another appointed by him) until such time as the Primates' meeting and the other instruments of unity of the Communion are enabled to consider our predicament and offer us help and protection. We cannot believe that because we are in a minority in this church we can be required to receive and endorse, in the person of the Presiding Bishop, a ministry which we have heretofore consistently, courteously and legitimately refused, and which is neither legitimate nor welcome in the greater part of the Communion. We can live with variant practices and mutual respect on the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion Network. Why is this denied us in The Episcopal Church? We are grateful to Archbishop Rowan Williams for his recent reminder to the church that ...(as has often been forgotten) the Lambeth Conference did resolve that for the time being those churches that did ordain women as priests and bishops and those that did not had an equal place within the Anglican spectrum. The Anglican concept of an open process of reception holds that the verdict is still out on this one, until the whole Catholic church comes to a consensus, on one side or the other of this contentious issue. Since the introduction of the ordination of women to the priesthood in The Episcopal Church (first illegally and then legally after the 1976 General Convention), the Diocese of Fort Worth has declared its opposition to this innovation. We then opposed the first ordination of a woman to the episcopate in 1989, in the same way and on the same grounds as a matter of conviction and conscience. With the election of the first female Presiding Bishop in The Episcopal Church, it is important to restate those grounds. We believe these innovations, which affect our koinonia and communio in sacris both among Anglicans worldwide and with our senior ecumenical partners in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and ancient Oriental Orthodox churches, have insufficient warrant in scripture, and no warrant or requirement in the apostolic tradition of the church, to justify such a change in the historic practice of the Church. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that fellow Anglicans abroad and fellow Episcopalians here sincerely believe otherwise. While maintaining our own conviction about the sacramental validity of such ordinations, we have accepted the fact that women