In Canterbury for the once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops known as the Lambeth Conference, the archbishop of Sudan has called on the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, to resign.

“Gene Robinson has to be away from the Anglican world and be a normal Christian,” said Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul at an afternoon news conference. “If he is, as he always says, a Christian, he should resign for the sake of the church.”

Bishop of Fort Worth, Texas, Jack Iker, says the bishops who consecrated Robinson and continue to support him should also leave Lambeth.

Robinson has been barred from attending official Lambeth events-including a meeting earlier this week of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops, which peeved the New Hampshire prelate.

Robinson, who has been asked to resign numerous times because of his sexuality, says he will not offer an official response to the Sudanese archbishop. But he says on the blog he’s keeping in Canterbury that the people of New Hampshire, who elected Robinson in 2003, “would be infuriated, as well they should be, if I entertained any notion of resigning”

“I would no more let them down or reneg on my commitments to them than fly to the moon,” Robinson said.