Akinola Denies Anglican Split on Agenda at Forthcoming Meeting

The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, has come out to deny media reports stating that the purpose the Anglican meeting next month in Alexandria, Egypt, was create a schism between conservatives and liberals in the Anglican Church, reports Reuters.
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The Anglican Communion is facing a growing crisis as traditionalists, mainly from Africa and Latin America, continue to virulently oppose the advancement of gay rights by liberal Anglicans in the United States, Canada and Britain.

According to reports, the meeting in Alexandria next month would see the creation of a new independent Africa-based Anglican community to be headed by Akinola, one of the most outspoken critics of the Church’s increasing liberalisation.

“The encounter is not a business meeting concerned with power, politics and other such mundane things,” said Akinola in a statement on the meeting next month.

Conservatives have said that it is up to the liberals to leave the Anglican Communion if they want to, but predict that a split was likely to occur eventually.

“We are not going anywhere,” says Archbishop Greg Venables of South America, a leader of the conservative Global South group, which includes Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Addressing reporters in Buenos Aires, Venables said: “How we begin to realign, we don’t know.”

He added: “I do not personally think the Anglican Communion will survive as we know it because we can’t bring together the two elements, they are antithetical.”

Venables predicts that the debate in the Anglican Church could rage on for another ten years owing to the Communion’s decentralised structure which, at present, has no mechanism in place for excluding members.

The Archbishop expects that the decision by the Church of England to allow gay priests registered under the new Civil Partnership Act on the promise of celibacy will only deepen the division.

Venables said that the decision by the Church of England was met with disbelief and deemed it “an indication that England is going to go down the same road as Canada and the U.S. and that there is going to be further division in the next months”.

An invitation to the meeting will be extended to U.S. and Canadian groups who disagree with the growing liberal trends in the Church, according to Venables.

He insisted, however, that the debate is not one about human sexuality, but about how strictly the Bible should be interpreted.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has been invited to attend the meeting, despite the decision by organisers to limit attendance at the conference to conservatives only.