Conservatives say not quitting Anglican Communion

By Ari Rabinovitch

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Conservative Anglican leaders vowed on Sunday to stay in the worldwide Anglican Communion but form a council of bishops to provide an alternative to churches they say are preaching a "false gospel" of sexual immorality.

The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) said member churches would continue sponsoring breakaway conservative parishes in liberal western member countries and called for a separate conservative province in North America.

It also said in a final declaration that Anglicanism -- the third largest group of Christians after Roman Catholics and Orthodox -- was not "determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury", Rowan Williams.

"We cherish our Anglican heritage and the Anglican Communion and have no intention of departing from it," it said after a week of talks in Jerusalem among 1,148 participants, including 291 bishops, who say they represent 35 million Anglicans.

"We grieve for the spiritual decline in the most economically developed nations, where the forces of militant secularism and pluralism are eating away the fabric of society and churches are compromised and enfeebled in their witness," GAFCON said in a final statement.

Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, a driving force behind GAFCON who earlier branded Williams an apostate, rejected the idea that they were forming "a church within a church".

"We are part of the worldwide church called the Anglican Communion," Akinola said at a news conference.

The conservatives, a coalition mainly of African Anglican churches and orthodox U.S. Episcopalians, has hinted it might break from the 77 million-strong Communion since the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003.