Divisive as it all may sound, conference organizers are quick to reject the charge that they are trying to upstage the upcoming Lambeth Conference, the official meeting of Communion bishops held in England every 10 years under the auspices of the archbishop of Canterbury, now the Most Rev. and Right Hon. Rowan Williams.

But many attending the Jerusalem meeting, including the Most Rev. Peter Akinola of Nigeria, have said that they will not attend the Lambeth gathering in mid-July. And GAFCON attendees admit they have lost patience with Anglican and Episcopal church leaders, who conservatives say have refused to take clear or decisive stands on such issues as gay marriage and openly gay clergy.

“The traditional power brokers of the Communion are being challenged,” says the Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns, missionary bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a group of about 60 American congregations that have cut ties with the U. S. Episcopal Church and are now incorporated under Archbishop Akinola’s Nigerian province. Minns charges that the Communion’s leadership in the global north continues to ignore demographic and theological reality: that the church in the global south is not only the largest part of the Communion (with more than 40 million of the 70 million Anglicans and Episcopalians) but also the most committed to orthodox Christian teaching.

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GAFCON leadership team and key participants in the week long conference are on their way to Jerusalem for the final preparations for the meeting beginning Sunday. The Pre-GAFCON consultation in Jordan wound up early, and the participants move to Jerusalem today. Hotel and meeting rooms previously unavailable in Jerusalem became available at the same time GAFCON leaders learned that previously granted permission for the Jordan consultation was deemed insufficient.

GAFCON delegates have taken the alterations in their stride, the move proving no barrier to a developing sense of fellowship.

Already, there’ve been joyous scenes as GAFCON leaders greeted each other.

The Nigerian delegation was given a rousing cheer as was Archbishop and Mrs Yong Ping Chung. Archbishop Yong, of Sabah, will give a Bible study during the Gafcon week.

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Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The exercise also included Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900 miles, which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.

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A report in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper referring to the book was headlined Hardline bishops declare Anglican split and went on to declare that they had “formally declared an end to the Anglican communion”.

That was firmly rejected by one of the GAFCON leaders, Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen, who referred to the actions in North America by churches in defiance of the Lambeth decisions of 1998 on homosexuality.

“If we’re talking about schism and the break up of the communion, that’s where it starts and that’s where the responsibility is,” Archbishop Jensen says.

Earlier, Archbishop Jensen told the BBC from Amman that the actions meant that the Anglican communion had turned “from a nuclear family to an extended family”.

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THE Clearest indication yet that the forthcoming Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) will herald a formal split in the Anglican Communion came yesterday (Thursday) with the publication of The Way, the Truth and the Life.

The 94-page book will be given to everyone who attends GAFCON ”” organisers expect 1000, including 280 bishops ”” and has been produced by the 25-strong GAFCON theological resource team, chaired by the Archbishop of Bendel, in Nigeria, the Most Revd Nicolas Okoh. The group’s secretary is Canon Dr Chris Sugden, executive secretary of Anglican Mainstream, based in Oxford.

The book uses the language of the parting of the ways. “We see a parallel between contemporary events and events in England in the 16th century. Then, the Catholic Church in England was faced with the choice of aligning itself with either Rome or Geneva. But, when forced to decide its identity, it sought to distinguish itself from both the practices of the Papacy and the excesses it associated with the more radical reformers.

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Gafcon, the Global Anglican Future Conference, will work towards shaping an “Anglican future in which the Gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centred mission [is] a top priority,” Dr Jensen, the chairman of the conference’s programme committee, said. He denied charges the conference was a shadow Lambeth Conference, saying the delegates meeting at the Renaissance Hotel near Israel’s Knesset in West Jerusalem were not going to “ape” Lambeth. “This is a conference about he future and we’ve deliberately invited lay people, clergy and others” to ask what it means “to be Anglican,” he said. “How can we best serve God, how can we honour his word and how can we best make his message known? They’re the big themes we’ll be looking at,” Dr Jensen said.

However, Dr Jensen, along with bishops from amongst the largest provinces of the Communion: Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, will boycott the Lambeth Conference, attending Gafcon in its place. “We have made other plans to travel to Jerusalem [instead of Lambeth] to reflect on how best we can do the work of the Lord,” Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya explained last week, citing conservative disquiet with its agenda and guest list.

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It is true that the forthcoming Lambeth Conference will also be a divided body, boycotted by an unprecedented numbers of bishops. But the semi-fiasco of Gafcon means that Dr Williams still has a chance of keeping the conservative Christians of, say, Uganda, in dialogue with the liberal provinces of the United States and Canada.

Whether the Anglican Communion can survive the inevitable discord of Lambeth is still unclear. But it is encouraging that some of the most vociferous critics of liberal Anglicanism have decided to join in debate and worship with their fellow bishops at their traditional gathering in England rather than declare allegiance to a rival body meeting in the Middle East.

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At the last Lambeth Conference, in 1998, the bishops overwhelmingly passed a resolution saying that homosexuality was “incompatible with Scripture,” and that homosexuals should not be ordained. The vote revealed the growing strength of the conservative bishops from Africa and the developing world.

To forestall conflict, the organizers of this year’s Lambeth Conference have planned for no resolutions, no proposals and no votes. Instead, the bishops will meet in small groups, on the theory that they will overcome their divisions by building personal relationships.

The Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., who served on the design committee for Lambeth, said in a news conference last month, “It’s fundamentally about the encounter, about conversations among the leaders all oriented to: what is God calling the Anglican Communion and the bishops to be about in the wider world?”

Bishop Minns said of the Lambeth Conference, “It’s unfortunate, at a time the church needs clear and strong leadership, it gets two weeks of conversation.”

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GAFCON, which says it represents about 35 million Anglicans mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, will be held less than a month before the 10-yearly Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world opens on July 16.

[Arne] Fjeldstad said [Archbishop Peter] Akinola was not denied entry into Jordan but gave up after several hours’ delay at the border.

“He was kept in bureaucratic limbo,” he said. “They claimed that, as a diplomatic passport holder, he had to give advance warning that he was coming. He decided to go back to Jerusalem.”

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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday the West has failed to break Iran’s will in the nuclear standoff, days after world powers presented Tehran with a new offer aimed at ending the crisis. “In the nuclear issue, the bullying powers have used up all their capabilities but could not break the will of the Iranian nation,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by state television.

World powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — on Saturday offered Tehran a new package of technological and economic incentives in exchange for suspending uranium enrichment activities.

The West fears the process might be used to make an atomic bomb although Iran insists it only wants to generate nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

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Many of the people attending these gatherings have smoldered for years over the church’s creeping universalism, the flouting of biblical authority, the increasing numbers of same-sex blessing ceremonies and the tolerance of gay clergy and bishops in the Episcopal Church.

GAFCON also is the conservative Anglican alternative to Lambeth, the once-every-10-years conference of Anglican bishops at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, starting in mid-July.

Lambeth usually attracts more than 800 bishops, but GAFCON has peeled off about one-quarter of that number who have elected to go to Jerusalem instead.

No doubt the folks meeting in the Middle East have a strategy for Lambeth, a huge world stage where for three weeks every cause imaginable gets huge media exposure.

Unfortunately, this year’s Lambeth was organized to confound the media by avoiding decisive votes and statements. The massive gathering will be organized as a series of private Bible studies among the bishops.

So, no matter where you turn, there are a lot of secret meetings going on. At some point, the smoke needs to clear.

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The pre-GAFCON preparatory consultation in Jordan wound up early, and the participants moved to Jerusalem on Thursday, 19th June. Hotel and meeting rooms previously unavailable in Jerusalem became available at the same time GAFCON leaders learned that previously granted permission for the Jordan consultation was deemed insufficient.

The time in Jordan was very valuable for prayer, fellowship, and networking. The group made pilgrimages to Mt. Nebo and the Baptism Site of Jesus. GAFCON Chairman Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, and Archbishop Greg Venables of Southern Cone, were for different reasons unable to be in Jordan. Both are, however, expected to play significant roles at GAFCON in Jerusalem.

GAFCON book, The Way, The Truth and the Life, will be released on Thursday, 19th June, in Jerusalem. A press conference will be held at the Renaissance Hotel on Thursday, 19th June at 19:00 hours.

The 94-page book is published by Latimer Trust and was prepared by GAFCON Theological Resource Team. It provides the theological and historical foundation for the movement of orthodox Anglicans that is meeting in Jerusalem June 22 ”“ 29. More than 1,000 Anglican leaders from 25 countries, including 280 bishops, are expected to attend the conference.

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In recent decades, as membership dwindled in liberal-leaning European and North American churches, the rolls of Global South churches, as they are known, expanded dramatically. The majority of Anglicans now live in developing countries and are scandalized by Northern views of Scripture.

The leadership of the conservative summit comes mainly from these provinces.

The top organizers are Orombi, along with the archbishops ”” called primates ”” of the Anglican churches of Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and the Southern Cone based in Argentina. U.S. conservatives, a minority within the Episcopal Church, and British Anglicans also are playing important roles.

“There is an air of certainty and clarity among the bishops going to GAFCON, which stifles debate and openness to those of other views,” said Mark D. Chapman, lecturer in systematic theology at Ripon College Cuddesdon in Oxford, England. “This would change the soul of Anglicanism as an inclusive and tolerant church that is able to live with difference.”

But Bishop Martyn Minns, head of the conservative Convocation of Anglicans in North America, said orthodox Anglicans are the ones being shut out.

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Who is organizing GAFCON?

GAFCON was conceived by the Anglican Archbishops of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, the Southern Cone (South America), and Sydney (Australia). Evangelical Anglican Bishops from the UK and the USA were also involved in its organization.

How many people will participate in GAFCON?

More than 1,000 people have registered for GAFCON, including more than 280 Bishops, their wives, clergy and non-ordained church leaders. One hundred and seven (107) people from Uganda will be going, including 34 Bishops.

Why is GAFCON being held in Jerusalem?

GAFCON is essentially a pilgrimage. We are going back to the roots of our faith, to the place where Jesus was born, lived, died, and was raised from the dead.

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Those of us from the Network attending this historic event are grateful for their prayers. Out of a total of more than 1,000 bishops, priests, deacons and laity who have registered for GAFCON, just over 130 will be from North America. Of the more than 280 bishops registered to attend, 19 are affiliated with Common Cause.

We are a small contingent going to what is likely the most important Anglican event in decades. We are not running the show or driving the agenda. This meeting is not about North America or our problems. It is about expanding a faithful, orthodox Anglican witness worldwide. It is also about working together to sail through the storms assailing the western colonial model that has characterized the Anglican Communion for the past century.

The storms are here and, frankly, the traditional structures of the Anglican Communion don’t appear ready to deal with them. Archbishop Williams is clearly steering the Lambeth Conference away from any sort of accounting for The Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada’s increasingly brazen flouting of orthodox faith and the decisions of the last Lambeth Conference. The Anglican Covenant becomes weaker with every revision. We hear reports that the earliest we could expect to see any covenant in place would be sometime around the 2018 Lambeth Conference.

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More than 200 Anglican bishops from conservative dioceses around the world are to boycott next month’s Lambeth Conference and attend a rival Global Anglican Future Conference in Jordan this week instead.

Entire provinces, such as Nigeria, Uganda and R wanda, are attending the alternative gathering, styled Gafcon, instead of Lambeth because of their emphasis on a Bible-based Christianity that rules out many of the liberal developments in the Western Church, such as the increasing acceptance of homosexuality.

Two Church of England bishops, Wallace Benn, of Lewes, and Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, of Rochester, will be carrying the standard for the Church of England, and conservatives from the United States and Australia will also be in Amman.

Although organisers say their goal is not to set up a rival Anglican structure, in a statement at the weekend the Church of Uganda admitted that the aim of Gafcon was “to prepare for an Anglican future in which the gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centred mission is a top priority”.

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More than 35 members of the Australian contingent to GAFCON gathered in Sydney to hear Archbishop Peter Jensen declare that the conference is about “facing new realities in the (Anglican) communion and turning them into gospel opportunities”.

The Sydney contingent met at St Andrew’s House to pray and prepare for the one-week gathering, which starts in Jerusalem on June 22.

The conference will be preceded by a meeting of the leadership team and bishops from majority-Muslim countries in Jordan.

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The massive undertaking that is the Global Anglican Future Conference or (GAFCON) is days away from starting in Jerusalem.

Archbishop Peter Jensen, along with the Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies and the Academic Dean of Moore College, Dr Mark Thompson will be meeting this week in Jordan with the conference leadership team in preparation for the seven days of prayer, bible study and fellowship that will follow in Israel.

Dr Jensen has told sydneyanglicans.net that he’s expecting to find a buzz among the 1000 who will gather.

“I’m expecting to find a great number of people thoroughly committed to the Bible and to the Lord Jesus Christ, fellowshipping together, working on who we are as Anglicans and then working on the future. It’s going to be one of the most significant events, I think, in the Anglican Communion, at least in this next two or three decades.”

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The former Bishop in Jerusalem has lost the second round of his court battle with the diocese over the ownership of a church school in Nazareth. Last month an Israeli court upheld a magistrate’s ruling ordering Bishop Riah Abu al-Assal and his family to turn custody of the “Bishop Riah Educational Campus” in Nazareth over to the Diocese pending a final court decision.

In a statement filed on its website, the Diocese in Jerusalem said that shortly before his retirement in March 2007, Bishop Riah established a charitable trust staffed by members of his family and sought to transfer the assets and administration of the diocese’s Christ Church School in Nazareth over to the new “Bishop Riah Educational Campus.”

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The British government was also investigating the deal. That probe had gotten so far as to gain access to Swiss bank accounts. But then the investigation was shut down. According to British court documents, Saudi Arabia threatened to kill another fighter plane deal with BAE that was being negotiated at the time. The Saudis also threatened to end their close intelligence and diplomatic relationship with the British government.

The Saudi threat to call off intelligence cooperation was taken very seriously. As the former director of Britain’s Serious Fraud Office testified, the Saudi ambassador to the U.K. put it to him this way: “British lives on British streets were at risk.”

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is providing unlimited material for speeches and declarations by Israeli politicians. Some are useless, some are senseless and some are downright harmful.

Not that nuclear weapons in the hands of the regime in Tehran would not present a danger to Israel. Ahmedinijad is not Hitler, and Iran is not Nazi Germany, but the destructive power of nuclear weapons is such that even in the hands of a Third World country, they have the potential of causing immense damage. Talk is not going to avert this danger. Whatever needs to be done is best done without publicity. But the subject is irresistible to Israeli politicians. It is grist for their mills and serves internal political purposes.

First, the specter of a major war with Iran has been held up by our politicians as an imminent danger for the past two years, and has been used as an excuse not to do anything about the daily rocket attacks on Israeli civilians in the South. Why get bogged down in Gaza, they hint, when we are likely to be engaged in a major war in the North at any moment?

Second, the Iranian threat is presented as a good excuse for offering the Golan Heights to Syria. What is more important at this time than disrupting the alliance between Iran and Syria, and the Syrians might be tempted to move away from Iran in return for the Golan Heights, some of our politicians declare. Moving 30,000 Israelis from their homes seems to them a small price to pay for such an achievement. Even in the unlikely event of a severance of the present close ties between Iran and Syria were to occur, how it would avert the nuclear danger from Iran is left to speculation.

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Israel yesterday attempted to play down a warning from a senior government minister that an attack on Iran was “unavoidable” if Tehran continued to develop nuclear weapons. The transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, a key figure in Israel’s dialogue with the US on Iran’s nuclear programme, raised the prospect of a unilateral Israeli attack against Tehran on Friday, adding that international sanctions had been ineffective.

The threat, which is at odds with Israel’s support so far for an international campaign to curtail and, if necessary, confront Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, contributed to frenzied buying in the financial markets, where oil prices soared to a record $139, and sparked an international furore.

Yesterday, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that “all options must remain on the table”, adding that “tangible steps by the international community” were needed to “put pressure on the regime in Tehran”.

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An Israeli deputy prime minister on Friday warned that Iran would face attack if it pursues what he said was its nuclear weapons programme.

“If Iran continues its nuclear weapons programme, we will attack it,” said Shaul Mofaz, who is also transportation minister.

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Speaking to me after the event, Blair was patient, arguing that that “could not be what they intended.” He admitted that on issues such as the rights of women, things “will be difficult,” but he insisted that “there is a larger unity.” He has no intention of being distracted from his mission.

That mission, as usual, takes the form of a sophisticated intellectual argument and a third-way rejection of ideological extremes. As the only European politician who still seems to take Sept. 11 seriously, Blair is highly critical of “extremist and exclusionary” religion. He draws a stark global dividing line, not between left and right or north and south but between pluralists and totalitarians. His new foundation intends to support people who oppose extremism, especially among the young.

But Blair is also critical of an “aggressive secularization,” which, he told me, makes it easier to “forget a higher calling than the fulfillment of our own desires.” Religious faith, at its best, not only encourages idealism, it provides an explanation and foundation for human rights and dignity, “an inalienable principle, rising above relativism and expediency.” This does not “eliminate the painful compromises of political existence,” Blair recognizes. But it does mean that “not everything can be considered in a utilitarian way.” Blair defends a pluralism without relativism, a tolerance consistent with a belief in religious and moral truth — indeed, a tolerance that arises from within those convictions.

It could not have been easy for Blair to embrace this calling as “the rest of my life’s work.” In British politics, religious conviction is tolerated as a private vice — like the collection of rare Victorian pornography. It may be understandable, but why would one talk about it in public?

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In 1910, when Bethlehem was a town in a sleepy province of the Ottoman Empire, a local man built a magnificent house on the main road from Jerusalem to Hebron. Made from the region’s limestone””whose shades, from pale honey to dazzling white, give the Holy Land its distinctive palette””the house was built around courtyards and fountains in the Ottoman style; frescoes and mosaics graced its walls and ceilings. In the 1930s, the man’s family went bankrupt. The house was later used as a prison by the British, when they governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate; it then did service as a police academy and a school. But in 2000 the old house was converted into a hotel. Closed during the second intifadeh, the Jacir Palace InterContinental reopened its doors in 2005.

On the evening of May 21, hundreds of business leaders from the region and beyond flowed through the halls of the hotel, past banks of honeysuckle and jasmine, into the garden, where cooks grilled chicken on giant charcoal burners and served baba ghanoush, tabbouleh and baklava. Participants at a conference on investment opportunities in Palestine, they talked up the prospects of the local information-technology industry (whose products, which can be whizzed to markets electronically, are not subject to the whims of Israeli border guards) and bragged about the performance of the Palestine stock exchange. At the center of the crowd””trim, smiling and looking a lot more relaxed than he did a year ago, when he resigned as Britain’s Prime Minister after 10 years at the post””was Tony Blair, the special envoy to the Middle East of the U.S.-Russia-European Union-U.N. “Quartet” of powers.

On May 30 in New York, Blair, 55, formally unveils The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which, among other things, is dedicated to proving that collaboration among those of different religious faiths can help address some of the world’s most pressing social problems. A quick look around the crowd at the Jacir Palace, and you might think that Blair’s work was already done””here were Jews, Christians and Muslims working together to make life better for ordinary Palestinians. A more measured assessment would lead to a different, more depressing conclusion. The Jacir Palace is a few minutes’ walk from a checkpoint at the looming security wall that Israel built after the second intifadeh, to physically separate the Jewish state from the West Bank. In Bethlehem, a long-established Arab Christian community is shrinking in the face of growing Islamic militancy. Even the Church of the Nativity (carved up by the Orthodox, Catholic, Assyrian, Coptic and Armenian denominations, a symbol of the divisions within Christianity) has not been immune to the clash of faiths. In 2002 Palestinian militants took refuge there, and together with civilians inside the church, were besieged by Israeli soldiers for 39 days. Blair understands very well that the Palestine-Israel conflict is about land, about culture, about competing narratives of history””but that it is also about faith. “Muslims often say of extremists,” he says, “It’s really got nothing to do with religion. And I say to them, These people say that they’re doing it in the name of God, so we can’t say that it doesn’t matter. It does matter.”

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The International Atomic Energy Agency, in an unusually blunt and detailed report, said Monday that Iran’s suspected research into the development of nuclear weapons remains “a matter of serious concern” and continues to need “substantial explanations.”

The nine-page report accused the Iranians of a willful lack of cooperation, particularly in answering allegations that its nuclear program may be pointed less at energy generation than at military use.

Part of the agency’s case hinges on 18 documents listed in the report and presented to Iran that, according to Western intelligence agencies, indicate the Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design — activities that ordinarily would be associated with constructing nuclear weapons.

“There are certain parts of their nuclear program where the military seems to have played a role,” said one senior official close to the agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic constraints. He added, “We want to understand why.”

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Any moment now, the Iranian challenge will be added to the list of things too serious to be left to politicians.

“Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union,” Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has said. Factually, he is correct. They are much smaller in area than the Soviet Union was. That did not stop the Republican candidate, John McCain, from accusing him of “reckless judgment.” And Obama says: The minuscule size of these rogue countries makes easier the decision to talk with their leaders directly, because if the U.S. sat down with the USSR even at the height of the Cold War, why not Iran? And McCain says: That is a bogus equation. And he is right as well.

A fateful strategic issue – certainly for the State of Israel – became a plaything this week for the American election circus. The Iranian threat is now the Iranian debate: to threaten or talk, to attack or wait. On the one hand, it’s a fascinating discussion that clarifies the difference between the viewpoints and approaches of the two presidential candidates. On the other hand, it’s a barren discussion that underscores how disconnected the election campaign is from the reality determined in Tehran and Washington.

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