Two Irish representatives on the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) have warned of a real danger that the crisis over homosexuality could lead to centralised authority in the Anglican Communion.
Responding to a communique issued by a meeting of Anglican primates in Newry last Friday, Dean Michael Burrows of Cork and Kate Turner of Connor diocese expressed concern at "the request made by the primates' meeting to the Episcopal Church (USA) and Anglican Church of Canada to withdraw their members from the ACC until the next Lambeth Conference (2008)".
Each of the communion's 38 provinces has between one and three members (lay and clerical) on the council. As larger provinces, both the US and Canada have three members each. It meets about every three years.
In their communique last Friday, the primates asked the North Americans not to attend ACC meetings for three years, but to do so next June in Nottingham to present their cases.
This follows the approval of same-sex blessings in the Canadian New Westminster diocese, and the consecration of a gay man, Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire in the US.
"For the ACC, a genuinely synodical international gathering, to have its membership and atmosphere adjusted essentially at the behest of the primates' meeting would severely damage the balance of dispersed authority within Anglicanism," Dean Burrows and Ms Turner have said.
"If the Anglican Church of Canada and Episcopal Church (USA) representatives on the ACC are only admitted to the Nottingham meeting in June to express their views on one issue, their churches will be precluded from participating in other important discussions which could both enhance fellowship and create perspective. What better way both to cement division and to compromise the independence of the ACC?" they said.
"For the moment, the supremely important thing is that members of the dysfunctional Anglican family somehow keep talking and listening and in so doing learn to make more charitable judgments concerning one another's motives if not deeds.
Given that the primates' meeting took place in Ireland, we feel it is especially important that our personal, courteous misgivings concerning some of its conclusions are heard, not least by our diverse global ACC colleagues."
