The Lambeth Conference is taking place in Canterbury amid controversy over the issue of homosexual bishops.
The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott is recording his thoughts from the conference over the next few weeks, as debate on the vital issues facing the Church unfolds.
DIVERSITY OR DIVISION? : 23 JULY
The media aren't allowed into many of the events taking place under the auspices of the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion's once-a-decade meeting taking place in Canterbury.
At daily news conferences mild-mannered archbishops have encountered hostility from correspondents irritated at being banned even from the early morning service of Holy Communion. They have scarcely been mollified by the explanation that the exclusion is for "security reasons".
However, the media have been welcomed to the blue, twin-peaked, big top - visible on the hilltop University of Kent campus from miles around - for a number of evening seminars.
Perhaps, given the lack of access to debates about evangelism and "Anglican identity" taking place in the groups of 40 to which discussions are limited, it's not surprising that the most recent seminar was carefully scrutinised for all-too-elusive signs of "news".
The speaker was Cardinal Ivan Dias, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, and a senior member of the Roman Catholic Church's Vatican staff. His address, to any of the 650 bishops and their spouses who wanted to attend, was the second on the subject of spreading the message of Christianity throughout the world and seeking to convert non-Christians.
This has recently become a much hotter topic within the Church of England.
Traditionalists are seeking to add the duty to convert non-Christians to the issue of homosexuality as a defining standard of Anglicanism. They suspect that liberal Anglicans - the same ones who read the Bible as offering a more sympathetic message to homosexual people - regard other religions as having an "equally valid" path to salvation as Christianity.
The debate over sexuality is now seem by both sides in the Communion as a defining one, a struggle for the soul of the Church
One liberal theologian at the conference told me that he regarded Jesus as uniquely the son of God. But he said "have other religions encountered God working on earth? Yes. Has God done something salvific (opening the way to ultimate "salvation") with them? Yes.
Anyway, all this meant close attention for Cardinal Dias' intriguing analogy between certain trends in Christianity and the deadly brain diseases Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (the latter of which notoriously led to Pope John Paul II's death in 2005).
Cardinal Dias was highlighting the need for Christians to stick together to cope with the "moral confusion" of a world in which people made up their own values to suit the moment and in which Christian values were being driven from the public arena.
He said the "thrust for evangelisation...animates both the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church".
However, warned the Cardinal, "when diversity degenerated into division", it compromised the effort to spread the message.
"Much is spoken today of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," he said.
Sexuality debate
"By analogy, their symptoms can, at times, be found even in our own Christian communities. For example when we live myopically in the fleeting present, oblivious to our past heritage and apostolic traditions, we could well be suffering from spiritual Alzheimer's.
"And when we behave in a disorderly manner, going whimsically on our own way without any coordination with the head or the other members of our community, it could be ecclesial (churchlike) Parkinson's."
To a Communion in which diversity has, with dramatic results, degenerated into division, it sounded like a pointed rebuke. If it was, it seemed to apply to both liberals and their drive to reform the Anglican view of sexuality - and to traditionalists, who held a rival conference in Jerusalem, sought to bypass the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the Communion, and largely boycotted the meeting in Canterbury.
The debate over sexuality is now seen by both sides in the Communion as a defining one, a struggle for the soul of the Church. It may not look pretty from Rome, but neither side seems likely to concede in order to optimise evangelism, let alone for the sake of appearances.
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