The tense and troubled meeting of the Anglican primates in Tanzania ended this week with an ultimatum to the Episcopal Church of the USA that it must stop its pro-gay policy or face exclusion.
The statement from the 36 archbishops who lead the world's 70 million Anglicans gave the American Church until the end of September to stop blessing gay partnerships and to promise it would not consecrate more gay bishops.
In a press conference the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said that if the Episcopal Church failed to meet the deadline it could be excluded from the 2008 Lambeth Conference to be held in Canterbury.
"If the reassurances requested of the House of Bishops cannot in good conscience be given," said the unanimous communiqué, "the relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as a whole remains damaged at best, and this has consequences for the full participation of the Church in the life of the Communion."
Fears of a schism were temporarily abated, although the official group photograph of the archbishops had to be cancelled because the two camps, broadly divided into Western liberals and conservatives from the Global South, would not pose together.
Seven archbishops also refused to take Communion with the American Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, because of her unswerving support for Gene Robinson, a practising gay who was consecrated bishop in 2003.
The communiqué sets up a "pastoral council" for conservative Episcopalians who have rejected the Presiding Bishop's leadership. The council - with both liberal and conservative members - will be responsible for overseeing conservative parishes and appointing a "primatial vicar". The result will please most liberal Americans who were bracing themselves for disciplinary action or expulsion.
The tension in Dar-es-Salaam this week reflects a global and cultural division between the growing and increasingly influential Churches of Africa and Asia and the more depleted Western Churches. Anglicans of the Global South see homosexual sex as unequivocally sinful while many liberal Anglicans see the excluding of gays as sinful.
Archbishop Williams treads a delicate line between the two camps. In a service in Zanzibar Cathedral he pleaded for humility among his fellow primates.
The primates, who met in a conference centre north of Dar-es-Salaam, were also shown a draft statement called "Growing Together in Unity and Mission" from the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, which identified common areas between the Churches. A press report claiming that the Anglican Communion could be united under the Pope was described as "sadly, much exaggerated" by the co-chairmen of the mission, the Archbishop of Brisbane John Bathersby and Anglican Bishop David Beetge from South Africa.
In a joint statement, the co-chairmen said the statement summarises 35 years of dialogue between the Churches and suggests that Anglicans include the Pope in their prayers and that Catholics pray for the Archbishop of Canterbury. It also recommends that the bishops decide on appropriate "concrete initiatives" based on "common mission, common study and common prayer" between Catholics and Anglicans. (See Stephen Bates and William Franklin, pages 4 and 5.)
