Anglican Conference Liberal critics call theological conservatives 'neo-Puritan' fundamentalists By Craig M. Kibler The Layman Online Monday, November 14, 2005 PITTSBURGH, Pa. – Conservative Episcopalians seeking "the rebirth of a Biblical, missionary and united Anglicanism" are being lambasted by their critics as "neo-Puritan" Protestant fundamentalists and "the voices that are speaking for division." Some of the more than 2,000 participants at the first-ever international conference "Hope and a Future" included members of the clergy, who had lost their pastoral licenses, and parishioners, who faced losing buildings, in theological disputes with more liberal bishops in the United States. The organizer of the conference, Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. of Pittsburgh, said he expects liberal activists in the denomination to attempt to depose him as bishop, noting that one national network already had called for such action. Duncan, in an interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said, "I'm not planning to go anywhere, but I think they will try to remove me. That is going to be my Good Friday. That is going to be my people's Good Friday. But I think we are prepared. We will not turn away from Jesus." Throughout the conference, leaders spoke of a "realignment" of worldwide Anglicanism. Drawing on a Bible passage in which Joshua challenged the Israelites to choose between the true God and pagan gods, there was a running theme of "choose you this day." Duncan, though, told the newspaper that he could not define that choice in institutional terms. No matter what church people belong to, he said, "the choice is for Jesus, as opposed to something less or a counterfeit. And we really think that [counterfeit] is what is being offered by the Episcopal Church at the moment." Supporters of the denomination's present policy on gays, including the gay bishop whose consecration in 2003 set off seismic shocks in the worldwide Anglican Communion, ratcheted up their criticism of Duncan and his supporters. V. Gene Robinson, the only gay bishop in the Episcopal Church USA, told The Church Times in London that he does not believe that the Episcopal Church USA is heading toward "an inevitable train wreck." "We are irreconcilable only if we choose to be. Reconciliation is the ministry we are all called to, and so to declare ourselves out of communion with one another is simply an infraction against God." "I can't be unmade a bishop," Robinson said. "We will continue to nourish these relationships around the globe, and trust that the Communion that is there will actually win over the voices that are speaking for division." Lionel Deimel, president of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh, said remarks by Duncan and other primates at the conference "could be read as an invitation to leave" the denomination. "We basically have a long history of working things out," he said, "but this is the most serious thing to happen to the Episcopal Church, and it has mobilized people on both sides." "My preference is that we all stand together and work out our differences and, in some cases, accept our differences," he said. After the consecration of Robinson, Demiel, in a letter to Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, said that the American Anglican Council and the Anglican Communion Network "began to implement its plan to take over the Episcopal Church. Any objective analysis of the situation can only conclude that, having failed in this and previous attempts to move this mainline church sharply to the right through democratic means, a group of Episcopal bishops has decided to stage a coup d'état." In his letter, Demiel said "the inclusive nature of the Episcopal Church is now threatened by a small dissident group of its bishops who arrogantly assert special knowledge of God's truth and demand that their opinions prevail, even though those opinions have been expressly rejected in scrupulously fair and regular votes by General Convention." Continually calling the theologically conservative bishops dissidents, Demiel said that they have "repeatedly failed to assert successfully their narrow view of scripture and revelation. They have increasingly turned to both ecclesiastical and secular courts in their quest for power, and they now seek to employ the Anglican Communion, not in its traditional collegial and advisory role, but as a weapon to be wielded against their theological opponents. In this plan, they have naïvely joined forces with domestic political reactionaries whose goal is to remove people of faith from the discussion in the public square of issues of social, economic, and environmental justice; and they have curried favor with foreign prelates and archbishops who, for their own reasons, have encouraged these bishops in their heedless rush to schism." The Rev. Jan Nunley, a spokeswoman for the denomination, told The Washington Times that the tensions voiced at the Pittsburgh conference were not new. "We're trying not to get ahead of events. We sit, watch and trust God, and hope for the spirit of reconciliation," she said.

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