THE spectre of schism haunted the opening of the General Synod of the Church of England this week.

In a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, 14 primates led by the Archbishop of Nigeria, Dr Peter Akinola, thundered against “unrepented sexual immorality, an offence so flagrant that Paul insisted that the sinner be expelled from the fellowship, and one of a type of sin which he said would cut the offender off from the kingdom of heaven”.

While Dr Williams is in the awkward position of having to try to hold the Anglican Communion together, the man at the eye of the storm is the American Gene Robinson, 58, Bishop of New Hampshire and an avowed homosexual.

Bishop Robinson recently visited Britain as a guest of Changing Attitude, a group trying to raise awareness about gays in the Church. The group, headed by the Anglican priest and psychotherapist Colin Coward, believes that references to homosexual behaviour in Scripture cannot be fairly applied to the kind of “faithful, lifelong relationships we wish to defend” — a position long widely accepted in the US Episcopal Church and close to the published personal views of the Archbishop of Canterbury himself.

However, even if Dr Williams had confronted the US and Canadian churches over Bishop Robinson’s consecration — as the 14 critical primates suggest — he would have had no success, as Bishop Robinson explains.

“I took very seriously the calls to stand down that came from primates and ordinary people around the world,” Bishop Robinson says. “I constantly took that to God in prayer and sought to hear God’s will for me. I did not leave it just to myself and my own listening. I worked on it with my spiritual director.

“It is very difficult to discern between God’s voice and your own ego doing a magnificent impression of God’s voice. In considering it, I never felt called by God to reverse the direction in which I was moving.”

Dr Williams, whom he met privately during his visit to Britain, had never asked him to stand down, he said. “If he had, I would have taken that to God in prayer. I was not willing to take the advice of anyone if it was contrary to what I perceived to be God’s will for me.

“To the best of my discernment, yes, I feel called by God.” He goes further: “I felt pursued by God.”

Robinson denies that he had been ambitious for the purple shirt. “I resisted being a bishop for a long time. You would have to have your head examined to do what I did, knowing that there was going to be this kind of controversy — although I do not think any of us dreamed that the controversy would be as deep or as broad or as long term as it has proved to be.”

He is not an insensitive man, and does have regrets. “I certainly regret profoundly the difficulty that this has caused the communion and individuals within the communion. I am so sorry that the Archbishop of Canterbury has had this happen almost immediately after he had been chosen.

“I wish we could stop talking about this and start talking about the gospel again. My diocese may be the only diocese in the Anglican Communion that is not obsessed with sex. We spend almost no time on it. There is this amazing disconnection between my diocese and the rest of the world. We talk about Anglicanism and witness to the rest of the world.”

Like almost everyone else not directly caught up in the debate, he feels desperately sorry for Dr Williams: “I would not want to be him. He is in a nearly impossible situation. He is doing everything he can to hold the communion together. I have assured him that I will do everything short of standing down to assist him in that. I pray for the unity of the Anglican Communion every day.”