What took place in February was the meeting in Tanzania of the Primates, the heads of the 38 Provinces of the Anglican Communion. Their chief concern was TEC, which by the actions of its 2003 General Convention had "torn the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level."

The Windsor Report, which was designed to deal with the resulting crisis, had asked for certain assurances concerning these actions. The 2006 General Convention gave assurances, but the Primates deemed these still ambiguous. They therefore asked that the TEC House of Bishops make explicit its position on the points in question, specifically that it would not allow the consecration of additional homosexual bishops or further blessings of same-sex unions.

They asked, moreover, that this be done by September 30. They made further requests of TEC. The most notable of these was that it allow the establishment of a Pastoral Council, to which congregations and dioceses unable to accept the actions of the 2003 General Convention could adhere without being under the direct jurisdiction of TEC. They also requested that TEC suspend its lawsuits against congregations which had left it for other jurisdictions.

Bishop Jefferts Schori, the TEC Presiding Bishop and Primate, agreed to the communique containing the requests of the Primates. Despite this, the response of TEC to the latter two requests was immediate and negative. Its House of Bishops, meeting in mid-March just three weeks later, rejected the Pastoral Council out of hand. (At the same time they invited the Archbishop of Canterbury to attend their next meeting, in mid-September.)

And the TEC Chancellor declared that the Primates' request for the suspension of lawsuits against its dissident congregations had no legal force, and thus would not be honored. Indeed, its legal actions against dissident congregations have if anything intensified. Regarding the explicit assurances sought by the Primates in relation to the sexuality issue, the House of Bishops' response cannot be known finally until after its mid-September meeting.

And the response of the Primates and others to that response will come only thereafter. Three developments in the meantime provide some indications, however. To these, which bring the role of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, especially into question, we need now to turn.

Archbishop Rowan himself instigated the first of the three developments: his issuance on May 22 of invitations to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Consisting heretofore of all the bishops of the Anglican Communion, it has met every ten years under Canterbury's auspices for the last century and a half. But this time he undertook to make some changes. To begin with, he sent out the invitations more than a year ahead of time-the Conference will take place in late July and early August-which is sooner than usual. And he sent them not to provinces as such but to individual bishops.

And, further, he did not include every bishop. Most prominent among his omissions was Gene Robinson, the practicing homosexual Bishop of New Hampshire whose consecration in 2003 precipitated the current crisis. But as if to offset this, he omitted also the bishops of the Anglican Mission in America, despite their membership in the Province of Rwanda, and Martyn Minns, the former rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, who was consecrated in Nigeria last August to be the Bishop for the Nigerian-sponsored Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA).

Further, he included those American bishops who had been Robinson's consecrators. As a result, the Nigerian and Rwandan Provinces, together with the Ugandan, have said that should the omissions of their bishops and the inclusion of Robinson's consecrators be maintained, their Provinces, whose membership makes up the larger part of the Anglican Communion, will not attend Lambeth. Conceivably there may still be changes. For in issuing his invitations Archbishop Rowan specified that he retained the right to add to and subtract from them. But whether and how he will use this right remains very much in question.

The second development was the issuance on July 21 of a statement by the meeting in London of the Global South Steering Committee, consisting of the Primates of Nigeria, Southeast Asia, Egypt, Rwanda, the West Indies, Central Africa, and the Southern Cone (Latin America). Like previous Global South pronouncements this was highly critical of TEC, calling on it to adhere to the process set forth in the Windsor Report as a way through the post-2003 crisis, and to meet the requirements that the Primates as a whole had placed upon it in Tanzania in February.

The statement was unprecedented, however, in its explicit criticism of Archbishop Rowan. This criticism was directed in part against his invitation list to the Lambeth Conference, as discussed above. But it was directed also against the design changes which under his auspices had been set for the 2008 Conference.

These tended to reduce it to informal discussions among the attending bishops, without consideration of resolutions as in the past. (Lambeth 1.10, adopted at the 1998 Conference as the standard of Anglican teaching on sexuality, is a notable example of such.) These Primates said that for them the Conference had become "difficult to see either as an instrument of unity or communion."

Their criticism was directed similarly against Archbishop Rowan's decision to accept the invitation of the TEC House of Bishops to their mid-September meeting. For they held that it encroached on the right of the Primates themselves to determine whether the bishops of TEC had complied with the Tanzania requirements. For all these reasons they called urgently for another Primates' Meeting, to be held as soon as possible after September.

Thirdly and finally, at the end of July the Annual Council of the Anglican Communion Network, with which All Saints' is affiliated, met in Texas. It stopped short of removing the clause in its charter committing it to operate within the TEC canons and constitution. But strengthened its ties with its Common Cause partners, namely Anglican bodies that have departed from TEC not just recently, as with CANA and AMiA, but some time ago as well. And it took a decidedly dim view of its prospects for remaining in TEC. Bishop Duncan, as Moderator, in his opening address considered TEC "lost" as a province of the Anglican Communion. And in response to questions he spoke of Archbishop Rowan as having, through his failures, lost his office and likewise the Lambeth Conference as instruments of unity in the Anglican Communion. The Network bishops still plan to attend the House of Bishops meeting in mid-September but with scant hope of success.

From these three developments it is evident that TEC has in no way softened its rejection of two of the requests made of it by the Primates' Meeting in February, namely the acceptance of a Pastoral Council and suspension of lawsuits. In fact on June 14 the TEC Executive Council reaffirmed the rejection of the Pastoral Council. And this being so, the TEC House of Bishops seems most unlikely to clarify its position on consecration of homosexual bishops and blessing of same-sex unions in the way desired by the February meeting. At the same time the Global South Primates, and also the Anglican Communion Network, are continuing to insist that these requests be complied with. And there seems little chance that either side will blink in direct the confrontation now in prospect.

It is evident, further, that there has been a change, by the Network as also the Global South, in their assessment of the role played by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although he had given little support to "orthodoxy versus revisionism" in the unfolding crisis, there was still the hope on their side that he was only biding his time, that at the decisive moment he would yet act. Evidently this hope has now been given up; hence the direct criticism of him on the part of the Network and the Global South.

And they may have justification for giving up on him. Theoretically, when he visits the House of Bishops in mid-September he could still insist that they conform to the Primates' requests, or else face withdrawal of their invitations to Lambeth. But a change of course of this magnitude, coming only at this late stage, by virtue of its abruptness appears unlikely and quite possibly ineffective anyway. If he ever contemplated such a move, he seems to have waited too long to make it. So now, humanly speaking, a division in the Anglican Communion seems virtually inevitable, with Archbishop Rowan himself bearing a share of the responsibility.

Perhaps I will be permitted a personal assessment of him, implicating no one but myself. I knew him somewhat in the latter 1980s when I was in Oxford and he was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity for the University. (This came about not through my eminence but through my friendship with a family member.) And I have heard him lecture and have spoken with him subsequently. He is academic brilliance is undeniable, but his experience of the world is limited.

To be sure, he went from Oxford to be Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales (he takes his Welsh origin seriously). But he was never a parish rector. Thus he may lack awareness of the need for and also the possibility of essentially political action even in the Church. He cited his prerogative of issuing invitations to the Lambeth Conference, but no others, when he spoke to the students and faculty of Wycliffe Hall in Oxford in November 2003, just after Gene Robinson's consecration, in my hearing. And he perhaps genuinely believes that he has few other powers.

In this view he may have been abetted, however, by the bureaucracy of Lambeth Palace and especially of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Anglican Communion Office, which in addition their institutional inertia could be reluctant to oppose TEC on account of its provision of the larger part of their financing.

Thus the Anglican Communion seems indeed to be headed for division. To be sure, the Anglican Covenant was presented in draft form to the Primates Meeting in February, and has been endorsed by the General Synod of the Church of England, as a means of setting parameters for decision-making in the Communion.

And it may yet afford cohesion among Provinces other than TEC. But it seems unlikely to be adopted in a form acceptable to both the Global South and TEC, and so to avoid a separation of TEC from the Communion. Necessarily this outcome has implications, perhaps dire ones, for congregations such as ours here at All Saints'.

To be sure, God may always surprise us, albeit in ways that we might not choose. Whatever happens, though, we will still have His word as set forth in Holy Scripture, together with the sacraments instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ. And these in the end may be what we really need.

---The Rev. Ted Lewis is Resident Theologian at All Saints' Church, Chevy Chase, Maryland in the Diocese of Washington He can be reached at: theodorell@aol.com