US: US ministers who split from the Episcopal Church in opposition to gay ordination and marriage have said a report to be released today by the Church of Ireland primate, Dr Robin Eames, will not convince them to return unless it rejects homosexuality as a sin.
The Eames report follows a year of bitter divisions among Episcopalians, with some US churches aligning with conservative bishops in developing countries rather than take direction from their own church leaders.
On Friday a coalition of conservative New England Episcopalians announced they were breaking away from the church and forming four new congregations that will be aligned with foreign Anglican churches.
The announcement came after some 300 Episcopal conservatives met at a Rhode Island convention to show defiance ahead of the publication of the report.
The Episcopal Church USA is the American province of the Anglican Communion, which comprises 38 provinces around the world.
In Los Angeles, the local Episcopal bishop is suing to have property seized from three conservative churches that have aligned with a Ugandan Anglican church and will defrock their ministers unless they return to the Episcopal community.
However, Mr Jim Dale, senior warden at St James's Church in Newport Beach near Los Angeles, said his church was now a member of the Ugandan Anglican Church and would not return to the US Episcopalian church unless it repented and rejected homosexuality as a sin.
The two other breakaway churches in the Los Angeles area have also indicated that the Eames report will only heal the rift if it unequivocally rejects homosexuality.
The report of the Lambeth Commission was set up following a decision by Anglicans in the US to consecrate a gay man, Canon Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire.
The Commission, headed by Dr Eames, was set up in October last year after a meeting at Lambeth in London of 38 primates of the international Anglican Communion. The Windsor Report, as it is titled, will be launched in St Paul's Cathedral Crypt at midday.
The 16-member international Commission was asked to make recommendations to the Anglican primates as to how they might maintain the highest degree of communion possible following the developments in North America.