Episcopal Leaders to Consider Demands by Overseas Anglicans

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Episcopal Church leaders will meet next week (June 11-14) to confront demands from overseas Anglican archbishops to roll back the church’s pro-gay policies and create a structure to oversee breakaway conservatives. The church’s 40-member Executive Council, led by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, will convene in Parsippany, N.J. Under […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Episcopal Church leaders will meet next week (June 11-14) to confront demands from overseas Anglican archbishops to roll back the church’s pro-gay policies and create a structure to oversee breakaway conservatives.

The church’s 40-member Executive Council, led by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, will convene in Parsippany, N.J. Under church rules, the panel has the ability to make key decisions between the church’s triennial General Conventions.


It’s unclear, however, what _ if any _ action the Executive Council will take, according to church leaders.

“There’s a lot of debate about that,” Jefferts Schori said Thursday (June 7). “It’s really only General Convention that makes policy for the church.”

At a meeting in Tanzania last February, top archbishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion demanded that the Episcopal Church, its U.S. branch, promise to cease consecrating gay bishops and blessing same-sex unions by Sept. 30 or face “consequences.”

The Anglican archbishops also said the 2.2-million member Episcopal Church should create an alternative structure for its conservative minority, some of whom do not accept the oversight of the church’s more liberal leadership.

In March, U.S. bishops flatly rejected the proposal to create an alternative structure and suggested the church’s executive council do the same. The bishops will meet again in September to issue their final response.

At a time of controversy within their church, Episcopal leaders are debating just who has the power to speak for the church and answer the Anglican archbishops’ demands.

Jefferts Schori has said that “the incursion into the Episcopal Church from other members of the Anglican Communion” will be on the agenda, according to Episcopal News Service.


The Rev. Ian Douglas, a member of the council, said the panel can execute decisions made by the General Convention, but under church rules it “can’t interpret and can’t initiate” policy on its own.

“Some will perceive that as a dodge,” said Douglas, a professor at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. But Douglas said that kind of churchwide deliberative process is required by the Episcopal Church’s democratic structure.

The Rev. Kendall Harmon, a conservative leader and a well-respected theologian from South Carolina, said next week’s meeting is important because “it affects the flavor of the church-wide discussion going into September.”

Moreover, “it’s the key means by which the rest of the church lets its bishops know what they think,” before the Sept. 30 deadline, Harmon said.

Harmon is less than hopeful his church will assent to the Anglican primates’ demands. Rather, he said, he expects them to “follow previous patterns.”

“They will once again say, `We really love the communion and we intend to be fully a part of the communion. But we won’t do what you want us to do,”’ Harmon said.


KRE/CM END BURKE

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