The Anglican Church took another step towards its apparently inevitable schism when US Episcopal bishops rejected the ultimatum from primates of the Anglican Communion to fall into line over homosexuals.

The bishops of the Episcopal Church accused Anglican primates of trying to drag their Church back into “a time of colonialism”. They said late on Tuesday night that they would resist the primates’ demand that they set up a new pastoral scheme with a “primatial vicar” to make a traditionalist enclave for antigay conservatives who reject the oversight of liberal bishops. They said that the scheme “violated” their canons, or Church law.

Christian gays in Britain yesterday welcomed the US decision and accused the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who chaired last month’s primates’ meeting in Tanzania, of trying to “sell them down the river” and of pandering to “forces of the extreme Right”.

If the wealthy US Church, headed by the Communion’s first woman primate, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, is expelled from the Communion, as now appears increasingly likely, the Anglican Communion worldwide will be plunged into financial crisis because so much of the central administration and overseas aid is bank-rolled by the Americans.

Although the 2.3 million American Episcopalians are few among the 77 million Anglicans worldwide, they are understood to finance up to one third of the Communion’s total international budget.

Speaking at the end of their annual spring retreat at Camp Allen near Houston, the Episcopal Church House of Bishops said in a statement that they had “declined to participate in a pastoral initiative designed by the primates to care for congregations and dioceses which, for reasons of conscience, cannot accept the episcopal ministry of their bishop or primate”.

The bishops said: “We believe that there is an urgent need for us to meet face to face with the Archbishop of Canterbury and members of the primates’ standing committee, and we hereby request and urge that such a meeting be negotiated . . . at the earliest possible opportunity.

“We invite the archbishop and members of the primates’ standing committee to join us at our expense for three days of prayer and conversation regarding these important matters.”

At their meeting in Dar es Salaam, the primates set a deadline of September 30 for the pastoral scheme to be set up. They also demanded a commitment not to authorise same-sex blessings or consecrate any more gay bishops.

“It harks back to a period of colonialism from which The Episcopal Church was liberated. It replaces local rule by laity with a curial model,” the US bishops said.

Responding for the UK’s Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, the Rev Richard Kirker said: “At last some sanity is breaking into the debate. There is an obvious realisation that the consequences of this pandering to the puritans means an increasing hostility towards lesbian and gay people so clearly demonstrated by the Archbishop of Nigeria, who is fiercely promoting antigay legislation in his country contrary to Scripture and all the decisions of Anglicanism over the last 30 years.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury has much to answer for. His decision to sell us down the river in the short term to buy time has back-fired. If the Americans are expelled, this will encourage those bent on our destruction to persecute lesbian and gay people even more.”

Origins of split

* The depth of the divisions in the Anglican Communion became clear at the 1998 Lambeth Conference when Resolution 1.10 set a conservative Biblical standard but insisted that lesbians and gays in the Church must be heard

* The seeds of the present schism were sown when in 2003 The Episcopal Church consecrated the openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson

* At about the same time, the New Westminster diocese in Canada authorised a rite of same-sex blessing. The first authorised gay blessing took place followed, leading the Church Times to declare the existence of one happy couple and 75 million unhappy Anglicans

* Conservatives in the US were swift to act, with some looking as far afield as African provinces such as Nigeria for orthodox bishops to lead them