But upstairs, something momentous was happening. Gafcon's concluding event, a Communion service on the Feast of Ss Peter and Paul, managed to make even the drab ballroom come alive. Peter Jensen, the archbishop of Sydney and one of the most prominent "Westerners" at the event, took the dais to say: "The chaos of the Anglican Communion is about to receive a dose of order." The Ugandan choir struck up the boisterous Swahili hymn Shetani akiniona anatetemeka (When Satan sees me, he trembles) and the gathered 1,000 broke into a spirited dance. Leaders of the movement crowded around a podium and signed a Statement of Principles, which lays out "the way forward".

Three significant assertions, each revolutionary, emerge from the text. The declaration claims first, that there is nothing of inherent authority or importance in the see at Canterbury and its Archbishop. Second, it announces a new church will be organised in North America as a formal rival to the US and Canadian branches of the Anglican Communion. (Until now, some 200 to 300 American churches, including the august Virginia church where George Washington served in the vestry, have affiliated on an ad hoc basis with African dioceses.) Finally, and perhaps most controversially, the Gafcon primates executed an ecclesiastical coup, asserting themselves to be an authoritative power, when in council, by virtue of their orthodoxy.

Rowan Williams, sensing urgency, responded by questioning the legitimacy of a "few" bishops acting as soi-disant authorities. There is little factual basis to claim that Gafcon represents a small minority of the church claiming undue rights. While only seven out of the communion's 38 primates have signed on to the Jerusalem Declaration, as Gafcon's final statement of principles is titled, their churches represent some 43m Anglicans out of an estimated total of 62m or 77m worldwide - a clear majority, no matter whose numbers are being used.

The Lambeth Conference, which would have seemed the logical location for such a coup, is merely a gathering of bishops. These prelates' relationship to numbers of churchgoers is tenuous and becoming more so with every year. There are, for instance, 109 dioceses of the US Episcopal Church, which has a membership of 2.1m and shrinking, while Kenya has a mere 29 dioceses with more than double the "active baptised membership". At Lambeth, unsurprisingly, liberals have attracted the support of more bishops than the conservatives, weighted as their numbers are to the West, but in Gafcon they have already lost much of the church.