The Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, a leading Evangelical Anglican bishop in the Church of England has said that the tactics of a new factional network within Anglicanism amount to "bullying".
Speaking on the BBC's World at One news programme, the Bishop of Durham, the fourth most senior post in the Church of England, also a noted New Testament scholar, said that the action taken by leaders of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) were also "deeply offensive".
Dr Wright, a key figure for conservative evangelicals inside and outside Anglicanism, said that GADCON was "taking a global sledgehammer to crack the American nut" in setting up the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA) - variously described as a breakaway, an alternative and a renewal movement.
The US reference was to the ordination of openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. (Listen to the interview here--and ponder, will GAFCON perhaps help English bishops better understand cross-boundary meddling in North American?)
Dr Wright had earlier written a more friendly article on the GAFCON conference for the evangelical group Fulcrum, which seeks to harmonize different strands of the movement - itself sometimes deeply divided.
"I spend 90 to 100 hours a week doing the work of the gospel in my diocese," said Bishop Wright. "To be told that I now need to be authorized ... by a group of primates somewhere else who come in and tell me which doctrines I should sign up to is not only ridiculous, it is deeply offensive."
He added: "The idea that they have a monopoly on biblical truth simply won't do. We must stand up to this. It is a kind of bullying."
From Ekklesia
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