News

By Hilary White

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan WilliamsLONDON, June 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Today, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, issued a lengthy and carefully worded statement that invited the secularized liberals in the US and elsewhere to embrace the traditional tenets of Anglican Christianity or form an “associate” church that would not share in the decision-making of the larger Communion.
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  Williams says that despite the political characterizations of the crisis, the debate “is not essentially a debate about the human rights of homosexual people,” but one more fundamental about what it means to be Christian and Anglican.
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  The Worldwide Anglican Communion is on the edge of disintegration over the US church’s decision in 2003 to ordain active homosexuals as bishops. Since the decision, the gulf between the secularist liberals and the rest of the Communion has grown with some African bishops offering to create alternate ecclesial structures for disaffected conservatives in the US and elsewhere.
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  In a meeting last week, the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church of the US, (ECUSA), moved the church further away fromÂa defining doctrine of Christianity, overwhelmingly refusing to even consider a resolution that affirmed Jesus Christ as the “only name by which any person may be saved.”
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  Around the world, Anglicans, who number approximately 77 million, have been calling on the Archbishop of Canterbury for a clarifying statement to end or ameliorate the crisis.
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  Williams faulted the US Church for forcing an issue that is still under debate and a source of division by pre-emptively ordaining as bishop a practicing homosexual “without even the American church itself …having formally decided as a local church what it thinks about blessing same sex partnerships.”
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  In a statement published on the internet, he said that the homosexual issue in the church was uniquely divisive because it strikes at the basis of the Christian identity. While there is a “fairly general, though not universal,” acceptance of differences over women clergy, Williams says, the issue of blessing active homosexuality enjoys no similar general acceptance.
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  The question of homosexual activity, he says, is more fundamental and concerns “what kind of behaviour a church that seeks to be loyal to the bible can bless and what kinds of behaviour it must warn against.”
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  Williams supports a proposal that those who support blessing active homosexuality should leave the Anglican Communion. He suggests they are forming a separate church that, while sharing historical and personal ties with Anglicanism,Âis no longer “talking the same language” as the Anglican Communion.
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  Those local churches, he says, who are not willing to submit to the “covenant” of the larger Anglican bodies that remain traditionally Christian may have to separate from the larger body of Anglicanism.
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  Williams proposal is an invitation to secularized liberals to re-join with biblically-based traditional Christianity or be left behind. He says this is necessary, “If we are to continue to be any sort of catholic church, if we believe that we are answerable to something more than our immediate environment and its priorities, and are held in unity by something more than just the consensus of the moment.”
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  One US bishop welcomed Williams’ statement as a signal that the Anglican Communion is no longer attempting to retain those elements within it that are opposed to classical creedal Christianity.
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  Bishop Robert Duncan, moderator of the Anglican Communion Network and bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and a critic of ECUSA’s secularist direction, said “For the first time, the Archbishop himself is acknowledging that some parts of the communion will not be able to continue in full membership if they insist on maintaining teaching and action outside of the received faith and order.”
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ÂRead related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
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  Anglicans Representing Two-Thirds of Global Body Reject Gay-Friendly North American Church
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/nov/05110211.html
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  Canadian Anglicans form Break-Away Group in Defiance of Same-Sex Couple “Blessings”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/nov/04110110.html
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  Listen to Williams’ statement:
https://db.astream.com/cofe/060627%20Archbishop%27s%20reflection%20on%20communion.mp3