Ruth Gledhill: Anglicans: an ABC of schism

Rowan Williams has at last issued his letter to the primates in the wake of The Episcopal Church general convention. Never again can anyone accuse him of failing to give leadership, or of not speaking plainly. Read the six-page commination for yourself or listen to the audio. We expected the letter a few days ago but the delay, sources tell me, was due to the Archbishop working hard to get it exactly right. No lawyers were involved, Lambeth Palace is keen to reassure me. The issues of property and money that will arise from this are not even mentioned in passing in the letter. But what will happen to the US funding that keeps the Anglican Communion office afloat, or to all those fantastically valuable properties and portfolios in the hands of the Episcopal Church, is anybody's guess. Lawyers in the US might not have been involved, but they will get rich out of this as the Anglican Church gets poorer, I prophesy. But as Rowan Williams points out, and as I've always known in any case, "The nature of prophetic action is that you do not have a cast-iron guarantee that you’re right."

But all this will be argued over later.

The thrust of the letter, an intense and passionate theological teaching document for any who are prepared to listen, seems to be that episcopalians in the US and anywhere else who are unwilling to sign up to a covenant setting out Anglicanism in its orthodox and traditional, biblical form will be consigned to "associate" status. They will no longer be full Anglicans. Instead, their relationship to Canterbury and the rest will be comparable to that of the Methodists. Ironically, this comes just as the Methodist church is moving closer to full unity with the Anglicans. So will the Anglican Communion lose The Episcopal Church and its allies just as it consecrates women bishops, and the Methodists in this country consecrate bishops, enabling them all to re-unite? And if the Methodists and Anglicans rejoin, will that include the US Methodists? Goodbye TEC, hello Methodists. "Your pain is my gain," as they say. the rest