Anglican bishops from around the world attended the opening business meeting of the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury on Monday. About 210 bishops, however—roughly a quarter of those invited—have boycotted the once-a-decade conference in protest of the consecration of homosexual bishop Gene Robinson.

What’s more, the 650 bishops who are attending are hardly united in their support of Anglican doctrine. They include, as the International Herald Tribunesays, “a mix of traditionalists, moderates and liberals, all with divergent ideas about what Anglicans should believe and how their fellowship should operate.”

Those boycotting the conference include the Anglican leaders in several nations in both Africa and South America, as well as from Sydney, Australia. The most senior Church of England figure to stay away is the bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali. Others, such as Keith Ackerman, bishop of Quincy, Illinois, are attending the conference simply to air their views, even though they disagree with the direction of the church.

The ordination of homosexual priests, together with other divisive issues, is causing a split through the middle of the Anglican Communion between traditionalists and liberals.

Last month, Anglican conservatives, responding to what they see as the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s failure to prevent the liberal drift of the church, formed a new global church network—the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans—that circumvents the archbishop’s authority though stopping short of schism. The conservative faction held its own separate meeting in Jerusalem in June and subsequently released a “Jerusalem Declaration” calling for a competing council of Anglican primates, relegating the archbishop of Canterbury to a less authoritative role, and denouncing homosexual ordinations. The conservative faction is said to have the support of nearly half (35 million) of the Anglican Communion’s total membership.

While the aim of the Lambeth Conference is to avoid schism in the church, it is unlikely to solve any of the contentious issues; no votes will be held nor resolutions made. “To avoid antagonism breaking out into the open, this year’s Lambeth Conference will avoid any firm resolutions that could be contentious,” the Christian Science Monitorreports. The conference will only paper over the gaping cracks in the communion.

As the divisions in the Anglican Communion persist, we can expect a further drift—and possibly a wholesale breaking away—of conservatives toward the Roman Catholic Church. For more on the simmering crisis threatening to break wide open the Anglican Communion and the prophetic significance of this, read “Cracks in the Anglican Cathedral” and “Returning to the Fold.”