Rift Deepens as Anglican Conservative Defies Ireland Agreement

On Friday, the crisis over division of the Anglican Church deepened, as it was disclosed that the leader of the conservative primates defied the agreement made in the Northern Ireland meeting last week concerning the resolution for the current homosexuality controversy.

The five-day meeting held at the Dromantine Conference Centre, County Down, Northern Ireland, gathered 35 Anglican primates all over the world last week. The archbishops and bishops all agreed a temporary split with the US Episcopal Church, as many conservatives in the Church supported.

The communiqué read, "...We request that the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada voluntarily withdraw their members from the Anglican Consultative Council for the period leading up to the next Lambeth Conference"

This was intended to give the two churches a chance to reconsider their liberal approach to the issue of homosexuality, which has outraged many parts of the Anglican Communion, particularly in Africa and Asia.

While the statement described that the primates from all over the world had met together with a generosity of spirit...Christian charity and abundant goodwill, one of the conservative leaders at the meeting has told the Guardian newspaper that the meeting had instead taken place in "an atmosphere of rancour and mutual hostility with Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, being treated with contempt by the conservative faction."

According to the conservative leader, many primates do not agree with Archbishop Wiliams’s effort to try to hold the Anglican Communion at all costs. They in fact believed that a split in the church was "inevitable".

In addition, the communiqué called on conservative archbishops to refrain from intervening in the affairs of other dioceses in the period of temporary split, to safeguard the traditional autonomy of other national churches within the Anglican Communion.

Last weekend however, the Guardian newspaper reported of a breach of the agreement by the Rt Rev Gregory Venables, presiding bishop of the church in South America, immediately after the primates’ meeting. He preached to conservative churches in the diocese of New Westminster in Vancouver, Canada, which was supposed to have split with the rest of Anglicans.

According to an interview with BBC prior to the primates’ meeting, Bishop Venables said that he already regarded the Anglican Communion as broken. He is an English conservative evangelical who presides over the 22,000-strong Anglican population, stretching from Peru to Argentina. He is also a supporter of the Church of England group Reform - a conservative evangelical network.

Some African provinces of the church had previously heavily relied on financial support from the US Episcopal Church, but now many have begun rejecting the funding. The primate explained to the Guardian, "I understand they have been told that American fundamentalist millionaires have promised to match any funding the African church would have received from the Episcopal Church dollar for dollar. Do we have a communion now? It is already broken."