VIEW FROM THE PEWS
with JOHN SANDEMAN
Forgive me if this sounds like a bad joke: but I want to tell you what the evangelical said " or rather wrote " to the lesbian priest.
It was the end of ten tension-filled days in June at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the US branch of the Anglican Communion. Evangelical Angela Minns slipped Susan Russell, president of the gay lobby group Integrity, a note. It read, "The gays and lesbians in this church have been sold out for a tea party at Lambeth'.
The evangelicals, a tiny minority at the convention, had watched a last-minute manouvere by one faction " the "institutional liberals' led by bishops " had outflanked Russell's "revolutionary liberals' with a last-minute motion which rather ambiguously promised that the Episcopalians would not elect any more gay bishops.
Yes, that's two factions of liberals " with the evangelicals too small to count for much. The Episcopalians are rather different from us. The usually dominant Liberals had split " over whether to put gay rights on the backburner and cave into demands by the Anglican Communion that they halt electing gay bishops and apologise for the damage to the Communion caused when they elected Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.
Angela Minns doesn't support the election of gay bishops. But she found the liberal bishops' desire for a trip to Lambeth at all costs, distasteful. All for a tea party. The tea party is the Lambeth Conference " a jamboree of bishops held every ten years. There's good evidence that the American bishops had received a message from England that they better get a motion passed to say, "no more gay bishops' or no cucumber sandwiches would be on offer.
Clearly the American bishops like Lambeth. It gives their denomination, small by US standards and shrinking, a sense at least of historical importance.
The overwhelming number of bishops from booming Third World evangelical provinces ave changed Lambeth from the white man's club it used to be. Many of them don't want to be associated with the liberal American church.
If the Church of England once lived up to the epithet of the "Tory (conservative) party at prayer' the Americans now resemble "the Green Party at prayer'. The Anglican Communion is struggling to hold together in the face of such diversity, despite the valiant efforts of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. He hopes that a new "covenant' will help bind churches together.
Others like our archbishop Peter Jensen think that events are moving too fast for Williams' plan to be practical. He believes that the Communion has been more like a loose federation for some time and becoming even looser " more and more like a tea party.
A mere tea party still has a host: someone gets to write the invites. The Communion has gradually ceased to be a real communion. Ministers can't automatically transfer around the world " which is what a functional communion would provide. Prayerbooks have been rewritten in some member churches to reflect very different theologies.
Which brings us back to Angela Minns. Her husband Martyn runs a very large evangelical Episcopalian church in the Virginian suburbs of Washington. He's been appointed a missionary bishop. By Nigeria. The Nigerians " and a couple of other Third World Anglican churches " have started to plant local churches across the US. Now that's more exciting than a tea party.
