LONDON – It wasn’t just a friendly invitation.

American Episcopal bishops, fed up with Anglican criticism of their support for gay priests, implored the Anglican spiritual leader to hear their side of the story — in person.

Starting Thursday, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will be in New Orleans for that private talk, hoping he can hold together the increasingly fractured world Anglican family.

“If anybody can do it, then somebody of the intellectual stature of Rowan Williams could,” said a lecturer in systematic theology at Ripon College Cuddesdon in Oxford, England, Mark D. Chapman. “But it is a very tall order.”

Archbishop Williams arrives in America facing a real danger that the global Anglican Communion could break up on his watch.

The communion, a 77-million-member fellowship of churches that trace their roots to the Church of England, has always held together members with conflicting biblical views. But debate erupted into confrontation in 2003, when the Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Ever since, Anglican conservatives, concentrated mainly in developing countries, have been pressing the Americans to promise not to consecrate another gay bishop. The 2.2 million-member Episcopal Church is the Anglican body in America.

Unlike the pope, Archbishop Williams has no direct authority to force a compromise. Instead, he listens, prays and seeks to persuade. “It’s eroding and exhausting,” Archbishop Williams recently told the National Catholic Reporter, an independent American weekly.

The upcoming American visit has only heightened the pressure on Archbishop Williams.

In a statement last month, Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, an outspoken conservative critic of the American church, condemned Archbishop Williams’ “failure of resolve” to get Episcopal leaders in line. A week before Archbishop Williams was due to arrive in America, two conservative-led Episcopal dioceses — Pittsburgh and Quincy, Ill. — said they were taking the first steps toward breaking with the American church and aligning with an overseas, like-minded Anglican province.

Over the last two months in Kenya and Uganda, Anglican leaders consecrated three former Episcopal priests as bishops, to minister to conservatives in America. Archbishop Akinola has started his own conservative parish network, based in Virginia, to rival the Episcopal Church.

Archbishop Williams, 57, was enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury in 2003 with a record of some support for gay priests. But as leader of the entire communion, he has operated with the understanding that most Anglicans believe the Bible bars gay relationships.

Liberals, who believe biblical teachings of tolerance and acceptance are paramount, have been bitterly disappointed. They were outraged last May when Archbishop Williams said he would not invite Bishop Robinson to the Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops.

The president of Integrity, the Episcopal gay advocacy group, the Rev. Susan Russell, said the decision showed “a disgraceful lack of leadership.”

Archbishop Williams “has allowed himself to be blackmailed by forces promoting bigotry and exclusion in the Anglican Communion,” she said.

A separate snub of Archbishop Williams came from the theological right. Conservative Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney, Australia, and his assistant bishops, said they have delayed responding to their Lambeth invitations from the archbishop of Canterbury, because they don’t want to be at the table with the American bishops who consecrated Bishop Robinson.

Some Anglican leaders in Africa followed Sydney’s lead, and raised an additional complaint — that Archbishop Williams didn’t invite a breakaway American conservative bishop, the Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns. Reverend Minns leads Archbishop Akinola’s American mission, which violates communion tradition that leaders operate within their own provincial territories.

At the New Orleans meeting, the Episcopal House of Bishops will weigh demands from Anglican leaders that the American church pledge not to consecrate another openly gay bishop or authorize official prayers for same-sex couples. If Episcopal leaders fail to agree by Sept. 30, they risk losing their full membership in the communion.

No one expects Episcopal leaders to completely agree to those terms.

In March, the Episcopal bishops rejected a key demand that they give up some authority to theological conservatives outside the American church so that conservative American parishes would not have to answer to the church’s national leader, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. Schori supports Bishop Robinson and blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples.

At the time, Archbishop Williams called the bishops’ decision “discouraging.”

Archbishop Williams will spend Thursday and Friday behind closed doors with the American bishops, then will leave while they debate their next move. The Episcopal bishops are expected to announce their decision before the meeting ends on Sept. 25.

“My aim is to try and keep people around the table for as long as possible on this,” Archbishop Williams said in April, when he announced he would meet with the Americans. “If there is to be any change on the church’s attitude on gay and lesbian behavior then I would hope it would be a change of attitude on the part of the church as a whole.”

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On the Net:

Archbishop of Canterbury: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

Episcopal Church: http://ecusa.anglican.org