Rival Lambeth warning
Date: July 7
By George Conger

The Church of Nigeria will back a rival Lambeth Conference in 2008 if the Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to bring the recalcitrant American Church to account. In a statement released at the close of the Church of Nigeria’s House of Bishops meeting on June 28 in Abuja, the leaders of the largest church in the Communion stated that The Episcopal Church had rejected the key tenets of the Windsor Report. The “revisionists” had failed to grasp the “reason for repentance from the harm and stress they have caused this Communion.”

The American Church’s contumacy had impaired “the unity of the Church” the bishops argued, “by promoting teachings and practises that are alien and inimical to the historic formularies of the Church.” Holding a Lambeth Conference in 2008 was “questionable” under these circumstances. The good brought to the Communion by the gathering of Anglican bishops from across the Communion every 10 years should not be lost to the church, however, the bishops stated, calling upon the “leadership of the Global South” and the bishops of the African churches to do “everything necessary” to “put in place a Conference of all Anglican Bishops” in 2008. The call for a rival Lambeth Conference was conditional, the Nigerian bishops noted, and would be held only if “all efforts to get the apostles of ‘revisionist agenda’ to repent and retrace their steps” failed. A spokesman for Lambeth Palace told The Church of England Newspaper they were studying the Nigerian statement. While the Nigerian Bishops’ communiqué is the first formal call for a second Lambeth Conference, the exclusion of the American bishops from Lambeth has been an ongoing topic of conversation since 2003. Global South leaders have repeatedly stated they would not attend Lambeth 2008 if the Episcopal Church remained undisciplined for its actions.

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