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On Saturday, November 12, Frank Lyons, the conservative Anglican bishop of Bolivia, performed four ordinations heard round the world.

In front of 2,400 conservative church leaders at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Lyons ordained three deacons and one priest—all who will minister in liberal dioceses of the Episcopal Church. In 2003, the 2.3 million-member denomination's top leaders endorsed V. Gene Robinson, an active homosexual, as bishop of New Hampshire. That act galvanized conservative opposition to the church's leftward march. About 22 of 38 primates (as global Anglicanism's leading bishops are called) oppose Robinson's consecration, setting in motion a clash of historic proportions among the world's 77 million Anglicans.

After the ordinations, Lyons told Christianity Today, "The Anglican Communion is broken." He said he and his archbishop in South America (Gregory Venables, Southern Cone) do not recognize the Episcopal Church as a legitimate Anglican body. "As far as I'm concerned, this is one great missionary territory up here for anybody." He said his diocese now has oversight for 18 congregations and 30 clergy within the United States. In normal times, a bishop would never assert that kind of direct control over churches outside his own diocese.

There may be as many as 200 Anglican/Episcopal congregations receiving oversight from non-U.S. bishops or archbishops, mostly from the Global South—Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.

In addition to Bolivia, oversight is coming from conservative leaders in Chile, Southeast Asia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya. One leader estimated that conservative Anglicans are planting a new congregation in the United States or giving safe harbor to an existing one at a rate of about one every three weeks.

This controversial trend started in 2000 with the creation of the Anglican Mission in America (AMIA), which has 85 congregations under oversight from Africa or Southeast Asia. AMIA's "outside strategy" has been to establish new, conservative Anglican churches accountable to Anglican leaders outside the Episcopal Church.

By contrast, the Anglican Communion Network has worked the "inside strategy." It represents 10 conservative dioceses and many individual congregations, all advocating for reform using the political process inside the church.

But what happened at Pittsburgh's Hope and a Future conference ups the ante considerably. In a significant departure, the network openly brokered new relationships between conservative non-U.S. bishops and startup American congregations.

Robert Duncan, head of the network and the Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh, embodies this new merger of inside and outside strategies. During an interview with CT, Duncan said, "My permission to Anglican bishops to function in my diocese and ordain priests who are under them is totally licit. I have always administered the canons faithfully and creatively. What has happened on the other side is they have become canonical fundamentalists." Critics have called such actions by the network "schismatic."

Privately, conservative Episcopalians admit that they have argued among themselves and waffled for years as liberals have step-by-step moved the national church to the left. But the Robinson consecration has functioned as a tripwire. Duncan told CT that conservatives have set aside for now disputes over the Episcopal prayer book, the ordination of women, and even the use of contemporary praise music.

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January 2006, Vol. 50, No. 1