'The Church I attend here in the US is barely talking to the Church in which I was ordained.'

Helen Angove reports on the reaction in the United States to its arm of the Anglican church being suspended from representation for three years.

Apparently, the American Episcopalian Church has been “voted off the island”.

That’s not, of course, quite true. But, as I’m sure you know, the leaders of the Anglican Communion recently issued a communiqué over issues concerning “gay marriage” and the “out” Bishop of New Hampshire.

The communiqué asks the Northern American Episcopal Churches to withdraw their members from a key council, and many church goers here feel as if they have been voted off the island. In fact, the preacher at our church on Sunday used those very words, albeit tongue in cheek.

I’m still reeling too. The Church I attend here in the US is barely talking to the Church in which I was ordained. It feels very odd, given that the values of the church I attend here are extremely similar to those that I found at my Church of England theological college.

But however important it seems to me, for many Americans this is simply a non-issue. On the day the press release was published, I looked at both www.bbc.co.uk, and www.cnn.com. The BBC website had quite good coverage of the story, as one of its main headlines. But the story didn’t even make the front page of the CNN website, and I struggled to find any mention of it at all on television news bulletins.

The doings of the established church in England are simply not of a great deal of interest here, even if it concerns America - unless of course, it has something to do with the marriage of Charles and Camilla.

This lack of interest, of course, is because the Episcopal Church - the American Anglican Church - is a relatively small denomination here. I asked some of my non-Episcopalian friends what they thought about the whole thing. The attitudes I heard could be summed up as “So what? Why should we want to be part of some English Church anyway?”. Only they were a bit more polite about it than that.

Listening to Episcopalians, on the other hand, I made another discovery. They didn’t seem to see that this is the action of the worldwide Anglican Communion. They appeared to think that the request to leave the Council came directly from the mouth of the Church of England, and was being initiated and promoted by the Church of England. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be other countries by whom the issue is being promoted with far more zeal.

This is partly because Rowan Williams is the figurehead for all this - and he, of course, is an archbishop in England. And historically, the Anglican Communion has tended to look for leadership to the Church of England. But I have a suspicion that it’s also because Americans love the image they have of the English as conservative and anti-progress - and all this fits that image so nicely.

And then there’s another cultural problem. The wording of the report is so terribly careful and understated. This just doesn’t work for the American psyche - I think Americans are generally more direct and confrontational about things. I read the report, and read something that I think is desperate to be conciliatory to all parties (rightly or wrongly!). My friends read it, and because it doesn’t come out in favour of their position, they read it as being against.

I have no idea whether this will result in a Church split or not. But there are so many cultural misunderstandings here, that I am not hopeful.

The moral of the story? Sharing a language is not enough to prevent translation problems. More talking and more listening, at an earlier stage, might have headed off this unpleasant crisis.

Anglican priest from the UK, who moved to California in July 2003.

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