The diversity of the Anglican Church makes it hard to keep together

This column is not the place to canvass the rights and wrongs of homosexual behaviour, for the issue has been high on religious agendas for many months. Another very real question is whether it is a matter of theology or culture.

Each Anglican parish, diocese or province throughout the world develops its own kinds of rituals, customs and interpretation of scripture – and even within Brisbane, say, there is a great gulf between solemn high mass at All Saints' Wickham Terrace and the more informal worship style of the charismatic parishes.

Evensong at St George's Cathedral in Jerusalem may not be very different from the same service in the cathedrals of St John in Brisbane or St Mary the Virgin in Lincoln but go to Anglican parish churches in many non-Western countries and you will find yourself in unfamiliar territory.

Customs and beliefs differ as much as services do. I once had a loud discussion with the bishop of Mt Kenya East at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, after a talk he gave defending his church's practice of clitorectomy (female circumcision) on the grounds that it wasn't specifically forbidden in scripture.

When I suggested that such a criterion would also allow polygamy, death by stoning and the banning of pork and shellfish in the diet, he got very angry and pulled rank, and we ended up not the best of friends.

The big question for the Anglican Communion is how far should one side be prepared to compromise, and over what issues – should liberals always give way to conservatives for the sake of harmony and solidarity?

In the diverse world of Anglicanism, where belief and worship styles are dictated as much by cultural values as by biblical principles (Hooker's famous "three-legged stool" of scripture, tradition and reason), is it purely a numbers game?

Should the more progressive principles of Western Christianity be forced to give way to the culturally based conservatism of some of the developing countries out of post-colonial guilt?

It's a grave problem for the church, for it has practical as well as ethical implications, and if the new Archbishop of Canterbury is to lead the other primates to a compromise, he'll need even greater wisdom than Solomon's about the danger of splitting the baby in two.