Updated
The Telegraph is reporting:
A powerful coalition of conservative Anglican leaders is preparing to create a parallel Church for conservatives in America in defiance of the Archbishop of Canterbury, provoking the biggest split in Anglican history, The Daily Telegraph has learned.
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According to sources, at least six primates are planning the consecration of a prominent American cleric as a bishop to minister to Americans who have rejected their liberal bishops over the issue of homosexuality.
The article is written by the usually reliable Jonathan Petre.
More:
The initiative is understood to have been co-ordinated by senior African archbishops, including the Primate of Kenya, Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi, who represent the core of the so-called Global South group of conservative primates.
But the group has a wider base and is also thought to include several relatively moderate primates from outside Africa
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The new conservative organisation in America will create ripples in the Church of England, which has been increasingly torn over the issue of homosexuality. It is certain to surface at next month’s meeting of the General Synod in York.
Read it all here.
We recall that only last week The Telegraph got it wrong.
ADDED, 6AM, 13 June. George Conger, writing in The Living Church:
The impetus for a Kenyan bishop to the U.S. came at a Jan. 13-14 meeting in Memphis, Tenn., between Archbishop Nzimbi and the clergy and lay leaders of 17 American AKC congregations. The congregations petitioned Archbishop Nzimbi to create a missionary diocese for the 25 U.S.-based congregations of Kenyan expatriates and American traditionalists under his care.
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The consecration of Canon Atwood, a former Episcopalian and general secretary of The Ekklesia Society, will mark the third time an African Anglican province has created a missionary jurisdiction in the United States. The Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) operates under the aegis of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda, while the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) is overseen by the Church of Nigeria. Several other overseas provinces, including Central Africa and the Southern Cone, also exercise jurisdiction over U.S.-based parishes.
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The Aug. 30 consecration of Canon Atwood as “Suffragan Bishop of All Saints’ Cathedral Diocese, Nairobi” is “part of a broader and coordinated plan with other provinces,” Archbishop Nzimbi said on June 12, to “support the international interests of the Anglican Church of Kenya, including support of Kenyan clergy and congregations in North America.”
Emphasis added. What do we have here? Coalescence or further fragmentation? Conger’s piece sounds like more of the same (CANA, AMiA, now this), no more a “parallel church in America for conservatives” than there already is.