Washington - A group of conservative Anglican churches in the United States split Wednesday from the Episcopal Church - as the US branch of the Anglican Communion is known - by forming their own rival province. At a gathering in Wheaton, Illinois, outside Chicago, the group unveiled a constitution forming a province, the first such grouping of the church that is not based purely on geographic location.
The church worldwide has been torn by the 2003 appointment of Gene Robinson, an openly homosexual man in a gay relationship, as bishop to head the New Hampshire diocese, prompting an outcry from those Anglicans who view homosexuality as incompatible with biblical teachings.
Several prominent US congregations had already left the Episcopal denomination and chosen to join with traditional groups based in Africa.
The declaration of the new province, calling itself the Anglican Church in North America, bonds all those disaffected groups into one body that claims to be the true voice of Anglicans in North America, competing with the more liberal Episcopalians who are recognized by the Bishop of Canterbury as the US branch of the Anglican Church.
"We are 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," the US conservatives said in a provisional constitution released Wednesday.
In June, some 200 break-away traditionalist bishops boycotted the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, hold their own "rival" conference in Jerusalem.
That meeting, called the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon), was dominated by traditionalists from Africa, South America, Asia and Australia, and condemned the "false gospel" that had paralysed the Anglican Communion over homosexuality and deplored the "spiritual decline of the most economically developed nations."
"One conclusion of the Global Anglican Future Conference held in Jerusalem last June was that the time for the recognition of a new Anglican body in North America had arrived," Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania said in a statement ahead of Wednesday's gathering.
The US churches were also to affirm their commitment to a declaration by the bishops in June in Jerusalem that stresses the need for reform and adherence to the church's traditional positions.
In a statement quoted by the Episcopal News Service, the church stressed that it along with Anglican churches in Canada and Mexico was the "recognized presence of the Anglican Communion in North America."
"And we 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," said the Reverend Charles Robertson, canon to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.
