Three members of the House of Bishops have been invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to address an extra-curricular session of the meeting of Anglican primates in Tanzania.

The Rt. Rev. C. Christopher Epting, Presiding Bishop’s deputy for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations and retired Bishop of Iowa, will join the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh and moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, and the Rt. Rev. D. Bruce McPherson, Bishop of Western Louisiana and president of the Presiding Bishop’s Council of Advice. They will speak to the state of The Episcopal Church, according to sources in London who spoke with a reporter for The Living Church.

The three bishops will join Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Archbishop Williams, Archbishop of York John Sentamu, and the 36 other primates at a hotel near Dar-es-Salaam for sessions on Feb. 14.

The session will not be part of the primates’ meeting itself, a spokesman for the Anglican Consultative Council noted. The primates’ meeting will go into recess in order to hear the presentations from the three bishops, and reconvene at the close of the hearing. The American bishops are guests of Archbishop Williams and not of the collegial gathering, the spokesman said.

In their September communiqué following the meeting of the Global South coalition of primates in Kigali, Rwanda, the conservative coalition of church leaders asked Archbishop Williams to invite “another bishop” selected by American traditionalists to “be present at the meeting so that we might listen to their voices during our deliberations.”

In his Dec. 18 Advent letter to the primates, Archbishop Williams responded stating that “given the acute dissension in the Episcopal Church,” he was “proposing to invite two or three other contributors from that province for a session to take place before the rest of our formal business, in which the situation [within The Episcopal Church] may be reviewed.”

“The Episcopal Church is not in any way a monochrome body,” Archbishop Williams observed, “and we need to be aware of the full range of conviction within it.”

In a Jan. 29 pastoral letter to the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Bishop Duncan noted he would be “accompanied by one non-Network Windsor Bishop” to Tanzania. The Presiding Bishop would also “be accompanied by one progressive bishop.”

The probable outcome of the encounter with the primates was uncertain, Bishop Duncan noted, as the “emerging structures beyond the level of the diocese can only be conjectured at.” However, “all of this is revolutionary in the life of the Episcopal Church and of the Anglican Communion.”

(The Rev.) George Conger

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