Anglican Rift on Gay Clergy Leads to Breakaway Summit

Conservative Anglican leaders have revealed plans for a breakaway summit for the hundreds of bishops who are expected to defy the Archbishop of Canterbury by boycotting the Lambeth Conference.

Up to a third of the Anglican church's 900 bishops could boycott the conference in protest at the perceived fudging by the archbishop, Rowan Williams, over the US Episcopal church's attitude to gay clergy.

Organisers of the Global Anglican Future Conference say their meeting, to be held in Jerusalem, will not be a rival to Lambeth but will "provide opportunities for fellowship and care for those who have decided not to attend Lambeth".

A website promoting the new summit, announced six weeks before Williams's flagship conference, says the 80-million-strong Anglican communion is "divided into liberal and conservative factions" and is near to breaking up over the consecration in 2003 of the gay priest Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.

In 1998 the Lambeth Conference - which is held every 10 years in Canterbury - asserted that the leaders of the overwhelming majority of Anglicans worldwide maintained the biblical view that sexual relationships should be reserved for marriage between a man and woman. But five years later, some Anglican churches "transgressed these boundaries in defiance of the Bible's authority", according to the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen.

The conservative coalition is led by the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, and Church of England supporters include Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, who was recently voted fourth most popular Anglican of the year, and the Bishop of Lewes, Wallace Benn.

Last month, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is head of the worldwide Anglican communion, condemned attempts by conservative leaders to undermine the Episcopal church over its support for gay rights, and in effect refused calls to disinvite American bishops from the Lambeth Conference.

In his long-awaited Advent message to the 38 primates of the communion, Williams criticized African and other church leaders who had consecrated their own American bishops and offered to look after the small number of dioceses whose conservative bishops had said they wished to separate from the US church and seek oversight from foreign provinces.