By Hilary White

CANTERBURY, England, July 17, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The opening yesterday of the fourteenth Lambeth Conference, the once-in-ten years meeting of the bishops of the Worldwide Anglican Communion, holds no hope of major reforms of the Anglican Church, according to the leader of the traditionalist movement in the US.

Nearly one third of the Communion’s bishops have declined to attend Lambeth in protest. That third of the episcopate, however, represents 30 million of the Anglican Church’s 55 million active adherents worldwide, or well over half.

"[W]e may be participating in the demise of the third largest Christian communion in the world," said Keith Ackerman, Episcopal bishop of Quincy in Illinois.

The Anglican Church is breaking up over the acceptance by its ultra-liberal and heavily secularised North American and British branches of homosexuality as morally equivalent to natural sexuality and their insistence on forcing the rest of the Communion to follow suit.

Ackerman, who is also the President of Forward in Faith North America, spoke to Anglican journalist David Virtue in Canterbury, England, on the eve of the opening of Lambeth. He said that this Conference will "require a very honest analysis of what it means to be a communion," indicating, however, that he holds little hope that this analysis will happen at the Conference.

The break-up of the Anglican Communion, Ackerman said, is being orchestrated by the Church’s higher levels of leadership, without the support of the majority of Anglican laity.

"The outcry from the laity is much greater than one can imagine when they are faced with revisionist plans that are inconsistent with the prevailing teachings of classical Anglicanism. It would be much more honest for those who have departed from traditional Anglicanism to merely state that that was their plan and they will continue to allow the [secular] culture to define the faith."

Ackerman is one of only two bishops in the US Episcopalian branch of the Anglican Communion who refuses to ordain women as clergy, citing scriptural and religious precedent going back 2000 years. He said it is "probably inevitable" that the other, Bishop Jack Iker of Fort Worth, will leave the Episcopal Church. He indicated that his own diocese is ready to fight the Episcopal Church to keep their church properties should the Quincy diocese vote to leave.

Bishop Ackerman drew a theological line of connection between the push for women clergy and bishops and the "sexual idolatry" of promoting homosexuality and downgrading natural relations.

"The priest not only takes the place of Christ at the altar," he said, "but is in immediate relationship with Holy Mother church, thus we recognize complementarity. In the case of marriage we see one man and one woman and therefore we see once again the reality of complementarity. The interchangeability of sex in these sacraments undermines the traditional perspective articulated in the Book of Genesis regarding creation and procreation."

When asked if he agreed that the Anglican Communion was now being led by people who were "Christian in name only" but who are not true believers, Ackerman responded, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

Worldwide Anglican Communion at an End says Nigerian Primate
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jun/08061908.html

The Split Widens: Anglican Bishops Call Global Conference for Traditional Anglicans
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jan/08010401.html