CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – The election of an openly gay bishop will widen the rift in the Episcopalian church over homosexuality, though the selection likely will be confirmed at the national General Convention, close observers of the church said Sunday.
Rev. V. Gene Robinson, 56, who lives with his partner, Mark Andrew, in Weare, was elected the bishop of New Hampshire Saturday in a vote of clergy and lay church members.
Rev. David L. Moyer, president of Forward in Faith, an association of Anglicans against the ordination of women, said the election will cause a greater rift within the church nationally and internationally.
“They are leading with their chin,” Moyer said. “I think either they aren’t concerned with their legionship with the … larger church or they’re asking to be dismissed by the Anglican community.”
Moyer, rector of the Church of the Good Sheperd in Rosemont, Pa., said the gay bishop’s election is an open rebellion against God’s created order and the teachings of the church. He said the greatest outcry will come from Anglicans in developing countries, especially Africa.
“Here is the first world basically thumbing our noses at the majority of the members of the Anglican community around the world,” he said. “These are the churches that are growing by leaps and bounds, where people are dying for this faith. The cost of Christianity is very, very high in Africa.”
Lawrence Knapp of Pittsburgh, who was a deputy at the General Convention six times and a church administrator for the Diocese of Pittsburgh, supported the election, but said it will upset many in the church.
“I think it will be very painful for many people,” he said. “I’m in a very conservative diocese and I know there will be a lot of unhappiness here.”
However, Moyer and Knapp said Robinson likely will get the necessary votes after intense debate at the 10-day General Convention in Minneapolis at the end of July.
“The revisionists are certainly in control of the leadership in the Episcopal Church,” Moyer said.
The Most Rev. Frank Griswold, in New York, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, declined to comment on the election.
Knapp likened the nomination to a conservative leader elected a few years ago.
“His election also needed to be confirmed, and it was. I think the sense there … was that those folks have the right to choose who their leaders are going to be,” he said.
Knapp said he thinks the church has suffered greater storms, such as deciding to ordain women, and survived.
“I don’t see us being destroyed,” he said.
Rev. Ian T. Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said he thinks Robinson’s election will shift the focus of the debate and force people to decide where they stand.
“We are no longer talking about some hypothetical or some disembodied discussions about liturgy,” he said. “This is a discussion about a real live person called to a real live leadership position in the church.”
The Anglican Communion represents 77 million people worldwide, including 2.3 million members of the Episcopal Church in the United States. In 1998, the Anglican Communion approved a resolution calling gay sex “incompatible with Scripture.”
According to the Episcopal News Service, the only other bishop to publicly state that he is actively gay is Otis Charles, former bishop of Utah, who made the announcement in 1993 after retiring.
Conservatives in the Church of England and elsewhere protested the appointment last month of an English bishop with liberal views on homosexuality, even though he vowed to uphold existing church policy on the subject.
AP-ES-06-08-03 1829EDT
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