ARCHBISHOP Rowan Williams’s candid refusal to affirm the Church of England’s traditional teaching against sex outside marriage will arouse new fears of a schism over homosexuality.
The issue will be on the agenda today when leaders of the Church Society, England’s most senior evangelical organisation, meet Dr Williams at his home in Newport to discuss similar fears to those held by the evangelical group Reform.
The leaders of Reform gave warning of “raised tensions” throughout the Church as a result of Dr Williams’s liberal stance on the issue. Evangelical parishes are expected to write to their own diocesan bishops to demand their views.
Where bishops take a liberal stance, parishes could seek alternative oversight from a more traditional suffragan or retired bishop.
“It is going to make life in the Church of England more difficult,” the Rev Rod Thomas, a spokesman for Reform and priest-in-charge of Elburton, Plymouth, said. “Parishes will want to distance themselves from those who do not hold to the authority of Scripture and associate themselves more with those who do.”
He said he knew of no one who was planning to leave the Church, “but within the Church relationships are going to become more strained”.
Anglican teaching on the issue remains confused as bishops seek to maintain unity between liberal, evangelical and traditionalist clergy.
Dr George Carey, who retires as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of this month, recently issued a stinging rebuke to liberal bishops with a warning that the Anglican Church was on the brink of a fundamental split over homosexuality.
Before Dr Carey retires, Church of England bishops will debate a draft follow-up to the controversial 1991 document Issues in Human Sexuality, which ruled out practising homosexual relationships for clergy but permitted them for lay people.
The follow-up draft, drawn up by a group of bishops headed by the Bishop of Oxford, the Right Rev Richard Harries, is understood to bolster the conclusions of the 1991 document. It is unlikely to allay the concerns of those who accused the bishops of double standards, however.
Dr Williams, who as Archbishop of Wales has not had to sign up to it and who has admitted ordaining a practising homosexual, is among the bishops who have been most critical of the 1991 document.
Dr Williams said that to permit stable homosexual relations among laity but not clergy was a contradiction that could not be sustained and forced clergy to be duplicitous.
“If the Church’s mind is that homosexual behaviour is intrinsically sinful, then it is intrinsically sinful for everyone,” he said in July last year. He also said that the Bible did not necessarily support a ban on homosexual partnerships.
In 1998 the Lambeth Conference, the ten-yearly meeting of bishops and archbishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion, agreed a resolution that declared homosexual practice was “incompatible with Scripture” and ruled out the ordination of practising homosexuals. The conference demanded sexual abstinence from all who were unmarried.
Dr Williams was one of nearly 200 bishops from around the world who later signed a pastoral statement apologising for “any sense of rejection” felt by lesbian and gay Anglicans and insisting that the Lambeth Conference resolution was not the last word.
But in July this year, immediately after his appointment was announced, he wrote to all the Primates of the Anglican Communion to reassure them that his personal opinion on the ordination of practising homosexuals had “no authority beyond that of an individual theologian”. He accepted that the Lambeth Conference resolution reflected the “mind” of the Anglican Communion.