The Archbishop of Canterbury has hit out at traditionalists who are planting a ‘missionary’ bishop in the UK after last week’s historic vote by Scottish Anglicans to approve gay marriage

The Archbishop of Canterbury has hit out at traditionalists who are planting a ‘missionary’ bishop in the UK after last week’s historic vote by Scottish Anglicans to approve gay marriage.

The rebuke from Justin Welby is his latest attempt to avert a damaging permanent split in the worldwide Anglican Communion over homosexuality.

As this newspaper revealed earlier this year, conservative archbishops, led by the Archbishop of Nigeria, Nicholas Okoh, are to consecrate Canon Andy Lines at a meeting in America this month after warning that Western churches are abandoning biblical teaching on the issue.

These archbishops say the new missionary bishop would support disaffected Anglicans who quit in protest at the Scottish Episcopal Church’s decision on Thursday to become the first Anglican body in the UK to allow same-sex marriage in its churches.

But Canon Lines, a former British Army tank commander and father-of-three from Surrey, will also minister to traditionalist parishes that break away from the Church of England.

Now, in a confidential letter to fellow Anglican leaders, seen by The Mail on Sunday, Archbishop Welby has warned the African archbishops against creating ‘disturbance and discords’ by intervening in Britain. He accused them bluntly of a ‘cross-border’ intervention’ that would ‘carry no weight in the Church of England’.

Welby said in his letter to Anglican leaders across the 80 million-strong worldwide Communion that there was no need for a missionary bishop in the Church of England because worshippers could already express a range of views.

He said there had been strong opposition to ‘cross-border interventions’ for centuries, and quoted the ‘uncompromising’ verdict of the early Church’s First Council of Nicea in 325 AD, which condemned the ‘great disturbances and discords that occur’ when bishops ministered in this way.

Canon Lines’s presence in the UK without Welby’s approval could be seen as provocative. But Lines’s backers complain that the Archbishop failed to rebuke the Scottish Episcopalians for permitting gay marriage, even though it is out of step with Church of England official policy.

As this newspaper revealed earlier this year, conservative archbishops, led by the Archbishop of Nigeria, Nicholas Okoh, are to consecrate Canon Andy Lines at a meeting in America this mont

The former Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, a prominent traditionalist who is attending the meeting in Chicago where Canon Lines is to be consecrated, said: ‘The Scottish Episcopal Church has done something that will cause many people to exercise their right of conscience and not remain in it. Who is going to look after them?

‘The question is not just about territory. It is also about faith.’