The openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire, whose consecration in 2003 has taken the Anglican Church to the brink of schism, is to be excluded from the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today.

In a significant blow to the lesbians and gays campaigning for equal rights within the Church, Dr Rowan Williams has decreed that Bishop Robinson will not be among the 800-plus Anglican bishops invited to Canterbury next summer for the three-week gathering.

Dr Williams' decision provoked fury from the gay community in the Church of England, who said it demonstrated the "institutional homophobia" haunting the Church of England. Dr Williams was also accused of practising "ecclesiastical correctness" by the conservative evangelical opponenents of Bishop Robinson.

But the Archbishop, once a proponent of liberal catholicism of the kind preached by Bishop Robinson and his supporters, had little choice in the matter. If he had invited Bishop Robinson, the conference would almost certainly have been boycotted by conservative evangelical bishops and archbishops from the 'Global South' provinces in Africa and Asia.

The first invitations for the 2008 conference were sent out today by Dr Williams. The gathering, which takes place every ten years and which next year will be the largest ever in the history of Anglicanism, will bring together bishops from the Churches in the 38 Provinces of the Anglican Communion together with ecumenical and other invited guests.

The 2008 conference will differ from previous gatherings in that the bishops will begin with a period of retreat and reflection. Much of this retreat time will be held in and around Canterbury Cathedral. There will be attempts, almost certainly futile, to avoid the controversies of previous years. In 1998 the controversy over homosexuality "came out" into the open for the first time, and 1988 was dominated by the controversy over women bishops.

Bishops' spouses will be invited later in the year by the Archbishop's wife, Dr Jane Williams, a theologian in her own right on the evangelical wing of the Church.

In his letter, Dr Williams acknowledges that there has been keen discussion of the Lambeth Conference of 2008, and makes a plea for a spirit of tolerance.

"Because there has been quite a bit of speculation about invitations and the conditions that might be attached to them, I want to set out briefly what I think the Conference is and is not," he writes.

"It is an occasion when the Archbishop of Canterbury exercises his privilege of calling his colleagues together, not to legislate but to discover and define something more about our common identity through prayer, listening to God’s Word and shared reflection. It is an occasion to rediscover the reality of the Church itself as a worldwide community united by the call and grace of Christ."

He continues: "Coming to the Lambeth Conference does not commit you to accepting the position of others as necessarily a legitimate expression of Anglican doctrine and discipline, or to any action that would compromise your conscience or the integrity of your local church."

Referring to the debates tearing the Church apart, he says: "At a time when our common identity seems less clear that it once did, the temptation is to move further away from each other into those circles where we only related to those who completely agree with us.

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