Word: communionism
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TIME: Many in the Anglican Communion feel it's hurtling toward schism, with you trying in vain to hold it together. Williams: I don't think schism is inevitable. The task I've got is to try and maintain as long as possible the space in which people can have constructive disagreements, learn from each other, and try and hold that within an agreed framework of discipline and practice. It feels very vulnerable. I can't, of course, deny that. It feels very vulnerable and very fragile, perhaps more so than it's been for a very long time...
...bishop of New Hampshire, and Martyn Minns, from the Convocation of Anglicans in North America. So you've excluded an emblematic liberal and an emblematic conservative. Of course, exclusion is not particularly a Gospel idea. The election and ordination of Gene Robinson was an event which many in the Communion had warned would deepen our divisions. Similarly, with Martyn Minns, there had been warnings that [his missionary assignment in the U.S.] looked like a kind of aggression against another Anglican province. I felt we would run the risk of their attendance becoming the subject matter of the conference...
...last official act before a three-month sabbatical, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams ordained a new bishop in London's St. Paul's Cathedral. Williams, the tousle-haired leader of the Church of England and titular head of its global offshoot, the Anglican Communion, performed the liturgy of ordination: "Will you strive for the visible unity of Christ's Church?" he asked. Answered the new bishop: "By the help of God, I will...
...pitting some of the wealthiest and most liberal of the church's 38 provinces, notably those in North America, against a more socially conservative group mostly concentrated in Africa and Asia and known as the Global South. The latter's views were reflected in 1998 in language at the communion's once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, calling homosexual practice "incompatible with Scripture." But in 2003 the Episcopal Church, the Anglican body in the U.S., ordained Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire. Unlike the Pope, the Archbishop makes no claims to infallibility and cannot dictate...
That was before he was asked to lead a global church. When the Episcopalians elected Robinson, Williams faced conservative demands that the Americans leave the communion. Instead, he endorsed milder requests like a promise, for now, to make no more gay bishops and bless no more gay marriages. The Episcopalians made ambiguous gestures of compliance but have elected as their presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who had supported Robinson. Today Williams calls Robinson's election--absent any prior decision allowing same-sex ordination--"bizarre and puzzling...