KENYA:Kenya's Anglican archbishop yesterday consecrated two conservative American bishops in the latest sign of a rift in the global church over homosexuality.
Bill Atwood of Texas and Bill Murdoch of Massachusetts will answer to the Kenyan church while continuing to serve in the US. Both denied they were driving a wedge into the 77 million strong Anglican Communion but said they were forced to act over the American Episcopal Church's liberal stance on gay priests.
And it was a particularly agonising decision for Mr Murdoch. His younger brother Brian is a gay priest in New England.
"I love my brother and care deeply for him, and obviously that's been a part of my family's struggle for 20 years," he said before the service at Nairobi's All Saints Cathedral. "So this has been a deep struggle, not a casual decision at all."
The crisis in the Anglican Communion surfaced in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire. Since then an alliance of conservative archbishops, largely from the developing world, has accused the Episcopal Church of ignoring Biblical teaching.
Liberals, who favour a looser interpretation of scripture, in turn accuse conservatives of taking the communion of 38 churches to the brink of schism.
A meeting of primates in Tanzania earlier this year agreed to draw up a "covenant", which would commit churches to procedures for resolving disputes within the communion.
In the meantime the Archbishop of Canterbury has asked African bishops to stop taking American conservatives under their wing. But for now the flow of renegades continues. More than 30 American congregations have joined the Kenyan church. Others have found sanctuary with Nigerian, Ugandan and Rwandan bishops.
Mr Atwood said homosexuality was incompatible with life in the clergy. "American males who are homosexually active have a life span that is three decades shorter than the norm," he said.
"How can a church say, 'you are precious, we care about you, we love you, we want the best for you and now we want to bless behaviours that cause you to die three decades early?"
Yesterday's service was attended by 10 archbishops or their representatives from the Global South, a coalition of conservative churches.
"The gospel of our Lord is clear in its teaching and must take precedence over our culture," said Drexel Gomez, a primate from the West Indies. "The issue is not primarily one of sexuality, but one which seeks to answer the following question: which relationship corresponds to God's ordering of life."