Ruth Gledhill: commentary - "New fears of schism in Anglican Church"

The day in 2003 when the Archbishop of Canterbury forced his friend Dr Jeffrey John to reject his appointment as Bishop of Reading became a defining moment of his archiepiscopate. The consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire became a defining moment for the entire Anglican Communion.

Now Britain could be about to have its own "Gene Robinson moment" with growing support in the province of Wales for his election to a bishopric, possibly as soon as in Bangor next month.

The Church in Wales is outside the Church of England, having been disestablished early in the 20th century, and with just six dioceses is one of the smaller of the 38 provinces with 75 million Anglicans worldwide.

But it has a tradition of liberal Catholicism, having nurtured this in Jeffrey John himself in his childhood in the province.

If Dr John is elected next month, voices in opposition will be strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Only last week, the bishops of the Global Anglican Future Conference, a "rival" Lambeth Conference set up in opposition to the liberal agenda of the West, met in London to plan their strategy.

Bishops at July's Lambeth Conference endorsed the call for a moratorium on the consecration of homosexual bishops in practising gay relationship.

But even though he has had a civil partnership ceremony with his long-term partner Grant Holmes, Dr John is not in a "practising" relationship. As he said in an interview with The Times at the height of the Reading controversy, his relationship is a celibate one.

The Church of England's bishops issued guidelines in 1991, Issues in Human Sexuality, that have become an unofficial benchmark for the entire Communion. These guidelines offered guarded acceptance of committed, faithful gay relationships for the laity.

For gay clergy, though, celibacy was made the rule, a rule that Dr John lives within.

The problem for conservatives is that Dr John has never retracted or repented his teachings in support of gay relationships.

There is no doubt that his appointment in Wales would add unholy fire to the Anglican spirit of hostility over sex.

But if he is not elected, Wales will have lost a seriously formidable pastor and theologian.

The more serious issue would be the precedent it set. Already, liberals in the US are lobbying hard for the agreed moratorium on gay consecrations to be rescinded when General Convention meets next summer. If Dr John were to be appointed in Wales, it would become almost impossible for conservatives to hold the line.

Schism would then be inevitable, except many Anglicans believe it has in all but name already happened, as last week's conservative meeting in London illustrates.

The argument then is why deprive Wales of a superb bishop for the sake of one cause that has already been lost, and at the cost of another that has been unjustly maligned, certainly in the case of Dr John.

New fears of schism in Anglican Church
Times Online, UK