Episcopal bishops express hope as five-day meeting ends

The nation’s Episcopal bishops concluded a five-day meeting Tuesday saying they were anxious but hopeful that their church would remain part of the worldwide Anglican Communion despite the Americans’ liberal stands on homosexuality.

The meeting here came just three weeks before an international church panel appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury was scheduled to make public recommendations on the future relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. That panel was formed after the Episcopal Church, which is the American arm of Anglicanism, last year consecrated an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire and allowed local bishops the option of permitting same sex blessings in their dioceses.

Some conservatives around the world reportedly are pushing for a strong rebuke of the American church, possibly forcing it out of active membership into some kind of observer status or even expelling it outright.

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church, said his members must be ready for a strong, even indignant, international response from the international panel, called the Lambeth Commission.

“We must be prepared to meet the other not with confident self-assertion, which is so characteristic of the American way, but with a genuine availability to the other and a willingness to receive what is proffered, even if it comes clothed not in purple and fine linen, but in anger,” Griswold said in a sermon here Sunday.