Conservatives form Rival Group to Episcopal Church

By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK – Theological conservatives upset by liberal views of U.S. Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans formed a rival North American province Wednesday, in a long-developing rift over the Bible that erupted when Episcopalians consecrated the first openly gay bishop.

The announcement represents a new challenge to the already splintering, 77-million-member world Anglican fellowship and the authority of its spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

The new Anglican Church in North America includes four breakaway Episcopal dioceses, dozens of individual parishes in the U.S. and Canada, and splinter groups that left the Anglican family years, or in one case, more than a century ago.

Its future status in the Anglican Communion is unclear.

It is unprecedented for an Anglican national province to be created where any other such national church already exists. But traditionalists say the new group is needed to represent the true historic tradition of Anglican Christianity.

Bishop Robert Duncan, who leads the breakaway Diocese of Pittsburgh, is the proposed new leader of the new North American province, which says it has 100,000 members.

"The Lord is displacing the Episcopal Church," Duncan said in a news conference in Wheaton, Ill., where the proposed constitution for the new province was drafted. He noted that membership and worship attendance in the U.S. denomination have been declining for years.

"We are a body that is growing, that is planting new congregations, that is concerned to be an authentic Christian presence in the U.S. and Canada," Duncan said.

The Rev. Charles Robertson, adviser to Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, said in a statement that "there is room within The Episcopal Church for people with different views and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ."

Williams has been striving for years to find a compromise that would keep Anglicans together, but he lacks the power to force a resolution.

The Anglican Communion links 38 self-governing provinces that trace their roots to the missionary work of the Church of England. The Episcopal Church is the Anglican body in the U.S., while the Anglican Church in Canada represents the communion in that country.

Anglicans have debated for decades over what members of their fellowship should believe. Tensions boiled over in 2003 when Episcopalians consecrated New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, who lives with his longtime male partner.

Around the same time, some Canadian Anglican leaders began authorizing blessing ceremonies for same-sex unions, saying biblical teachings on social justice required them to do so. The actions pushed the Anglican family to the brink of schism.

A London spokesman for the Anglican Communion did not respond to a request for comment.

Archdeacon Michael Pollesel, general secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada, said the new province leaders "really have no standing with the Anglican Communion at this point."

Robertson underscored that the U.S. and Canadian churches are "the recognized presence of the Anglican Communion in North America."

The impact of Wednesday's announcement on the 2.1 million-member Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Church of Canada, with has about 640,000 people on its rolls, was unclear.

There are conservatives in both countries who will not join the new province and instead have vowed to stay within their national denominations despite theological differences.

The new province will not be fully formed for months, or perhaps longer, as it goes through the process of approving a new constitution and leadership. Members of the new church also must overcome their own theological differences, over ordaining women and other issues.

In the four breakaway Episcopal dioceses, legal challenges over property will likely take resources away from building the new province. The four dioceses are Fort Worth, Texas; Pittsburgh; Quincy, Ill.; and San Joaquin, based in Fresno, Calif. National Episcopal leaders are helping local parishioners reorganize those dioceses.

The new conservative province already has the support of seven leaders of Anglican national churches, called primates, including the archbishops of Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya and the Southern Cone, based in Argentina. Duncan and others are soliciting more support from the overseas archbishops. However, it's not known whether that will lead to full acceptance by the communion.

Episcopal Church Dissidents Move Toward Division

By Michael Conlon, Religion Writer

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Conservatives who have left the U.S. Episcopal Church took the first step on Wednesday to form a separate Anglican Church in North America, following years of division over gay rights and scriptural interpretation.

Meeting at Wheaton College near Chicago, the Common Cause Partnership, referring to itself as the "Anglican Church in North America" and claiming 100,000 followers, published a constitution. Its bid for separate status requires global church approval.

The document said members were "grieved by the current state of brokenness within the Anglican Communion prompted by those who have embraced erroneous teaching and who have rejected a repeated call to repentance."

Long-standing divisions between liberals and conservatives had already fragmented the Episcopal Church by 2003 when it consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of Anglican Church history.

That act further roiled the 2.1 million-member U.S. church and the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion of which it is part. In recent months, four dioceses, out of a total of 110, have split from the Episcopal Church in California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Illinois. The church says that fewer than 100 of 7,100 congregations had left or voted to leave before the recent diocesan defections.

The dissidents who met on Wednesday want to become a province within the Anglican Communion -- on equal footing with the Episcopal Church. Achieving that status would require approval from two-thirds of the primates -- the heads of national churches -- in the Anglican Communion and ultimate recognition from the Anglican Consultative Council, another church body.

Bishop Martyn Minns, a leader of the dissidents, said earlier he thought more than half the primates would support the breakaway group.

The Episcopal Church issued a statement on Wednesday saying it did not know what would come from the meeting of dissidents but it "along with the Anglican Church of Canada and the La Iglesia Anglicana de Mexico, comprise the official, recognized presence of the Anglican Communion in North America."

It said it wanted to "reiterate what has been true of Anglicanism for centuries: That there is room within the Episcopal Church for people with different views, and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ."

The Anglican primates meet in February and, if they approve, the matter would go to the consultative council when it meets in Jamaica in May, according to church publications.

Minns, a former Episcopalian and leader of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, believes the new province if approved could count on 100,000 people as its average weekly attendance. The Episcopal Church says its average weekly attendance is about 727,000.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

Poll: Calif. Gay Marriage Ban Driven by Religion

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO – Voters' economic status and religious convictions played a greater role than race and age in determining whether they supported the Nov. 4 ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California, a new poll shows.

The ban drew its strongest support from both evangelical Christians and voters who didn't attend college, according to results released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Age and race, meanwhile, were not as strong factors as assumed. According to the poll, 56 percent of voters over age 55 and 57 percent of nonwhite voters cast a yes ballot for the gay marriage ban.

People who identified themselves as practicing Christians were highly likely to support the constitutional amendment, with 85 percent of evangelical Christians, 66 percent of Protestants and 60 percent of Roman Catholics favoring it.

The poll also showed that the measure got strong backing from voters who did not attend college (69 percent), voters who earned less than $40,000 a year (63 percent) and Latinos (61 percent).

The proposition, which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned the state Supreme Court's May decision legalizing gay marriage in California. The measure inserts language into the constitution limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The poll found that, overall, 48 percent of voters oppose the idea of making gay marriage legal. Forty-seven percent support it, while 5 percent are undecided.

The results mirror previous PPIC polls from the last three years, suggesting that the $73 million spent for and against the measure did not do much to change public attitudes on allowing gay couples to wed, said survey director Mark Baldassare.

"At no point in time, before or after the election, did we have a majority of Californians saying they supported gay marriage," Baldassare said. "My takeaway from this is that until there is a major shift in public opinion one way or another, it's going to be another issue where voters are deeply divided."

Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California, said the PPIC poll demonstrates that same-sex marriage advocates "need to make inroads in every category. If 2 percent of voters had voted differently, we would have had a different result," he said.

The poll was based on a phone survey of 2,003 California voters in the Nov. 4 election who were interviewed from Nov. 5-6. The sampling error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.