such realignments across the Anglican world. In the last year, the Nigerian, Ugandan, and Kenyan provinces have followed the Rwandan province in consecrating “missionary bishops” for work in the United States. More recently, the bishop and diocesan convention of the Diocese of San Joaquin, California, have voted to align themselves with the South America-based Province of the Southern Cone, and other Episcopal dioceses are reported to be considering “exit strategies.” And while strategic partnerships between Northern conservatives and Southern Anglican leaders and churches have clearly become more common, there is no reason to preclude moderates and liberals within the Communion from creating their own affinity networks. Hassett, for example, chronicles the founding in 2000 of a Ugandan branch of Integrity, an advocacy organization for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Anglicans, and the subsequent controversy within the province over the involvement of a retired bishop, Christopher Ssenyonjo, as the group’s counselor. The author’s most important contribution might well prove to be her disentangling of this bewildering collection of efferent strands and reweaving them into a comprehensible narrative heralding one vision of how today’s feuds might eventually be resolved.

As an academic work, Anglican Communion in Crisis is not without its share of problems. For example, while differing attitudes about homosexuals has certainly received a great deal of media attention, is it really “the defining issue in contemporary Episcopal Church (and, arguably, Anglican Communion) conflicts” that Hassett characterizes it as? A credible case can be made that the fault lines run much deeper into clashes over fundamentals of faith and that the controversy over homosexuality is perhaps better understood oftentimes as a proxy used by some on both sides of the revisionist/traditionalist divide. Despite serious efforts to “struggle against [her] eagerness to offer [her] own solutions or conclusions” and to “avoid adjudicating in matters of debate,” Hassett occasionally lapses into making assertions which are at the very least methodologically weak, undocumented, and possibly even inaccurate. To cite one case, since she correctly reports that most Episcopalians “are not particularly mobilized on the issue of gay rights” and that “public, outspoken activism for the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Episcopalians in the church is largely limited to the leaders of the Episcopal GLBT rights group, Integrity, and a few outspoken bishops, other church leaders, and scholars,” as a matter of social science how can she then claim that “the mobilized liberal camp represents a position with general support of a majority of Episcopalians” in the absence of any reference to survey data supporting that conclusion? Also, the book is bogged down at times in a tendentious disputation with certain conclusions in Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom, a conceit all the more disappointing since Hassett does not appear to have taken into account any of the subsequent work by the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University that would have obviated a substantial part of the critique.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings and the fact, modestly acknowledged by the author, that its “account of current debates in the Anglican tradition is contestable,” Anglican Communion in Crisis is a must-read, not only by those most directly involved in what are, frankly, often unseemly fracases within the Anglican body politic–especially the mitered heads at Lambeth (as well as GAFCON) who are called, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “for the work and ministry of a bishop…the edifying and well-governing of the Church”–but also by anyone interested in the future of Christianity as a whole amidst constantly shifting global dynamics.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia, is the author of many works on religion, international affairs, and African politics. An ordained priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy, he has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on books by Pope Benedict XVI and Philip Jenkins.