ATHENS, Greece -- The agenda for this week's gathering of conservative Anglican clerics includes dialogue with Islam and fighting poverty. But the wider message is expected to be protest: Another frontal attack against gay clergy and same-sex unions that threaten to break apart the world's 77 million-member Anglican Communion.

The six-day meeting, beginning Tuesday in Egypt, will bring together some of the leading opponents of liberalizing trends and highlight the growing strength of Africa and other places outside the traditional Anglican spheres of influence in England and North America.

More than 120 conservative clerics and loyalists are expected from across the so-called Anglican "south" -- Africa, Asia and Latin America -- who have increasingly warned they could form independent, breakaway churches. The tensions have become so alarming that the leader of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, plans to travel to Egypt in an apparent attempt to calm dissent led by powerful Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola.

"The establishment is desperate to keep together the communion," said George Curry, chairman of the Church Society, a conservative lay and clergy Anglican group based in Watford, England. "But the liberals are unwilling to revisit or invalidate the movements that the conservatives find intolerable. This tolerance has been stretched to the breaking point."

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