Anglican conservatives meeting in Israel yesterday described their sense of “betrayal and abandonment” by the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and declared the formation of a new global Anglican communion for “faithful” Anglicans living in liberal provinces.

Details of the “church within a church” will be announced on Sunday. The founders intend it to halt the slide of their Church towards Western secular values and to reform it from within.

Meeting in Jerusalem, more than 1,100 evangelicals from around the world, including 300 bishops, have stepped back from the brink of schism.

Up to 600 Church of England parishes are expected to be at a conference in London next month to discuss affiliating with the new “orthodox” structure.

The announcement came after a week of tense negotiations between hardliners calling for schism and moderates urging reform from within. Organisers claimed that the Jerusalem gathering was the most significant event in Anglicanism in their lifetimes and said that it would herald a “new reformation”.

The new body will have its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges, and eventually its own structures, within the legal constraints of existing Anglican institutions. Two theological colleges - Oak Hill in North London and Wycliffe Hall in Oxford - have been earmarked for the training of evangelical clergy.

The Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) was prompted by the “failure”, as conservatives see it, of Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to “discipline” American bishops who took part in the consecration of the gay Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, in 2003 by not inviting them to next month’s Lambeth Conference.

Many bishops from Africa and Asia consider themselves patronised by their former colonialist masters, who supplanted their traditional religions by importing Christianity and then liberalised it into something barely recognisable as the Gospel they believe in. The Archbishop of Kenya, Benjamin Nzimbi, said that there was a need for more permanent structures “for faithful Anglicans who live and serve in provinces that have abandoned the traditional teaching of the Bible”.

More than 100 bishops have voted to boycott the Lambeth Conference in Kent. Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, who helped to move the debate on from homosexuality with an address on the need for reform from within, will also be avoiding worship and plenary sessions at the Conference. His speech went a long way towards healing the hurt among the Global South delegates, but the US conservatives remain angry and are driving the talk of schism. Lambeth Palace is “cool” about all this. Dr Williams understands that some of the bishops boycotting Lambeth would have liked to accept his invitation, but are staying away in line with the African principle of loyalty to their own “baba” or “father” archbishops.

Conference organisers have tried to avoid an obsession with the gay issue and were privately furious when a junior volunteer, acting out of misguided zeal, gave security staff a list of pro-gay activists “not allowed in” to the conference. This list - obtained by The Times and featuring a cast now known in the blogosphere as the “Gafcon 8” - made the conference appear far more militant than it is. The Bishop of Jerusalem’s new chaplain was one of those on the list.

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