Church needs a miracle to survive - Bishop

It will take a “miracle” to stop the Anglican Communion breaking apart over controversies about sexuality, the head of the church in South America has claimed.

He is one of the few church leaders to attend both the breakaway Gafcon summit in Jerusalem last month, at which a new church within a church was launched for orthodox Anglicans who believe the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, and the ongoing Lambeth Conference in Canterbury.

A quarter of the worldwide Anglican Communion’s 880 bishops are boycotting the once-a-decade Lambeth gathering in protest at liberal American and Canadian churches which tolerate gay clergy and bless same-sex unions.

Archbishop Venables, an Englishman who runs the South American province from Buenos Aires, said he was “extremely sad” that so many traditionalist leaders were staying away from the meeting and not contributing to the discussions.

In an interview with the website Religious Intelligence this week, he warned that it would take a “miracle” to hold the worldwide Communion together now.

The archbishop said: “Humanely speaking there is little hope for even a peaceful separation.”

His comments come despite repeated claims by the head of the worldwide church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that a schism is far from inevitable.

Dr Rowan Williams acknowledged in his presidential address to Lambeth that the church is facing “one of the most severe challenges” in its history.

But he also claimed that there never has been a “golden age” for the church, and insisted that a new set of rules known as a Covenant could help it stay together despite the deep divisions.

Today Windsor Continuation Group will report back on the responses from around the world to the Windsor Report, which in 2004 warned the liberal churches not to consecrate any more gay bishops or bless any more same-sex unions, and which suggested a set of rules or Covenant to guide Anglicans.

But Archbishop Venables said he did not have much hope for the Covenant because so many churches want to play by their own rules.

e said: “I haven’t got a great deal of hope because I think there are important sectors of the Communion that simply don’t want to work towards a covenant — they believe in autonomy. And one would say, if we haven’t been able to agree on what we’ve done so far, starting with the scripture and the creeds and the things we’ve done in more recent days as Anglicans, I don’t have much hope.

“But I think we’ve got to work at something we can talk about, something that puts us around the table and something that enables us at least at the very minimum to agree to disagree – or maybe find out that there are things we have in common which could be more hopeful.”