WHEREAS the Preface to the original 1789 Book of Common Prayer of The Episcopal Church and each ensuing revision contains the following statement:

“In which it will also appear that this Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship; or further than local circumstances require”; and

Church leaders anxious to promote unity have welcomed the proposals, but they will meet fierce resistance from conservative Protestants.

The Rev David Phillips, the general secretary of the Church Society and a Synod member, said: "We would reject universal primacy even if the papacy is reformed. There is no way we would want to be linked to the Roman Catholic Church. On some issues, its teaching is even worse now than it was at the Reformation."

The network's temporary leader, Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, says the meeting will give traditionalists ``some sense there is a future.''

Delegates will adopt an organizational charter, elect leaders and debate how to help conservative parishes in liberal dioceses. Planners insist the network isn't a breakaway denomination or schism, but a ``church within a church.''

Yet the upcoming meeting puts him, once again, in the thick of the debate over homosexuality within his denomination.

The convention's aim will be to produce a church-within-a-church arrangement, so that Episcopal conservatives - estimated by opponents as roughly 15 percent of the denomination's 2.3 million members - can work together directly. Its relationship to the Episcopal Church's national structure is still emerging.