WP: Uninvited, Gay Bishop Attends Conference Anyway
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 26, 2008; Page A08
....Since (Gene) Robinson, 61, was consecrated as bishop in New Hampshire five years ago, his presence has threatened to split the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest church. A traditionalist wing of the church whose leaders include Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who condemns homosexuality as an abomination against God's teaching, has been so at odds with welcoming gay people and women that it held its own breakaway meeting in Jerusalem last month.
Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the Communion, did not invite Robinson to the church's gathering in Canterbury, known as the Lambeth Conference, in an attempt to calm any move toward formal schism. Even so, Akinola and more than 200 bishops, many from Africa, have boycotted the conference, held once every 10 years. But 650 of the 880 bishops invited did come. Robinson, with no invitation, showed up, too, though he cannot go to the official meetings....
"I would rather be on the inside. It's never okay to be relegated to the fringe by someone," said Robinson, a charismatic man with short graying hair and rimless glasses. If he succeeds in explaining how he can be "unabashedly gay and unabashedly Christian" to even one more person who cannot fathom it, he said, "it will have been worth it."
The last Lambeth conference, in 1998, produced a resolution that declared active homosexuality to be incompatible with the teachings of the Bible. Robinson's elevation to bishop five years later by the U.S. branch of Anglicanism, the Episcopal Church, accelerated the clash. More than a dozen Episcopal congregations in Virginia voted in late 2006 and early 2007 to break with the U.S. church, including the influential Falls Church in Falls Church and Truro Church in Fairfax. Most of these are now aligned with Akinola, the archbishop in Nigeria.
Moreover, the Episcopal Church is now led by a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori. Many conservative members of the faith continue to oppose appointment of women priests and bishops, but no issue has stirred division globally as much as treatment of gays and lesbians in the church....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502828.html?hpid=topnews