By Richard Komakech
ARCHBISHOP Henry Luke Orombi has said he is willing to listen to views on the homosexuality debate in the Anglican Church.

The Ugandan prelate has been an unsympathetic critic of homosexuality since taking over as Archbishop last year.

He likened the views of both proponents and opponents of homosexuality to views of any other people and said the church could only find a solution by listening to them.

“I proclaim the good news, and the good news has power to change,” Orombi was quoted by the Anglican Communion News service.

Orombi and three other Archbishops, Rowan Williams of Cantebury, Drexel Gomez (West Indies) and Peter Carnley (Australia) delivered the prelates communiqué on the final day of the prelates meeting at Newry in Northern Ireland.

The meeting is a regular summit for senior archbishops and bishops of the 38 Anglican provinces.

In their statement, the bishops called on the US and Canadian churches to “voluntarily withdraw their members from the Anglican Consultative Council for the period leading up to the next Lambeth Conference”, an international Anglican gathering due to be held in 2008.

Archbishop Williams said the church still faced a possibility of division but that could be resolved if it could realise that it made mistakes and accept responsibility for doing so.

“We still face the possibility of division. That’s not going to go away. Any lasting solution, I think, will require people to say somewhere along the line, ‘Yes, we were wrong’,” he said.
Ends