A quibble:

There is no worldwide Anglican “Church”. There has never been a worldwide Anglican “Church”.

There is a worldwide Anglican Communion of 38 separate, equal and independent national churches. For the first 110 or so years after the the US War of Independence, the Church of England didn’t recognize them because American clergy wouldn’t take oaths to the English Monarch so non-recognition of each other is not new.

These Anglican churches only chose to meet together at international conferences about 120 years ago. The first Lambeth Conference took place in the late 1880s, over 300 years after the establishment of the Church of England and 110 years after the Americans broke off. The Lambeth Conference have issued all kinds of resolutions in the past that would strike us as archaic today: banning the remarriage of an innocent party in an adulterous relationship, banning interracial relationships, banning birth control and banning the reception of communion by anyone who wasn’t confirmed.

I am a lifelong Anglican and never heard anything about the “worldwide Anglican Communion”, nor did anyone seem to care much about the “worldwide Anglican Communion” when I was growing up. This only became part of the vocabulary over the gay issue and it is only so that the anti-gay right-wing, which is a tiny minority in North America, could stack the numbers against the dominant progressive wing.

It is sad that those meetings won’t include everyone, but this is not the first and only time this has happened. It’s just the latest one.

I’m not Anglican, but I love them. While less and less likely, i really hope they remain unified. a schism would be hurtful for everyone and threats of schisming are only saber rattling – you won’t change anyone’s mind and just because the heresy is in another group doesn’t make it go away. it’s another case of Protestant/Essenic isolationism where instead of confronting a challenge they retreat into their own closed communities and pretend that as long as a few people have correct theology then everything is ok.

what saddens me as well is that the foundation of Anglicanism is in fact unity in the face of schism. When England was threatened with being split between Catholics and Protestants, the Anglican Church appeared as a way bring everyone in peacefully. And they don’t have to split now either. unforunately, the Archbishop’s refusal to acknowledge the bishophood of Robinson at Lambeth has shown the administration is no longer interested in dialogue or compromise as it was 400 years ago.

Of course, the real interesting thing is that there are enough…colorful personalities in this drama that while Akinola appears to be the leader of this group for the time being, most expect there will be a pretty heated battle for power in this new “Anglican” church post-schism.

Peter Jensen, the anglican archbishop of Sydney is a vigorous anti-gay campaigner, and the Sydney anglicans are very conservative, “bible-based” church-goers.

However the rest of Australia’s anglicans are more closely aligned with the mainstream church. The church controls huge wealth here, and should a split occur, the wealth will stay with the mainstream church. This means that Jensen and his followers will have to choose between the money and their homophobia.

Somehow I can’t see Sydney’s anglican archbishop being forced to preach from a tin shed in the outer suburbs, so I’m backing the money.

There’s a very long but very readable account here.