On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, it is an Episcopalian tradition in New York City for the bishop of New York to visit Trinity Church, at the head of Wall Street. True to form, the Right Reverend Mark Sisk presided over a noontime service last Wednesday at the historic church with some 400 people in attendance.

The bishop reminded the congregation of why Ash Wednesday is so important. Historically, he said, it is “a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church.”

To those following recent events in the Anglican Communion, the worldwide church to which the Episcopal Church belongs, the themes of Ash Wednesday — forgiveness, penitence, and reconciliation — are particularly relevant. This past Monday, a meeting of 38 Anglican archbishops published a communiqué that calls for the Episcopal Church to renounce its support of gay clergy and blessing same-sex unions.

The Episcopal Church has until September to renounce its policies, according to the document. If it doesn’t, a schism with the Anglican Communion will likely be the result. The rector of St. Paul’s Church in Darien, Conn., the Reverend Christopher Leighton, best describes the impending outcome: “The Episcopalians will become a boutique church pursuing its own agenda outside the purview of an international body,” he told the Hartford Courant earlier this week.

It’s too tempting not to point out the irony of two groups of bishops drawing lines in the sand just as the church calendar turns to Lent. If there’s going to be any reconciliation among Anglicans, one side needs to budge. If recent history is a guide, don’t expect either side to waver.

The majority of Episcopalians in America, or in the Northeast, at the least, have, like their brethren in other mainline Protestant denominations, embraced socially and politically progressive causes for decades. Bishops began ordaining women as priests in the mid-1970s, and as bishops since the late 1980s.

There are 2.5 million Episcopalians in America representing only a sliver of the 100 million-strong Anglican Communion. But because of their wealth and influence as Americans, Episcopalians have had the privilege of setting the pace and agenda for a church that is now largely unwilling to go along with them.

The fact is that the prospect of a schism has little to do with gay clergy or female bishops. These are issues that have fueled the flames of discord among those with different points of view. But just about any combination of issues would have eventually brought the church to this point.

What’s really going on is a global shift in American power and influence over the rest of the world. In this case, it’s being played out in the context of a church.

The world is fortunate that America remains the only superpower. But if this Inter-Anglican controversy stands as any example, it’s that Americans often live up to their image as bullies. Like it or not, the tremendous clout that our nation and its institutions currently enjoy on the world stage rests on how mindful we are of how others perceive us in the future.

Many Anglicans in other parts of the world, including those in the Church of England, have cringed at the in-your-face attitude of their American counterparts. A few years ago, the Episcopal Church approved the consecration of an openly gay man as a bishop.

The archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, called a meeting of church leaders at the time that essentially recommended, in the pages of the Windsor Report, that the Episcopal Church needed to help cool things down. Anglicans around the world viewed the events in America as another example of rich Westerners running roughshod over the authority of the scriptures.

Last summer, Episcopalians responded to the archbishop of Canterbury’s plea by electing a woman to be their next presiding bishop — a move that didn’t exactly cool things down. Monday’s communiqué, therefore, had been coming for a long time and certainly did not come as a surprise.

Some of the most vocal opponents of the Episcopal Church’s politics come from Africa, where Anglican archbishops are on the front lines of spreading the Gospel in the face of poverty, disease, and the influences of radical Islam. These men draw strength from the authority of the scriptures and the centuries-old traditions of the church. They are bewildered, to say the least, at what they see as arrogant actions of a rich American church.

Indeed, a common view among Episcopalians is that these Africans should either fall into line and stop criticizing their American brothers or risk ending the flow of American funding to their ministries. There’s nothing like money, it seems, to coax people into seeing things your way.

Can an entire church body reconcile itself as it moves into the Lenten season? The divisions are deep and both sides are filled with anger and frustration. It’s the perfect time on the church calendar to reflect and to see if reconciliation and forgiveness will take root.

Mr. Akasie, a member of Trinity Church, is a reporter of The New York Sun.