News Brief

Eames report to leave both sides unhappy in gay bishop dispute -17/10/04

Sources have suggested that a report due to be published on Monday, which could signal whether the church will fall apart over the election of a gay bishop in the US, will not satisfy either side in the dispute. Many have been hoping that Ireland's Archbishop Robin Eames, experienced in the Northern Irish peace process and author of an earlier report into the equally contentious issue of women's ordination, will pull an unexpected solution out of the bag and maintain unity between the church's two factions. The 80 page report, product of a year's deliberation by a commission of senior churchmen and theologians headed by Archbishop Eames, has been produced under tight security to avoid leaks. However a source who has had sight of the report, has suggested to the Ekklesia news service that neither side will be happy with what the report has to say. Conservative traditionalists and evangelicals believe homosexual practice is for ever and in all circumstances forbidden by the Bible, while liberals and others who also hold a high regard for the biblical text insist that God never meant to condemn a group of people to a lifetime of celibacy for an orientation that is not their fault. The report will concentrate on the future of the 70 million-strong church with a view to producing an agreed disciplinary structure which would maintain a framework of unity across diverse societies. The report has been widely expected to censure the 50 or so bishops, mainly from the US Episcopal Church but also from Canada and Ireland, who attended the consecration of Gene Robinson, the church's first openly gay bishop, to lead the diocese of New Hampshire in November last year. They did so in defiance of a warning from the church's primates that the consecration would "tear the fabric of our communion at its deepest level". Some in the US believe that the Episcopal Church will be asked to apologise for its action in electing Bishop Robinson because of the damage it has done to the unity of the worldwide church. But this would fall well short of the individual and collective repentance or expulsion some hardline conservative evangelicals have been calling for. Despite the year's breathing space the appointment of the commission was meant to provide, conservative evangelicals have been preparing for months for a more fractured future with the church. Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the church in Nigeria, Anglicanism's largest province, who has been the most vocal critic of homosexuals, has spent the last fortnight touring the US drumming up support for a church within a church for expatriate Nigerians and disaffected Episcopalians. To read more about the long-running dispute, read Ekklesia's director Jonathan Bartley's review of Stephen Bates' book "The Church at War" in the Guardian, or his article "Martyrs and Mitres" in the same paper