The ticking clock was not, perhaps, the web designer’s best idea. On the front page of www.lambethconference.org, a digital clock is counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to the Lambeth conference – the once-a-decade global gathering of Anglican bishops – which starts tomorrow.

Intended to build excitement, to followers of ecclesiastical affairs the clock is more suggestive of a ticking timebomb beneath the Anglican “communion”, an organisation apparently with an appetite for self-destruction. Only last month, conservative Anglicans unhappy with liberal agendas launched a dissident Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.