[...]

Is this it?

Two of my most respected colleagues, Jonathan Wynne-Jones on the Telegraph and Stephen Bates on the Guardian believe it is.

Jonathan writes: 'When I saw Rowan Williams on Saturday, he said that he was hopeful that they would continue to hold the line agreed by the Communion that practising homosexuals should not be consecrated as bishops. He had been out to the General Convention, which is being held in Anaheim, California, and had come back reasonably optimistic. In deciding to ignore the pleas for this policy to be upheld, the Americans have clearly shaken him warmly by the hand before stabbing him in the front. They have delivered a fatal blow to his hopes for unity and now there can be no more fudging the issue.'

Stephen says: 'There have been many predictions of dawning schism in the worldwide Anglican communion over the last six years – as the Guardian's former religious affairs correspondent I wrote some of them myself – but the decision of the US Episcopal church to affirm its belief that gays, lesbians and transgendered folk are eligible to be considered for ordination may indeed mark a watershed.'

Arguably, this is a schism that's been waiting to happen for 400 years. A denomination or communion founded on divorce, both of a king and of a church, is hardly one that's predicated for infinite unity. The right for the freedom not to be bound by archaic and arcane doctrine tradition was what the reformers fought for, and is what liberals in TEC would argue is their right today.

The latest is that bishops in the US have 'called for resources' for same-sex blessings.

Maybe this isn't a train crash at all.

Maybe it is just an inevitable decoupling, the 'walking apart' described prophetically in Windsor.

In that event, perhaps, it is to be welcomed. The parties can cite irreconcilable breakdown. Reconciliation has been tried, and failed.

All that will remain is to divide up the assets.

Then division will be absolute.

What we have to remember, in all the pain, recriminations and self-righteous accusations that will undoubtedly follow, is that in spite of the rhetoric of the train crash used so powerfully by the Bishop of Durham in The Times, there are no dead bodies.

[...]

[Note: See the video on Gledhill's page for an emotional and moving reflection, by +Love, on the present state of things and what may likely follow.]