BOB ABERNETHY: Dramatic defiance this past weekend of the authority of the head of the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church USA and the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which Episcopalians are a part. In Denver, two conservative foreign archbishops, from Southeast Asia and Rwanda, consecrated as Bishops four conservative American priests.

The new bishops join two others consecrated last year. They are part of a breakaway missionary movement that has raised the prospect of Episcopal schism. Deryl Davis has our story.

DERYL DAVIS: It was a familiar, and yet, unprecedented, ceremony. The consecration of four American bishops, performed in America by archbishops from Africa and Asia.

The four new bishops are part of the Anglican Mission In America, or AMIA, a small, conservative breakaway movement from the U.S. Episcopal Church.

Thad Barnum is a newly appointed "missionary" bishop serving under the Archbishop of Rwanda.

BISHOP THAD BARNUM: We're not doing anything new, we just got a new missionary district -- it's called the United States of America.

DAVIS: Barnum and others formed the AMIA last year in reaction to liberal movements in the Episcopal Church. They asked the two archbishops to make them missionaries in their own country.

BARNUM: No longer do we have to hear from our seminaries and our bishops that they are going to deny the person, the uniqueness, of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God. We are now free to go coast to coast and plant churches, fully Anglican, fully in America, and fully under those churches that we used to send missionaries to and now they are missionaries to us.