At the altar of a Virginia church, a Nigerian canon lawyer clad in a white-powdered wig stood and read an edict relating the election of the Rev. Martyn Minns.

At the altar of a Virginia church, a Nigerian canon lawyer clad in a white-powdered wig stood and read an edict relating the election of the Rev. Martyn Minns, a conservative American priest, as a bishop of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. Thereupon Minns processed through the nave, knelt before the Nigerian church's primate, Archbishop Peter Akinola, and amidst joyous hymns was consecrated. His installation marks a formal schism in the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has for four years been riven by the Episcopal Church USA's election of an openly gay bishop for its New Hampshire diocese. Altogether about 30 parishes, including historic Truro Parish (where George Washington served in the vestry), are now affiliated with Rt. Rev. Minns's bishopric, known as the Convocation of Anglicans in North America. Organizationally, CANA is an overseas mission of the Nigerian church, marking a strange reversal of colonial fate: Europe once sent Christian missionaries to Africa, but now the traffic flows the other way. The Episcopal Church has bristled at the intrusion--its presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, complained to Akinola that he transgressed diocesan borders and thus "violate[d] the ancient customs of the church." In his response, Akinola offered no apologies, thinking it sufficient to note the irony of the American church's leader so belatedly seeing value in "ancient customs."