Sexuality Reports Back Presbyterian, Episcopal Changes : Study: The Episcopal Church’s July convention will get to consider a church panel proposal to ordain gay and lesbian seminarians.

In a three-year study released Friday, an Episcopal Church commission recommends that bishops be allowed to ordain openly gay and lesbian seminarians to the priesthood.

The 2.5-million-member denomination, which will consider the report at its July convention in Phoenix, has generally followed a 1979 convention resolution specifying that it was “not appropriate” to ordain active homosexuals even though the issue remains hotly debated.

“I think the church is ready to take a little more progressive stance,” said Bishop George N. Hunt of Providence, R.I., head of the Standing Commission on Human Affairs that proposed the new policy.

The proposed resolution says that “each diocese of this church . . . is fully competent to determine whom best to ordain . . . in the light of the qualifications presented for ordination.”

Hunt said that he believes that passage of the resolution would negate the 1979 resolution. His commission “heard from virtually every perspective available on the subject” during its study, he said, and “mirrored the feelings that exist in the church at large.”

The recommendation was criticized Friday by Ted Nelson of Dallas, board chairman of Episcopalians United, a conservative group, as “a flagrant attack” on church unity. Nelson said the Episcopal Church “has no right to thumb our noses” at the rest of the Anglican churches worldwide by taking an unprecedented step.

The resolution “has a chance” of passage, Nelson predicted. The measure would have to pass both the House of Bishops and the House of (clergy and lay) Deputies at the bicameral Episcopal General Convention in order to be adopted. Nelson said he thought it would have its toughest test in the clergy and lay house.

Some church leaders expect delegates to make counterproposals to revise canon laws specifically forbidding ordination of active homosexuals, thus toughening the current convention stand.

“We’re saying,” according to Bishop Hunt, “Let’s not proscribe a whole class of people, but leave it up to the local bishop and his standing committee.”

In December 1989, Bishop John Spong of Newark, N.J., ordained Robert Williams, who is an active homosexual, only to be rebuked for it last fall by a narrow margin in the church’s House of Bishops.

The commission report also recommends that the church consider blessing the relationships of committed gay and lesbian couples, but does not ask definitive action about it, and suggests further study.