Some 50 faithful Anglicans came together for the conference titled The Affirmation of St. Louis: Seeking a Path to Reconciliation and Unity, co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen and the Anglican Fellowship of the Delaware Valley (AFDV).

More than 120 conservative clerics and loyalists are expected from across the so-called Anglican "south" -- Africa, Asia and Latin America -- who have increasingly warned they could form independent, breakaway churches. The tensions have become so alarming that the leader of the Anglican communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, plans to travel to Egypt in an apparent attempt to calm dissent led by powerful Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola.

V. Gene Robinson will celebrate the second anniversary of his consecration next month. He reflected on his two years as bishop in an interview with Foster's Sunday Citizen last week. He compared the outrage over his sexuality with disagreement over the ordination of women priests about three decades ago.

He claimed during a lecture at the Yale Divinity School that the implications of recent actions by the Church of Nigeria, which had removed all references to being in communion with the See of Canterbury, were "most serious".

He claimed that this was in contrast to the Windsor Report which had sought a "corporate striving to find the will of God in contentious and divisive issues".

Archbishop Eames himself chaired the Lambeth Commission which produced the report.