At the weekend, Anglicans in Kenya and Uganda, in a protest against the consecration of the Rt Revd Gene Robinson, who lives with a homosexual partner, refused $125,000 from ECUSA.

The patron of the new Anglican Network fund is the Most Revd Peter Akinola, who was among the first to break communion with ECUSA over the consecration of Bishop Robinson.

Three conservative Primates and one former Primate are trustees of the fund: Archbishops Yong Ping Chung, Henry Orombi, Drexel Gomez, and David Gitari.

The fund has been started in partnership with Geneva Global, an established development agency, which has promised to match ARD’s first $2-million target with another $0.5 million. The emphasis will be on funding "grass-roots organisations . . . run by local leaders working for local wages".

The rejected grants came from the United Thank Offering (UTO), set up and administered by women in ECUSA. In 2004, it approved grants totalling more than $2.5 million. More than $400,000 of this was earmarked for Africa.

The UTO had approved a grant of $40,000 for a sustainability project in Nairobi; $35,000 for a health clinic in the diocese of Kajiado, also in Kenya; $30,000 for a new girls’ hostel at Ndejje University, in Luweero diocese in Uganda; and $20,000 for a school serving orphaned girls in the diocese of West Buganda. All four grants have been declined.

A statement last week from the Archbishop of Uganda, the Most Revd Henry Orombi, said that his province had asked the UTO not to send any more funds. Archbishop Orombi also called on ECUSA not to send any more aid from the ERD, and to halt multi-year grants. "The Church of Uganda did gratefully receive ERD grants in 2001, 2002 and 2003 — prior to the consecration as bishop of a man in an actively homosexual relationship."

A spokesman for the United Thank Offering, based at the Episcopalian headquarters in New York, said on Tuesday that UTO were not members of ECUSA’s executive council, and had asked Uganda and Kenya to reconsider.

On Sunday, the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA, the Most Revd Frank Griswold, said: "Sexuality . . . appears to have trumped the Creeds in determining the fundamentals of our faith." He was preaching in St John’s Cathedral, Spokane, during the meeting of the US House of Bishops. He went on to ask if it was not time "to meet our Anglican others in a stance of availability to realities other than our own".

He said that, although the American way was often "confident self-assertion" , life in the Anglican Communion involved "an encounter with otherness". There should be a "genuine availability to the other, and a willingness to receive what is proffered, even if it comes clothed not in purple and fine linen, but in anger". What "really matters is not who wins or loses, but faithfulness".

In The Sunday Telegraph, the Archbishop of Kaduna, in Nigeria, the Most Revd Josiah Idowu-Fearon, was reported as saying that ECUSA must apologise for Bishop Robinson’s consecration, and that he believed ECUSA would retract the appointment.

Lambeth Palace last week said that any meetings held by the Archbishop of Canterbury "in relation to the current concerns in the Anglican Communion" remained private. The Archbishop had supported the use of the term "network" for those dissenting but wishing to remain within ECUSA’s structures, but "no proposals as to [the network’s] potential form, structure or outworking were advanced."

END