The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has issued a thoughtful and (to my reading) poignant response to the recent decisions by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States.Here is a crucial paragraph:

18. To accept without challenge the priority of local and pastoral factors in the case either of sexuality or of sacramental practice would be to abandon the possibility of a global consensus among the Anglican churches such as would continue to make sense of the shape and content of most of our ecumenical activity. It would be to re-conceive the Anglican Communion as essentially a loose federation of local bodies with a cultural history in common, rather than a theologically coherent ‘community of Christian communities’.

The rest is here.