The Anglican Church worldwide is currently facing the gravest threat ever to its international unity. Where the vitriolic debates over the ordination of women failed to shatter the Anglican Communion, the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the US in late 2003 may well succeed. Conservative bishops have demanded that the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s leaders be disciplined. If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not oblige once an international report has been tabled later this year, the break-up of the Anglican Communion is highly probable.

Australian Anglicans are not immune from those tensions, even though, to date, no local bishop or synod has made a pre-emptive move to ordain gay men or women in same-sex relationships. Nor are they likely to do so. But Australia’s largest and richest Anglican diocese, Sydney, is one of the most conservative in the world, and has in recent years taken a key leadership role among like-minded dioceses in Africa, South America and South-East Asia. With its considerable resources, and under the energetic, uncompromising leadership of Archbishop Peter Jensen, it has swiftly become a force to be reckoned with on the international arena.