Is there a big schism brewing in the Anglican Communion?
Yep. There is a split between conservative Anglicans (a broad category that could include anything from Anglo-Catholic to hardcore Calvinists and everything in between, even happy clappy evangelical types) and the liberal Anglicans (again could be anything from Affirming Catholics to broad churchmanship to Open Evangelical). The most recent point of division has been over the church’s response to homosexual persons. Should their same-sex attraction be affirmed by the church as a positive aspect of who they are?
There are provinces (member churches of the Anglican Communion) that tend to be more liberal (the US Episcopal Church for example) and those that tend to be more conservative (the Anglican Church in Rwanda). In recent years, conservatives in America and Canada begged for Anglican churches in Africa, South America and Asia to essentially rescue them. Parishes and in some cases entire dioceses voted to withdraw from the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church in Canada and submit to traditional bishops in other parts of the world.
Church authorities in the US and Canada accused the overseas provinces of interfering in their national churches, and the overseas provinces accused the US and Canadians of infidelity and heresy. Both sides appealed to the larger Anglican Communion to restore order, but the Communion has been paralyzed.
Meanwhile, the Anglican parishes and dioceses in North America that had come under the oversight of the foreign Anglican churches were organized into a new Anglican church, the ACNA that is in direct competition with the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada. The ACNA is not part of the Anglican Communion; however, it is in communion with the conservative provinces. Meanwhile, many of the conservative provinces have declared themselves in impaired communion with Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.
The conservatives have created their own organization, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, which in many ways functions as an alternative to the Anglican Communion.
