Is the Anglican Communion scapegoating – for the sake of its purity and unity?

Snow has fallen on the South Pennines for only the second time this winter. At first the snow makes everything seem pure, clean, undefiled. But it doesn’t last, of course, because life goes on. After I stepped out onto the smooth white surface of the garden, to put titbits on to the wall, a succession of welcome visitors appeared – great tits, blue tits, robins, blackbirds, collared doves, and eventually the grey squirrel who kept all the smaller creatures at a distance.

The world I hold in my thoughts and prayers each day seems remoter now - the world of my brothers and sisters in the Anglican Communion, for example. For over twenty years I have been following the Anglican Cycle of Prayer, in order to bring closer to me millions of people in their awe-inspiring diversity. “The Church is held together by its shared prayer”, writes the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in the Cycle's foreword, “We should be faithful in prayer for each other.”

But it seems, in reality, that fewer and fewer people are striving to hold the Communion together. Dr Williams, to be sure, is still one of those. I would like to support him in this. But at what price? Putting out into the cold a minority group already persecuted for centuries? People like me, who have entered into a same-sex civil partnership. If the Anglican Communion does scapegoat us, it gives moral justification to the continuing insults, the harassments, the denial of civil rights, the rejections, the ostracisations, the bullyings, the lynchings, the beatings, the hangings and the beheadings around the world.

That is too much of a price to pay for purity and unity. One person I know has already paid a big enough price, on a cross, and he innocent and undefiled. One person is enough. No more.