c. 2007 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ When the head of the worldwide Anglican church meets with Episcopal bishops from across the country in New Orleans this fall, it will briefly position the Crescent City at the center of the Anglican universe, but for an unlikely reason.

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, announced the meeting during a visit with Canadian bishops in Toronto this week. He will be accompanied on his visit by key archbishops, or “primates,” from conservative overseas Anglican churches, where pressure has been steadily building to eject American Episcopalians from the global confederation of churches.

The meetings will be held Sept. 20-25. The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops previously scheduled a meeting here to see its church-related hurricane relief work. That will come precisely as Anglican leaders worldwide demand an answer from Americans on contentious questions of homosexuality dividing the worldwide church.

Williams, who has struggled to keep opposing sides together, is head of the Church of England and the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest church, behind the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Yet his New Orleans visit might not become a high-profile celebration marked by civic receptions and mass public events, one church official said.

That’s at least partly because Williams is fully occupied trying to steer the Anglican Communion through one of the most perilous moments in its more-than-450-year history.

The flash point nominally is the church’s teaching on homosexuality: whether the Anglican world can live with American Episcopalians’ blessing same-sex unions and ordaining partnered gay bishops.

More deeply, it is how the church uses the guides of Scripture, tradition and reason to make all moral judgments.

On one side are 2.3 million overwhelmingly liberal Episcopalians who recently elected as their presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, not only the global communion’s first woman primate, but one who, in her former Nevada diocese, supported same-sex unions and the ordination of the Rev. Gene Robinson as the church’s first partnered gay bishop.

Opposed are conservative Anglicans in the Southern Hemisphere, especially Africa and Asia, who take a traditional Scriptural view of homosexuality.

American Episcopalians have the wealth, sending tens of millions of dollars to Anglican churches overseas. But conservatives have the numbers. Nigeria alone, headed by the outspoken conservative Archbishop Peter Akinola, has 17 million Anglicans _ seven times the United States membership.

In February, Anglican primates from around the world met in Tanzania and issued the American church an ultimatum: Stop authorizing same-sex unions and stop ordaining partnered gay bishops. They gave the Americans a Sept. 30 deadline, giving the New Orleans meeting an unexpected prominence.

In March, U.S. bishops meeting outside Houston rejected the ultimatum, but they begged Williams for the face-to-face meeting he will grant in New Orleans.

Like Williams, Bishop Charles Jenkins of the Diocese of Louisiana has sought to keep disaffected conservative Episcopalians from walking out of the American church, but since Katrina, he has been occupied with other issues, including raising money and organizing local church-related relief work. He said New Orleans’ needs were much on his mind as he thought about Williams’ visit.

“I hope this will be an opportunity for him to visit and see and bless the work of Episcopal Relief and Development in New Orleans,” Jenkins said. “It’s when we’re involved in this kind of work that some issues that so divide us take on their proper perspective. I think one of the reasons we’re holding together here in the Diocese of Louisiana is that we have a relief and development focus, and not on ourselves or others.”

Jenkins said the meeting might bring 500 to 600 visitors to New Orleans. About 100 would be bishops, and the rest staff, said the Rev. Jan Nunley, a church spokeswoman.

Jenkins said he has asked each bishop to come with a gift of $10,000 to be split between the dioceses of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Louisiana’s share would help support a post-Katrina Episcopalian church that relief workers founded in the Lower 9th Ward, he said.

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times Picayune in New Orleans.)

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