THE Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised fundamentalists and extremists on both sides of the Anglican Church for distorting the message of the Bible in the debate over homosexuality.

Rowan Williams told members of the Lambeth Commission on homosexuality that a church “faithful to the biblical revelation has to exercise discipline and draw boundaries if it is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus and not its own concerns”.

Dr Williams said the problem was not simply about “biblical faithfulness versus fashionable relativism”. He said that there were “profound biblical principles involved” and criticised those at both extremes of the debate.

The Archbishop was addressing the first meeting of the commission set up to avert rifts in the Anglican Communion over the ordination of homosexuals and the blessings of same-sex marriage.

The commission was set up after an emergency meeting of the primates of the Anglican church to debate the crisis caused by the election of the openly gay father of two, Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire.

The commission, chaired by the Primate of Ireland, Dr Robin Eames, includes members from all sides of the debate. It aims to produce a report early next year.

In a statement, commission members said they were “saddened” that tensions in the Church, exacerbated by the use of strident language, had continued to rise.

The crisis has already prompted the establishment of a new network of conservative Anglicans in the Episcopal Church of the US. The network, which some sources claim intends to supersede the mainstream church, is supported by 13 primates from the Global South.

Dr Williams warned the commission: “You will need to be aware of the danger of those doctrines of the Church which, by isolating one element of the Bible’s teaching, produce distortions — a Church of the perfect or the perfectly unanimous on one side, a Church of general human inspiration or liberation on the other.”

The Archbishop, commissioning members for their task, advised them that the primates “have repeatedly asserted that they wish to remain a Communion, rather than becoming a federation of churches”.

He continued: “The difficult balance in our Communion as it presently exists is between the deep conviction that we should not look for a single executive authority and the equally deep anxiety about the way in which a single local decision can step beyond what the communion as whole is committed to, and create division, embarrassment and evangelistic difficulties in other churches.”

The consultation was opened with prayers by Dr Williams who charged the members to be “diligent in discharging this weighty task” and to work together for the good of “our communion”.

He also urged them to present “a model of cooperation in love and charity” so that Anglicans worldwide could “take heart”.

Mary Tanner, a leading theologian, compared the debate over homosexuality to that over women priests and said that agreement from the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Council had been sought before women were first ordained. By comparison, the Episcopal Church of the US went ahead and ordained an openly gay bishop in spite of a resolution to the contrary from the 1998 Lambeth Conference and pleas from the Church’s primates worldwide not to do so.

Dr Tanner said that the crisis was one of “authority and decision-making in communion”. She gave warning that it was clear that the issue of homosexuality “will not go away”.

She acknowledged that it will be hard to find a man for the future to unite “the presently warring groups, some of whom hardly seem able to hear one another, or to want to hear one another”. Dr Paul Avis, General Secretary of the Council for Christian Unity, said it was possible for Anglicans to “passionately and bitterly disagree with one another” without breaking communion.

Dr Chris Sugden, director of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, gave warning that the Anglican Communion could be in danger of becoming “an expression of the ethics of western liberal elites”.

He said: “The Anglican Communion is at a crossroads. For some the current crisis has been precipitated by heterodox leadership in the communion in an economically powerful province.”

In the view of some, the US was over-influential in the central structure and bureaucracy of the Church, he said. Referring to declarations by several provinces that they are formally “out of communion” with the American church, Dr Sugden called for the US church to be suspended from the communion, with the goal of eventual reconciliation.

Advocating the evangelical view, he said: “We have to note that the liberal strand in the Anglican tradition is practically absent in the regions where the Church is growing,”

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