c. 2004 Religion News Service

LONDON _ Two bishops, one an American supporter of gay rights within the Anglican Communion and the other an African critic of such efforts, appeared at a forum Tuesday to explain their differences and express hope for a unified future for their international denomination.

“It is the body of Christ,” said Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon of Kaduna, Nigeria, referring to an Anglican Communion torn over the issue of homosexuality. “I cannot see the Lord himself allowing his body to disintegrate.”

Idowu-Fearon and Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal Church appeared at a discussion organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. They appeared together a day after a panel chaired by Archbishop Robin Eames of Ireland issued a long-awaited report on the Anglican Communion’s growing divide over homosexuality.

Among other things, the panel called on Episcopalians (American Anglicans) to apologize for stirring international disunity in allowing an openly gay bishop and said African bishops should stop efforts to oversee like-minded conservative congregations in the United States wanting to pull away from the Episcopal Church.

While both bishops expressed hope about the future, they acknowledged fundamental differences dividing believers from their respective countries.

Pointing out that the Anglican Church of Nigeria was “very evangelical,” Idowu-Fearon said faith in Africa tends to be experiential.

“Over 70 percent of us have personal conversion experiences,” he said. “For us, Christianity means a complete change of life.”

Nigerian Anglicans find the current crisis “extremely painful” because of attitudes toward homosexuality rooted in their culture, said Idowu-Fearon.

“If you have homosexual tendencies you go to the medicine man because it is seen as a disease,” he said. He said his language has “no word for homosexuality.”

By contrast, Griswold argued that not only did American Anglicanism have a tradition of pluralism but it based its spirituality largely on the church’s sacramental life. He explained that Episcopalians are usually baptized as infants and their experience of Christ is thus a cumulative process rather than a sudden moment of conversion.

In the Episcopal Church the question of homosexuality had been a matter of discussion and debate for the past 30 years, and many Anglicans had been able to come to terms with gay relationships, said Griswold.

Griswold deplored the way in which the dispute over homosexuality is distracting from the church’s concern with issues like poverty and disease.

He cited the case of a widow with three children in Uganda who, with aid from Episcopalians in the United States, had been able to acquire a cow which supplied her with milk and provided manure to help her crops flourish.

But Anglicans in Uganda, protesting Episcopalians’ acceptance of openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, refused the funds in protest.

“That is a sin,” said Griswold.

Nonetheless, Griswold, like Idowu-Fearon, expressed optimism about the Anglican Communion’s future, and promised to do what he could to promote unity.

END RNS