Fr. Bill Carroll, at Anglican Resistance, has posted a strong objection to the exclusion of Gene Robinson and Martyn Minns from the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Fr. Carroll’s title, “I would not go to Lambeth: Would you?” indicates the substance. Here’s just the first paragraph.

Episcopal Cafe links here to a Washington Post article that indicates that neither Gene Robinson nor Martyn Minns will be invited to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. If I were a bishop of the Episcopal Church, I would not go, until all my brothers and sisters were invited. And I would write the people of my diocese, the Presiding Bishop, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, politely explaining my absence. I don’t see it as a boycott per se, so much as a temporary suspension of any participation in the life of the Anglican Communion, which has clearly become toxic and which doesn’t want the Episcopal Church to participate as we are. Katharine Grieb of Virginia Seminary suggested as much at the House of Bishops, and it is time to consider her idea carefully. I would devote myself to the human and divine relationships that form the fabric of real communion, and stop worrying about large, expensive meetings of bishops. There is no equivalence between Gene Robinson, a duly elected bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Martyn Minns, part of a schismatic attempt to break our fellowship apart and realign (i.e. destroy) Anglicanism into a fundamentalist shadow of its true self.

I must say that I agree. Later in in the piece, Fr. Carroll takes the Archbishop of Canterbury to task for lack of leadership in this matter and others. Those who know the Archbishop’s mind better than I may agree here too, but I am remembering something the ABC said in a recent interview:

Now, some parts of the [Anglican] Communion would be happy if we could be just a federation of loosely connected local bodies. I’m not happy with that. We could be more than that. We should be more than that. We should be living out of each other’s life and resources and vision and be more closely connected.

One doesn’t want to disagree with this statement–it seems almost unchristian to do so. But having read the proposed Anglican covenant and having observed the ABC’s apparent unwillingness to criticize the outrageous behavior of the global south Primates towards The Episcopal Church, I’m frankly suspicious of the Archbishop’s motives.

The rest of Fr. Carroll’s eloquent protest may be found here.