The global Anglican Communion got through its scheduled day of reckoning over homosexuality yesterday with Toronto Bishop Colin Johnson giving credit to the Holy Spirit for avoiding an open split between liberal and conservative bishops.
Less bullish observers of the church's decennial Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England - attended by more than 600 bishops - chalked up the absence of rift to a boycott by 230 prelates who say homosexuality is against God's will, and a conference structure carefully crafted to rule out decisions being made.
Bishop Johnson, acting as spokesman for fellow liberals at the closed talks, said he couldn't speak for any bishops having changed their minds during the one day scheduled for discussion of sexuality but "I think probably some have nuanced their positions. ... The conversation continues. We are continuing to engage.
"The third party in the conversation is the Holy Spirit, and in listening to one another and the Holy Spirit we can have an encounter and be transformed.
"No one encounters the living God without being transformed."
In Anglican theology, the Holy Spirit is the presence of God in human affairs.
The 77-million-member church - the world's third-largest Christian denomination - had been widely predicted to fall into the abyss of schism during the three-week-long Lambeth Conference.
Rev. Ed Hird, a Vancouver priest who speaks for the Anglican Coalition in Canada, a group of clergy and their congregations who have left the Anglican Church of Canada, acknowledged that the bishops at Lambeth likely had found a certain energy after being together for so long - an awareness, he said, that they no longer can sit around and do nothing.
But he and others who have been observing the conference said in interviews yesterday they were unable to see the church heading in any direction to avoid an eventual fracture.
Decisions on make-or-break issues have been deferred to a meeting next May of the Anglican Consultative Council, the church's quasi-executive body.
Those issues include a proposed covenant of Anglican belief, moratoria against the blessing of same-sex unions, consecration of openly gay bishops and the intervention of national or regional branches of Anglicanism (known as provinces) in each other's affairs and the creation of a "pastoral forum" to police provincial behaviour.
Meanwhile, Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, primate of Uganda, one of the largest provinces, has written a commentary article to be published today in The Times of London newspaper labelling Anglicanism's titular leader, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a remnant of colonialism who has betrayed the church "at the very deepest level."
Conservatives accuse Archbishop Williams of allowing the liberal branches of the church in Canada and the United States to drift into heretical theological interpretations of the Bible.
And earlier in the week, Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi, the primate of Kenya, said Anglican churches in Africa and elsewhere in the global south would not stop creating parallel church structures in North America to provide "pastoral care" for Anglicans opposed to blessing of same-sex unions and the consecration of openly gay bishops.
Archbishop Williams has condemned cross-province interventions.
