The Lambeth Conference, the once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops from around the globe, has come up with what it hopes will be the perfect solution for avoiding any mud-slinging.

No news could be said to be good news for the beleaguered church right now and the organisers of the Anglican summit in the English cathedral city of Canterbury may well have the Zulus to thank for that.

Anglicanism has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons as conservatives and liberals lock horns in an increasingly bitter war of words over the ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. Up to a quarter of the bishops have stayed away from Lambeth in protest, a move that has shaken the Anglican Communion but, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Willliams says, will not lead to a schism.

Lambeth organisers have come up with a solution to keep the angry rhetoric to a minimum, hoping that their gathering will be given much more anodyne coverage.

The bishops are being split up into “Indaba” groups of about 40. Indaba is a Zulu word for “a gathering for purposeful discussion.”

But the organisers, explaining the concept, warned that even after two weeks of the bishops putting their heads together on every subject from evangelism to transforming society, “Indaba is not shaped for producing a communique, an encycical letter or a text.”

“Indaba is open-ended conversation,” they explained. Open-ended, but not open to the media — we can’t attend the sessions and report on how they actually work.

As the procedure was explained to us, each Indaba group, after much soul-searching together, appoints a “listener” who will help to put together a final “reflective document.” So there will be no messy fights over resolutions like the debate over homosexuality that dominated the 1998 Lambeth Conference.

Little wonder then that Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the 450-year history of the Anglican church, does not expect any fireworks at the conference — to which he has not been invited.

In an interview with Reuters before Lambeth, Robinson forecast that the Anglican summit “will drive the press crazy. There will be be no resolutions, no proclamations, no lines drawn in the sand, no up or down votes to report the count.”

“This is the place where the Archbishop got it exactly right. What we need at the moment is deepening conversation,” he said.

The Anglican Communion website has its own Lambeth Daily with news from the Conference, including soundbites and cartoons.

Sitting in the sun-kissed grounds of a London church, U.S.Bishop Gene Robinson reflected in sombre mood on what it meant to be the first openly gay bishop in the 450-year history of the Anglican church.

Robinson, a divorced father of two, has received death threats and wore a bulletproof vest at his consecration back in 2003. Two uniformed police officers stood guard last month as he entered into a civil partnership with his longtime partner. He was heckled when preaching in London over the weekend.

“I take the threats very seriously, I have to,” he said. “But I am not interested in being a martyr, I just want to be a bishop.”

Robinson’s visit to Britain concides with the Lambeth Conference, the ten-yearly meeting of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion, but he has not been invited to attend. So he has several speaking engagements outside of the conference, including a sermon at Saint Mary’s Church in the Putney section of London on Sunday where he urged Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to show firmer leadership and get conservative foes to tone down homophobic taunts.

In an interview with Reuters, there was no hiding the disappointment in his voice when talking about Williams’ decision not to invite him. And he repeated that he felt it was high time Williams took a stand against Conservative opponents who taunted him with homophobic mockery.

“There is no place in the Christian Church for someone to say Satan has entered the church with my consecration or that gay people are lower than dogs,” the 61-year-old bishop said.

“You cannot say those kind of things about gays and lesbians people and then be shocked when there is violence against them,” he said.

Clearly exasperated with a navel-gazing church obsessed with its own internal problems, he said human sexuality was an important issue but added “I would agree with many Africans that there are so many more important things to be dealing with.”

But he was clearly proud of what he had achieved in trying to sweep hypocrisy away, saying: “I would like to think I have raised the issue of how destructive ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ can be.”