With only a month before the opening of the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion looks increasingly like members of a family who cannot live in harmony yet dare not seek to part. On the two most controversial issues that are tearing at the fabric of the Church - gay clergy and the consecration of women bishops - the gulf has grown deeper. News of a recent celebration in a London church of the civil union by two gay clergymen, which came very close to a traditional marriage ceremony, has provoked outrage among conservatives and led in turn to angry defiance by embattled liberals. At the same time, a vote by bishops to approve the consecration of women without enshrining legal safeguards for traditionalists has so angered clergy opposed to women bishops that hundreds are considering leaving the Church, while some are even contemplating suing for constructive dismissal (see page 18).

Both issues could not come at a more sensitive time for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams is striving to hold together the communion of 38 Anglican provinces by keeping the agenda at the three-week conference as consensual as possible. He would like to focus particularly on the proposed covenant. This document deals largely with ecclesiastical organisation, but it also proposes a set of core principles and beliefs to which Anglicans subscribe and provides a framework to define and hold together the fissiparous Church. The difficulty is that this raises the question of how the Bible should be read, in turn exposing the differences between liberals and those wanting closer adherence to scriptural text. These differences go to the core of the arguments over homosexuality and women bishops.

The arguments have become more embittered as they become more overtly political. Disagreements with the Episcopalian Church in the United States over its consecration of a gay bishop have taken on an ugly note of anti-Americanism, especially in Africa, where some bishops, to mask other problems, have whipped up populist emotion by denouncing the pro-homosexual leanings of the Americans. At the same time the Southern Cone group of churches have expressed the resentment of developing countries at what they see as the political, as well as ecclesiastical, domination of the richer north. Coincidentally, 200 bishops from the south are meeting in Jordan this week in a rival Global Anglican Future Conference that may lead to their boycotting Lambeth.

Open schism looks inevitable. Would it undermine the faith of Anglicans in each individual province if they were no longer in communion with all other churches? An agreement to disagree looks like the only compromise, possible if the world's 80 million Anglicans formed a looser federation instead of a doctrinally compatible communion. But Dr Williams fears this will not work: differences are too raw for any amicable separation, and the splits would be within as well as between churches, including the Church of England. His efforts to maintain unity are wholly honourable: no organisation as old and resonant as the Church can lightly contemplate break-up. It would be sad if the efforts at compromise were to sacrifice people's commitment to their faith, their compassion for other human beings and their devotion to God. What matters is that Anglicans should be clear and settled not only in their leadership but in what they believe.