Anglicans divided over homosexuality: Lambeth in trouble

David Marr
June 10, 2008





The church I was ordained in is not the church I am in now --Peter Jensen



The Anglican Church faces a modern Great Schism, with gay-tolerant Christians on one side and radical "Bible-believers" on the other. And at the forefront of the hardliners is Australia's outspoken evangelist Peter Jensen.

Pilgrims to the mount of olives late this month may be startled to see a couple of hundred Anglican divines kitted out in purple toiling up the slope. Most of the faces will be black. Back home these men are princes of the church; their followers run into tens of millions. But somewhere among the bishops, dressed incongruously in civvies, will be the humble, smiling face of Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney.

What's afoot in Jerusalem is the destruction of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide church loosely aligned to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It spread with the empire and has so far survived, despite all its contradictions, for about 450 years, guided by the tart good sense of its founding monarch, Elizabeth I: "There is only one Jesus Christ and all the rest is a dispute over trifles."

The church has held together despite Charles Darwin, the bells-and-smells insurgents of Anglo-Catholicism, the collapse of the British Empire, the discovery of the pill, the arrival of divorce, women as priests and even women as bishops. But the gathering in Jerusalem is intent on "scattering" this communion of 75 million believers because the North American church has gone soft on homosexuality.

"The church I was ordained in is not the church I am in now," Peter Jensen declares with brisk resignation. He puts himself among the true "orthodox" Anglicans defending their faith against the temptation to drift with the times. The archbishop insists it's bigger than sex. "That is a presenting issue that has really opened up the whole chasm between those who will come to terms with their culture at the expense of Biblical authority and those who won't." He holds out no hope for the old worldwide church. "Unlike some other people, I believe this is permanent. I don't think the Americans will step back from that. Not for a moment."

Jensen is talking New Hampshire. In the ice- hockey stadium of the state's university, in the presence of more than 50 bishops, a massed choir, a band and about 3000 Anglican faithful, a gay man was consecrated bishop on November 2, 2003. Even the hardest hardliners don't pretend this was the first gay bishop in the history of Christendom, or even contemporary Anglicanism. The trouble this time is that everyone's in the know.

Gene Robinson had been a priest in the diocese for nearly 30 years. Mark Andrew, his partner of 16 years, was there at the ceremony. On instructions from the police, both wore bulletproof vests. But the event went off peacefully enough - except for one clergyman haranguing the assembly about the evils of anal sex, and a knot of demonstrators standing rink-side with placards that read: "Fag Church, Fag Gospel", "Thank God for September 11", and "AIDS is God's Curse".

Protests about Robinson's consecration had been rolling round the Anglican globe for months. Peter Akinola, the leader of 20 million Nigerian Christians and the moving force behind the Jerusalem pilgrimage, denounced Robinson's elevation as "a Satanic attack on God's Church". Anglican leaders across Africa, the Middle East and Asia gave the events in New Hampshire blistering notices. Jensen calls them "plain disobedience to the teaching of the Holy Scripture". For him, judgement doesn't come more implacable.

International rage over new hampshire came tinged with elation. The consecration of a gay man was seen from the first as an opportunity to be seized, a chance for "Bible-believing" Anglicans to build a new, purer church. That's the mission GAFCON - the Global Anglican Future Conference - will be pursuing in Jerusalem. "I'm not saying to the Americans: 'Pull your head in,' " says Jensen. "We said that five years ago, and that didn't work. They will do their thing. But if they do do that thing, then their freedom frees us as well."

High titles and fancy dress can confuse us into thinking Cardinal George Pell is the biggest figure Australia has on the ecclesiastical world stage. In fact, it's Peter Jensen. Pell is one of any number of conservatives in the ruling faction of the Catholic Church - and said to be rather out of favour, these days, with the Pope - but Peter Jensen is a decisive leader of a breakaway faith that claims to represent half the keen Anglicans on earth. In this cause, he has spent his energy, intelligence, prestige and an unknown amount of Sydney's money. The city's archbishops have been travellers in the past, but Jensen is a frequent flyer in the pursuit of schism, turning up wherever needed - Blackpool, Nairobi, the Red Sea and, later this month, Jerusalem.

But he does not represent Australia. Sydney is the oldest and richest diocese in the country. It's growing more strongly than any other in the land. But in many eyes it's hardly Anglican at all. Visitors from Melbourne worshipping in a Sydney parish might think they've wandered into a protestant chapel: where are the crosses and vestments? What's this demand that all believers be Born Again in Jesus Christ?

GAFCON is only step one. Most of the 200 or so bishops, after issuing a communique on the shape of the new "alternative communion", will return to their dioceses and boycott Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury's meeting of all the Anglican bishops of the world, in July. Sydney's six bishops have decided not to sit down with the Americans.

"If you believe that the practice of homosexuality is sinful - such as to exclude a person from the kingdom of God - then these bishops are intolerable, false teachers," explained Phillip Jensen, brother of the archbishop and the fiery dean of Sydney's St Andrew's Cathedral. The younger Jensen called on the world's bishops, even those who have already accepted their invitations, to renege and stay away. "To reinforce your error of judgement by attending is to make the same mistake as Herod when he executed John the Baptist."

The archbishop is careful not to use the "split" word. It has terrible legal consequences. After New Hampshire, when some very wealthy US Anglican parishes split from their bishops to demonstrate their devotion to the Bible and their hostility to homosexuality, the courts told them they were free to go wherever God called them - but they had to leave their property behind. Jensen knows he can't take the immense wealth of the Sydney diocese into a new church. "I can't. I'm part of a constitution, which is virtually unchangeable, of the Australian church. I wouldn't want to. I love the church. It would be bad for Christianity, bad for the gospel."

The property is a set of golden fetters. "There couldn't possibly be a division in the sense of a legal division," says Jensen. He talks expansively instead of an old empire evolving, families scattering, ties loosening, but with friendship and regard somehow surviving. "I think there is going to be an evolution in the Anglican Communion. It has occurred. And what the Future Conference is going to work out is how to live best within that evolution. That's its business."

More bluntly, GAFCON is planning to collapse the church into a sort of Balkan confusion in which national branches turn their backs on each other, bishops dabble in one another's territory, and dingo fences cut across the landscape to keep "orthodox" Bible-believing, homosexual-denouncing Anglicans safe on one side of the wire, and "liberals" on the other. If the split comes, it will shatter national churches as well as the international communion. It will be particularly messy for Australia.

Who Jensen really represents in manoeuvring his diocese into the splitters' camp is far from clear. The endorsement of his synod - the parliament of the Sydney diocese - only came after he and his inner circle took all the big decisions. Only one Australian bishop outside the Sydney diocese is joining the boycott. The other 40 or so may not like what happened in New Hampshire but they don't see it as a reason to turn their backs on the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Perhaps it's the hair, perhaps it's the smile, but Peter Jensen bears an uncanny resemblance to Kevin Rudd. The two have something of the same manner: powerful men who present themselves as patient explainers. The archbishop believes all mysteries can be explained in big, clear paragraphs. "I just keep going," he says with self-deprecating grace and then smiles his broad, man-to-man smile. Jensen's smile is one of the familiar sights of Sydney on posters, on websites, in brochures, in newspapers, wherever his church is offering a new life through Jesus Christ. A good smile is an asset in this business.

He is formidable and feared, but comes without a trace of episcopal glamour. The voice is plain. So are the clothes. He seems absolutely content that the role of the Archbishop of Sydney and Metropolitan of NSW is performed by a plain man. But not dull. Jensen goes where other church leaders fear to tread and is not afraid to tempt ridicule in the pursuit of Truth. His Easter message this year was devoted to ghosts, spirits and the dangers of Christians meddling with the occult. "One of the gravest weaknesses of contemporary Christianity," he declared a few weeks later, "is the little attention paid to the wrath of God."

Nearly 50 years have passed since Billy Graham swept 15-year-old Peter Jensen off his feet. After all this time it's hard to imagine the excitement of Graham's 1959 crusade through Australia. The North Carolina Baptist with a picture-perfect family and Charlton Heston good looks filled the press, the sports grounds and then the churches with his dramatic message: "The Bible says we are sick - sick with pride, sick with lust, sick with greed, sick with selfishness, sick with materialism, sick with secularism. We are sick, sick, sick!"

Young Peter went back to hear this 17 or 18 times. Graham's phrase, "The Bible says", made him sit up and think. "I already believed the Bible was the word of God. His appeal to the Bible as his authority meant he wasn't speaking out of his own head but he was explaining the Bible to us ... It had a big impact on me."

After failing first-year law a couple of times -and working in an office with the young John Howard, whom he found decent, helpful and "always political" - Jensen switched to theology at Moore College. This Anglican institution, which nestles beside, but is not a part of, Sydney University, proved his ladder to success. After studies in the UK, he lectured here, then ran the place for more than 15 years before becoming Archbishop of Sydney in 2001.

Jensen's headquarters is now a large room on the second floor of an office block behind St Andrew's Cathedral. The foyer has the feel of a moderately profitable Scandinavian shipping line, but the archbishop's office is astonishingly bare. Vast distances separate odd bits of furniture. A framed montage of protestant worthies is the only clue that this is the workplace of a church leader. Jensen claims to prefer a couple of English prints of ducks paddling about in bulrushes. He may be joking.

"I am responsible for the Anglicans in the boundaries of the diocese of Sydney," he says but he flatly denies there's a binding Anglican tradition that bishops stick to their own patch. "Every bishop in the Anglican Church has an interest, of course, in what goes on elsewhere. Most of us have many connections with people elsewhere ... Sometimes those ministries will jump over boundaries." Nothing has earned Jensen so much ire in the Australian church as the Sydney strategy of jumping boundaries to "plant" congregations of "Bible-believers" in surrounding Anglican territory.

He, on the other hand, patrols his own boundaries vigorously. Women priests are forbidden. Single men can't expect to be given a parish and no openly gay priest will find employment in the diocese. Visiting Anglican luminaries with uncomfortable views are not allowed to preach. Gene Robinson was in Sydney late last year for a private visit that went unnoticed by the press. He did not ask for permission to preach or celebrate communion. He knew it wouldn't be allowed. He didn't meet Jensen.

The North American troubles began only a year after Jensen took office in 2001 in an election where his own emphatic views on homosexuality had proved an asset. The following June, he condemned a diocese of the Canadian church that voted to bless same-sex unions. The following May, Jensen and Akinola threatened schism over English plans - already endorsed by Downing Street and Buckingham Palace - to make a celibate gay man bishop of Reading. That plan collapsed the same week the American church voted - 65 dioceses for, 31 against and 12 divided - to endorse Robinson's consecration.

From his medieval palace in London, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, tried to keep the peace. Bishops were called to emergency meetings in exotic locales. There were reports, pleas, faction deals and communiques but the brawl kept gathering momentum. Parishes in North America began to seek "oversight" from Anglican bishops in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria - and the first court battles over property began.

What this is really all about is a matter of endless debate. "This dispute is not really about homosexuality," claims Jensen. "It's really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible." Others stand back from the fracas and contend it's really about power. But analysts like Jim Naughton, the director of communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC, argue this crisis is clearly about homosexuality and "the visceral fear" it engenders. "Absent that match, and the tinder does not catch fire."

In 2005, jensen was at the red sea meeting of prelates that formalised the Global South alliance under the leadership of Peter Akinola. This Nigerian leader with a taste for fiery rhetoric, spectacular vestments and dynamic political intervention headed an alliance of Anglican churches spanning South America, Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia - with the diocese of Sydney as a sympathetic First World supporter. The following year The New Yorker called Akinola "possibly the most powerful figure in Anglicanism" and Time declared him one of the 100 leading figures shaping the world.

His is part of a great African success story for Christianity. A carpenter and peddler of patent medicines before he saw the light, Akinola studied for a time in America before returning in the early 1980s to begin an astonishing 2 1/2 decades of evangelism that saw him build - in head-to-head competition with Islam - a church with 20 million believers, more than 90 bishops, a hunger for growth and access to serious wealth. Sub-Saharan Africa contains more than half of all "active" Anglicans on a continent where there are now so many Christians that the centre of gravity of the world's faith is said to be Timbuktu.

Across that swathe of Africa, homosexuality remains taboo. In northern Nigeria where Sharia law prevails, homosexuals are stoned to death.

In the rest of the country they face 14 years in prison, to which Akinola would like to add another five years for belonging to gay organisations, advocating gay marriage or watching gay movies. "Homosexuality seeks to destroy marriage as we know it," he told The Christian Science Monitor last year. "When God created man, he saw man was alone and added a female mate for him. Why didn't he pick one of the baboons, one of the lions to make his partner...?"

Jensen has distanced himself once or twice from Akinola's abuse, but he has no theological quarrel with the man. The Sydney archbishop commends those Global South Christians who stand shoulder to shoulder with Islam in absolute hostility to homosexuality. He seems happy for Islam to call the shots for Anglicans worldwide - in order to speed evangelism and save Christians in Africa and South-East Asia from being "denounced and traduced and vilified because of the action of the North Americans ... It could be that the Americans may have been less up-front about all of this if they had thought about the impact on worldwide Christianity."

Moore college is eating its corner of Sydney street by street. Shops, a pub, rows of terraces and an old office block have all been consumed over the past 40 or 50 years as the college flexed its muscles and grew. This is Jensen's old stamping ground, the powerhouse of Sydney Anglicanism and guardian of its teachings. By arrangement with the archbishop I turned up there on a wintry afternoon to be briefed by its principal, Dr John Woodhouse, a hard man with a good mind who for many years ran a huge parish on Sydney's North Shore.

My question: what exactly is the Sydney Anglican line on homosexuality? Woodhouse had much to say on the plus side about the forgiveness available through Jesus Christ, but his list of minuses was long: homosexuals who persist in having sex are wicked sinners breaking God's law; they are unfit to take Holy Communion; unfit for any post in the parish; unfit for employment by the church; unfit for ministry; unfit to be elected bishop of anywhere; and unless they refrain from sex with one another for their entire lives, destined for Judgement.

These theologians find science interesting but irrelevant in the end to the moral issues at hand. Woodhouse will neither confirm nor deny the scientists' notion that homosexuals are what they are and can't be changed. The Sydney church funds an outfit called Liberty Christian Ministries to help gays turn straight. They concede it's not for everyone, but those who can't switch face lifelong abstinence in line with Christ's ruling - rather hard to pin down in the Gospels - that sex can only ever be had inside heterosexual marriage. The formula is: "Chaste singleness and faithful marriage."

But having literally put the fear of God into everyone, young and old, Anglican leaders speak almost tenderly of the need to respect homosexuals and protect them from violence. Happiness does not seem to be part of the Woodhouse calculus, but Jensen argues that a return to "classic" heterosexual marriage for all who can manage it - and abstinence for the rest - will prove a recipe for happiness for all.

"The biblical teaching on sexuality, of which homosexuality is only a part, confronts Western civilisation more and more with a very different vision of what it is to be human," says Jensen. "I think what we're doing is testifying, in what may be an increasingly minority way, to a truth about human nature and a vision for human life which is different, which is very demanding - very demanding indeed - but which will prove to be in the end for the betterment of us all. But it will take a hundred years for it to be true."

Neither Woodhouse nor Jensen would accept any link between their preaching and the high levels of violence and extremely high levels of self-harm and suicide that young homosexuals experience in a society even as relaxed as ours. "If the churches were to fall silent, the same things would apply," suggests Jensen. "I believe it is likely there is a natural feeling that there is something wrong here - it may be a natural feeling that may need to be challenged and all sorts of other things - that leads young men and sometimes young women to have tremendous self-doubt, etcetera. This will occur, I think, in any case. And I think you think that, too."

But you give those ideas comfort?

"And the reason is, I believe, that the ideas are right: that is to say, there is something here that does call for a Christian response, namely to commit yourself to a life of chastity, which is a very hard thing. But I believe that is right and better for the human being."

Persuading an anglican bishop to stay away from Lambeth is like begging an athlete to boycott the Olympics. Lambeth is what being a prelate is all about. It's a once-every-decade time of prayer, plotting and worship in the spectacular setting of Canterbury Cathedral. The Queen holds a garden party. And when the communion is being rent in two by such a brawl as this, it would seem self-defeating to stay away - unless you want the worst to happen.

December 2007 saw Jensen in Nairobi working with Akinola and a dozen Global South bishops on plans for both Lambeth and GAFCON's invitation-only pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Alerted by press release, Christian leaders in the Middle East begged the bishops to stay away.

Bishop Suheil Dawani of Jerusalem told Jensen face to face that his flock found "issues of peace and dialogue between the different faith communities of the Holy Land were far more important at this time than issues of homosexuality". Jensen and Akinola rode over local objections, tweaked the rhetoric, scheduled a pre-pilgrimage caucus of GAFCON leaders over the border in Jordan, but stuck to plan.

Lambeth proved harder to enforce. Several Global South prelates broke ranks and let it be known they would be going to the shindig in Britain. Back home in Sydney, Jensen met resistance among his five assistant bishops. He concedes each was free in theory to sign or not, "but I think they would regard themselves as being bound by cabinet solidarity". One of them was given the task of drafting a letter to Rowan Williams that all would sign. They agonised over this all through January without reaching a resolution.

Williams had not invited Gene Robinson. This pleased the forces of Global South. But the same clergy had been highly displeased to find no invitations were being extended to the "missionary bishops" consecrated by Global South leaders over the past six or seven years to give episcopal oversight to the breakaway parishes in North America. Akinola took Williams' stand particularly amiss. In large part, the coming boycott is an act of solidarity with those excluded renegades.

Jensen is a cautious radical. though he operates with extraordinary freedom, he knows the Australian church sets limits to his autonomy. "I am a very law-abiding person," he says. "I have a great respect for the law and I want to keep it." Always in the background is the Special Tribunal of judges and bishops with power to sack an errant archbishop for "wilful violation" of the church's constitution. So Jensen's services on behalf of the schism must stay just this side of total breach.

He knows he can't take Sydney's riches off into a new communion. He also knows he has to be extremely careful before joining his African brothers in consecrating "missionary bishops" for breakaway parishes in North America. He doesn't rule out the possibility of one day taking this boundary-hopping step but adds, "That is something I'd have to take very careful advice on." He fires this warning shot across the bows of the local bishops: "Gene Robinson hasn't been consecrated in Australia. If that were to happen, there would be a further loosening of the ties."

This man has many enemies in the Australian church. His Billy Graham brand of Christianity repels them; his refusal to recognise women priests irritates them; church planting in rival dioceses enrages them. But no one has taken him on. "The trouble," observes one highly placed analyst of Jensen's career, "is that the great warriors of the past are old beasts now and no new generation of warriors has been blooded."

The Sydney bishops had still not made up their minds to boycott Lambeth after four weeks of "agonising and struggle" - the words of Jensen's media officer Russell Powell - when Akinola announced their decision for them in far-off Lagos, telling a press conference he was not going to Lambeth - and nor were the bishops of Uganda, Rwanda and Sydney.

Jensen scrambled. He rang the Archbishop of Canterbury's office to say the Sydney bishops were not coming. At some point the letter was signed and sent. Then Jensen made the decision public. But senior sources in the church say two bishops remain deeply troubled: "They were told to like it or lump it." My calls to those men were flick-passed to Jensen's office. Powell informed me that everyone, including Jensen, was upset not to be going. "But the bishops are gladly united in the decision that has been taken."

Jensen drove all these big decisions. Only when they were signed and sealed did he take them to the Standing Committee of his synod - the parliament of his diocese - where they were rubber-stamped by the clergy and laity. Was that the right way round? "Some would think it a failure of leadership to do it any other way," answers Powell. The Standing Committee gave its support and "thanks to God for the unreserved commitment to biblical teaching of the Archbishop and his Bishops".

Jensen speaks of the old Anglican Communion in the past tense. As far as he's concerned, it's finished. Lambeth can go on quarrelling about homosexuality, but the Archbishop of Sydney expects the subject will hardly be mentioned at GAFCON. That's in the past. It is, after all, a bond between them. "To my mind we are just living in a new age. We're in a different sort of organisation. Now it's exploring the possibilities of this different organisation that is now before us." All the way from Westminster Abbey comes the sound of Queen Elizabeth I spinning in her tomb.