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Primate's snub points to Communion split
The Church of England Newspaper
Number: 5707
Date: March 4,
Attempts to pretend that it is business as usual for the Anglican Communion were fatally undermined this week as the Primate of Nigeria pulled out of one of its routine annual committee meetings.
Archbishop Peter Akinola refused to attend the annual joint standing committee of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting because of the presence of two American members, the Rev Dr Ian Douglas and the Presiding Bishop of the United States, Frank Griswold.
The Archbishop maintained that to attend the meeting would be to give legitimacy to the Episcopal Church of the USA which he maintains, in consecrating a practising homosexual bishop, has broken communion with the Anglican world.
The Archbishop, who also chairs the Council of African Provinces in Africa, has led the hard line against the consecration from the majority of Anglicans on the continent. In an statement emailed to the Anglican Communion Office in London last week, he said that he would not sit at any meeting with representatives of ECUSA.
“Archbishop Akinola is baffled that the Anglican Communion Office continues to act as if what ECUSA did does not really matter,” said the Ven Oluranti Odubogun, the General Secretary of the Church of Nigeria.
Archbishop Akinola’s absence reinforces the fact that Anglican Communion has effectively broken up, in spite of the efforts of the Lambeth Commission, which has until September to come up with some sort of workable compromise to hold things together.
The Province of Central Africa only last week released a statement claiming that the American Church had broken communion with them by consecrating a practising gay bishop.
Dr Akinola’s impatience with the Anglican Communion Office’s alleged lack of neutrality in the current crisis is not new. Since Lambeth 1998 a number of leaders from Churches in the developing world have raised concerns about the London-based but American-run bureaucracy. Senior Church of England evangelicals have repeatedly complained to the Anglican Communion News Service about its failure to carry statements and press releases from provinces in the global south on its website.
They will also be concerned at the fact that only last week Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s remarks at the new London premises of the Anglican Communion Offices calling for the inclusion of practising homosexuals were given such prominence on the news service
This week’s meeting of the joint standing committee is expected to look at plans for the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council in 2005 and the appointment of a new Secretary General of the Anglican Communion when Canon John Peterson retires later this year.
