VIRGINIA: Nigerian Primate to install bishop; Presiding Bishop says action would 'heighten tensions'
Episcopal News Service. April 30, 2007 [043007-08]
Nigerian Primate Peter J. Akinola is scheduled to appear in Virginia May 5 at a service to install a bishop appointed to lead a convocation of congregations formed of members who have disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church.
The visit comes after the Anglican Communion's Primates, meeting in Tanzania in February, said international boundary crossing should not persist among the Communion's 38 Provinces, of which the Episcopal Church and the Church of Nigeria are part.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, in an April 27 statement (full text below), said such action would be "regrettable" but that her office would seek to arrange a meeting with Akinola to allow the two Primates to confer while he is in the United States.
"I have only just become aware of the possible visit by the Primate of Nigeria," Jefferts Schori wrote. "Unfortunately, my office has not been directly informed of his pending visit, but we will now pursue extending to him a personal invitation to see him while he is in the United States. I regret that he has apparently accepted an invitation to provide episcopal ministry here without any notice or prior invitation. That is not the ancient practice followed in most of the church catholic, which since the fourth century has expected that bishops minister only within their own churches, except by explicit invitation from another bishop with jurisdiction. This action would only serve to heighten current tensions, and would be regrettable if it does indeed occur."
The May 5 service, set for the Hylton Memorial Chapel in Woodbridge, Virginia, "a nondenominational Christian Event Center," is intended to install Martyn Minns as bishop of CANA, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a recently formed branch of the Nigerian church.
Minns, the former rector of Truro Parish, an Episcopal congregation in Fairfax, Virginia, was on site in Tanzania at the recent Primates' Meeting. Reporters observed him conferring regularly with Akinola in sessions apparently devoted to planning and influencing the Primates' Communique issued from the Dar es Salaam proceedings.
Minns told the New York Times that the convocation that he is to lead was not interfering with the Episcopal Church.
"The reality is that there is a broken relationship between the Episcopal Church and the rest of the communion," Minns said. "We want to give people a freedom of choice to remain Anglican but not under the Episcopal Church as it is currently led."
Officials of the Diocese of Virginia have affirmed the Presiding Bishop's statement on the May 5 event.