LONDON — In the end, the 2008 Lambeth Conference will probably be remembered most for the bishop who was not in attendance but who nonetheless threatened to break apart the world’s third-largest church. The once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops and archbishops, which ended Sunday, was dominated by disputes concerning V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican church, who was consecrated five years ago in New Hampshire. In a news conference Sunday, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, urged bishops to halt further consecrations of gay bishops, pointing a finger specifically at the United States. He said that certain dioceses in the American church continue ‘to put our relations as a communion under strain, and some problems won’t be resolved while those practices continue.’ Williams also pushed for the creation of a covenant, a doctrinal document of shared beliefs to be signed by each of the 38 self-governing Anglican provinces, including the Episcopal Church in the United States, which has about 2.3 million members. For all the attention he generated, Robinson did not attend the 20-day conference. Williams withheld his invitation in […]