The proposal included an option to create two levels of church: full-membership provinces that adhere to the majority view, and lower-level adherents with their own rules.

Archbishop Hutchison, head of the Anglican Church in Canada, said in a telephone interview from England that most of the primates wanted a covenant, but said getting agreement on its wording would take years.

"We're now in a world with a huge variety of cultures. Some are traditional. Some are progressive. We're trying to reconcile that to a single consensus," he said.

Any covenant designed to discipline churches would not be supported in Canada, though, Archbishop Hutchison said.

"If people want a covenant that is much more definitive of who's in and who's out, then Canada would not want to be part of it. A covenant would allow people with different views to sit at the same table," he said.

A tiered system would be a "difference," but did not necessarily require the church to split, he said.

The concept of a covenant was suggested in 2004 in the Windsor report, which called for the U.S. church to apologize for appointing a gay bishop without fully consulting other Anglican bodies.

Responding to that report, Archbishop Williams's letter argued the church is not a sum of local communities, but has "a cross-cultural dimension" that is vital to its survival and requires an agreed structure in which church provinces would make a "formal, but voluntary, commitment to each other."

"There is no way the Anglican Communion can remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment," he wrote.

But the suggestion of membership levels is "a matter for concern" for Reverend Richard Leggett, professor of liturgical studies at the Vancouver School of Theology.

If forced to choose, Dr. Leggett said he would not sacrifice Canadian beliefs to be part of a global church.

"He [Archbishop Williams] seems to be weighing in on the side of more conservative voices for the sake of maintaining some sort of visible unity," Dr. Leggett said.

"I am an Anglican who would say I am not prepared to sacrifice the integrity of gay and lesbian Christians for the sake of organizational unity. We have historically dealt with serious issues without breaking the communion. The church holds differing views on abortion, contraception, divorce and remarriage, ministry of women."

The Bishop of Edmonton, Victoria Matthews, said a covenant could set limits on individual provinces and drive home the fact any decision has consequences for the church as a whole.

"It really says that the member churches need to take very seriously the decisions they've been making because there will be a cost," she said.

"Up until now, that hasn't been the case. I think they've been taking their decisions individually, as opposed to understanding they need to consult."

But that shouldn't detract from the church's acceptance of difference, she said. "We allow for ambiguity that often brings out a brilliance not found elsewhere," Bishop Matthews said.

The issue of same-sex blessings "is a difficult one," Archbishop Hutchison said. In Britain, he said, hundreds of same-sex couples are blessed by the church. Canada has placed a moratorium on such blessings until the general synod -- the church's governing body -- meets in June next year.

This comes only a few weeks after the general convention of the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of Anglicanism, elected the first woman to lead the church.

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