From Across the Pond; Things Fall Apart

From Stephen Bates in today's UK Guardian:

Archbishop Rowan Williams's plea last week for measured discussion and lengthy contemplation over whether the Anglican communion should develop a mutually agreed covenant of core beliefs and then, eventually, perhaps, a looser structure of constituent churches and associated churches, seems to be falling apart within days.

The bishops of Nigeria are already demanding that those same liberals should be excised like a cancer from the body of the church. Their primate, Archbishop Peter Akinola, criticised Dr Williams's letter even before he had read it. And some liberals, here and in the US, are beginning to ask themselves whether the worldwide Anglican communion is such a worthwhile body to belong to after all.

Akinola has already begun the process of anointing his own representative in the US, the Rev Martyn Minns (the English evangelical who ministers to a church in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC) as a bishop of the Nigerian church, putatively to lead like-minded conservatives in America - a move described by Lambeth as unhelpful. Not sure what Minns's rivals, such as the Rev David Anderson of the conservative American Anglican Council, or Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh, for that matter, think of that, but at least Minns, after several failed attempts to get a mitre in an American diocese, has now achieved one from Africa.

Read it all here.