The bombshell that dropped this week into the proceedings of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States may be a turning point for the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Church history is about to be made by the first appointment to the ranks of the bishops of an openly gay man in an active same-sex relationship. That in itself will cause a perceptible shaking of the Church’s foundations.

But the eleventh-hour intervention by a man alleging sexual misconduct on the part of Canon Gene Robinson and the subsequent dismissal of that allegation has ensured that the issue of the Bishop-elect of New Hampshire will rock the Anglican Church with greater force than could have been imagined. It makes the controversy in the Church of England over the Bishop-elect of Reading look like a tame warm-up act.

In all the interviews he has given, Gene Robinson has come across as a man of integrity: open, transparent, humble and faithful to what he believes about himself and about God. In the last-minute accusations, it was hard not to suspect the tactics of an opposition desperate to scupper an almost assured positive outcome. Once the accusation was made, the ratifying, or not, of Canon Robinson was certain to become even more controversial than it was already.

For conservatives in the Church, the appointment of active homosexuals to the episcopacy is a non-negotiable issue. Appointing homosexual bishops, even more so than the question of appointing women bishops, has become the deepest line in the sand. Not only do the conservatives believe they know the truth, they are insistent that other people should share their views and get it “right”.

The misapprehension that lies behind this right/wrong approach to truth is that reality is a dualistic construct. This notion, ingested from Greek philosophical dualism, holds that just as there is light and dark, hot and cold, spirit and body, male and female, so also must there be right and wrong. The God who inhabits this tidy, compartmentalised world of opposing elements is a God who has revealed Himself (and, make no mistake, it is a Him) once and for all, and the task of good and faithful believers is to discover what God wants, and then to get it right.

This is also a God who, in the extreme Calvinist position, has withdrawn from some parts of the created world. There is the world of the faithful and then there is the secular world. Prudent and obedient Christians will not risk sullying themselves in the “world”, but will stay in the safe and holy confines of the sanctified and the faithful.

Others, myself included, believe in a God who exists as a dynamic Trinity, whose Spirit is still moving over the face of the earth, who still loves the world, even though the divine image is hideously marred and obscured in many places and persons. This God is still involved, is still inviting us also to become caught up in a relationship characterised by extravagant love and mutual trust.

Hearing the call of this God requires more listening, to God and to one another, and more confidence in God’s ways than in our own rigid certainties and correctness. It means that we have to be open to change. It means that, from time to time, we will have to take the risk of getting it wrong.

There have been other fiercely contested issues in the past. The issue of whether the Gospel was intended only for the Jews, or whether the message of the good news could include the gentiles, nearly split the early Church. More recently, there were good Christians on both sides of the slavery debate, quoting from Scripture as well as appealing to common sense and reason to support their passionate, and opposing, convictions. In the end, decisions were taken which are no longer contested, even though they overturned centuries of previously accepted truth.

The greatest mistake the Anglican Church can make now is to doubt that God is involved in the process in which the Church finds itself, and to try to hinder the moving of God’s Spirit in a less prescriptive, more open and risky direction.

In all this, the role of Archbishop Rowan Williams will be critical. It would appear that his deepest instincts are to trust in the seemingly paradoxical unchanging God of continual change. If the situation in America develops in a way that threatens to split the Anglican Communion, then the Archbishop will have his mettle tested as never before. It will not, however, be a case of his getting it right, but of resolutely refusing to lose faith in a God whom he must believe has made all welcome at the foot of the Cross.

The author is a member of the General Synod, and a writer and broadcaster on church affairs

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