AT THE recent Lambeth Conference Ballarat's Anglican Bishop Michael Hough found himself in a discussion group led by a female Canadian bishop.It would have been an unusual scenario for an Australian bishop.Australia has only one female Anglican bishop, based in Perth, and Bishop Hough presides over a diocese in which women can become deacons but not priests."She (the Canadian bishop) helped me to see a different aspect of theology, and a lot of others too," Bishop Hough told The Courier late last week.The Lambeth Conference is the once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops, a gathering first held in the 1880s in an attempt to resolve a crisis within the Anglican church in South Africa.It is convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, currently Rowan Williams.Bishop Hough said he returned to Australia a "Rowanite", convinced by the message and approach to managing the church taken by Archbishop Williams."Rowan was pilloried, attacked and mocked - but he got on with being the Archbishop of Canterbury," Bishop Hough said.He said the approach taken at the conference to ensure all bishops had a chance to speak was to divide the 800 bishops - about 300 bishops boycotted the conference - into groups of about 40.This was, Bishop Hough said, an African model of reaching consensus called Indaba."The term that Rowan used were `the bonds of affection that bind us'," Bihsop Hough said."If we can't build on those then what are we doing here?""Rowan said God's watching us, the world's watching us. If we don't handle our heritage with integrity then we fail in God's eyes."If we don't handle conflict then we have failed in the world's eyes." "Rowan kept saying the West has the luxury of navel gazing while elsewhere many church groups are simply worried about feeding themselves."It was a bit of a shock for us because we Anglicans like looking inwards.""There were always those who wanted to fight and you knew who they were because they were always standing at the microphones," Bishop Hough said.He said the conflict was largely between the African and American bishops, with the more conservative Africans at odds with the liberal North American approach to sexuality and authority.Bishop Hough said there would be no rush to allow female Anglican priests in Ballarat."There have been 2000 years of church history and changes are many," he said."My position is we change as a church, not as an individual diocese."Just because you think you can, doesn't mean you should. Bishops have to preserve the heritage of the church but at the same time bishops have a prophetic role to bring the church into the modern world". Bishop Hough says the conference "heightened the dangers of getting sucked into a lukewarm church"."It's revived my passion for the continual movement of the church to engage more directly with the poor. I think the more we do that the more authentic we become," he said.He said the document developed from the conference was about engaging with other churches and ensuring a focus on the church's millennium goals including improving child education, eradicating poverty and improving fair trade.