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|  | Anglican bishops in Jerusalem, last week Photo: Reuters
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Conservatives say not quitting Anglican Communion
Conservative Anglican leaders end rebel summit in Jerusalem without formally breaking away from global Communion which they say includes churches preaching 'false gospel' of immoral sexual behavior
Reuters
Conservative Anglican leaders ended a rebel summit on Sunday without formally breaking away from a global Anglican Communion which they said included churches preaching a "false gospel" of immoral sexual behavior.
"We cherish our Anglican heritage and the Anglican Communion and have no intention of departing from it," said a statement by the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which met over the past week in Jerusalem.
But GAFCON said in a statement summing up the meeting that it was launching a "fellowship" and encouraging GAFCON Primates to form a new council of church leaders that would address the "spiritual decline" in the most economically developed nations.
Hundreds of conservative bishops and clergy, many of them from developing countries, attended the convention amid divisions in the 77-million-strong Communion over issues such as homosexuality and biblical authority.
GAFCON met a month before the Lambent conference, the once-in-a-decade Anglican summit hosted by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams that agrees on guidelines for member churches.
Conservative bishops from Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya have said they will boycott the Lambent Conference.
In its statement, GAFCON accused churches in the West of proclaiming a "a false gospel (that) undermines the authority of God's Word" and promotes a "variety of sexual preferences and immoral behavior", including same-sex marriages.
But it said the fellowship would continue to acknowledge "the nature of Canterbury as an historic see".
The conservatives, who claim to represent 35 million Anglicans, had been hinting at a split since Anglicanism's first openly gay bishop was consecrated in the United States in 2003.
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