Anglican church turmoil over gay issues deepens

By Michael Conlon, Religion Writer

CHICAGO (Reuters) - An African archbishop's defiant intervention in the U.S. Episcopal Church has sent new shock waves through a global Anglican church already badly divided and facing possible schism over gay issues.

Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria kept up his high profile attack this week, saying the leadership of the U.S. branch of the Worldwide Anglican Communion was "insulting and condescending" to the church at large.

"The decisions, actions, defiance and continuing intransigence of the Episcopal Church are at the heart of our crisis," he told Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and titular leader of the 77-million-member global church.

"They are determined to pursue their own unbiblical agenda and exacerbate our current divisions," he said in a letter to Williams, who had asked him to stay out of the United States and not participate in a ceremony last Saturday in Virginia.

Akinola ignored the plea from Williams and an earlier one from the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. He carried out the ceremony in which Bishop Martyn Minns, an Episcopalian, was installed as head of a new Nigerian-based church branch designed as a refuge for orthodox American believers.

The 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church has been splintered since 2003, when it consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first openly gay bishop in more than 450 years of Anglican church history.

Some congregations have already placed themselves under the jurisdiction of conservative bishops in Africa and elsewhere. The Episcopal Church has said that only 45 out of more than 7,400 congregations have voted to break away.

Akinola is a defender of traditional Christianity and a leader of the Anglican Communion's "Global South," churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America that now account for half of the world's Anglican church membership.