By Alfred Wasike

The Church of Uganda is to boycott the Lambeth Conference 2008 if bishops supporting homosexuality are invited, Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi announced yesterday.

“We have decided that if the American bishops are invited, the bishops of the Church of Uganda are not going,” Orombi told The New Vision at his Namirembe residence.

The archbishop made the news last February when he refused the Holy Communion during an Anglican primates’ summit in Tanzania.

“We took a position last December and we want to affirm that. We are not going to ride on the wings of the Americans. As members of this Communion, we have the right to uphold what we feel is the right thing.”

The Lambeth Conference is the meeting of the archbishops and bishops of the Anglican Communion worldwide. The conference is held every 10 years and will take place at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, from July 16 to August 4.

Orombi was responding to an announcement that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, had invited all but a “small number of bishops”.

Among those not invited were bishops Gene Robinson of New Hampshire; Nolbert Kunonga of Harare, Zimbabwe, and Martyn Minns of the Church of Nigeria-founded Convocation of Anglicans in North America.

“All the American bishops who approved and have continued to support the consecration as bishop of a man living in a homosexual relationship have been invited,” Orombi said.

He referred to a decision taken on December 9, 2006 by the Ugandan bishops. “We will definitely not attend any Lambeth Conference to which the violators of the Lambeth Resolution are also invited as participants or observers,” the statement read.

The Lambeth Resolution rejects ‘homosexual practice as incompatible with the scripture’. It also ‘cannot advise the legitimising or blessing of same-sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions.’

Orombi is the second Anglican primate who has indicated that he may not attend the conference.

Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola last week said the issue of homosexuality should be resolved before the conference.

He further announced that excluding Martyn Minns would be viewed as “withholding an invitation to the entire House of Bishops of the Church of Nigeria”.

For her part, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, in a message to the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops, urged a “calm approach” to the announcement of the invitations.

“It is possible that aspects of this matter may change in the next 14 months, and the House of Bishops’ September meeting offers us a forum for further discussion,” she wrote on May 22.