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The Church of England on Wednesday started the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Reports said the move is aimed at preventing 80 million Anglicans worldwide from splitting over issues of gay marriage and women bishops.
A report by Reuters said the new church leader must reconcile modernists and traditionalists in the Church, and stem a long-term decline in church attendance.
Outgoing Archbishop Rowan Williams, 62, said his successor as head of the global Anglican Communion will need “the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros”.
“It’d be hard to find somebody more unifying than Rowan Williams, and yet he hasn’t managed to hold it together,” Paul Handley, editor of the Church Times newspaper, told Reuters.
“Under him, there have been two significant changes: one is the growth of secularism … and the other is greater division in the church over issues like women bishops, women priests and gay weddings.”
The process of selecting the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury is wrapped in layers of protocol perhaps unsurprising for a role with roots going back 1,400 years.
Meeting for three days behind closed doors at a secret location, a 16-member panel of bishops, church members and lay people will pick a preferred candidate and a reserve choice.
They will give the two names to Prime Minister David Cameron who will forward the name of the preferred candidate to Queen Elizabeth, supreme governor of the Church of England. Once she approves the candidate, Cameron’s Downing Street office will make the announcement next week, possibly on Wednesday.
The report said the new archbishop will be under pressure to prevent the Anglican world from being torn apart over homosexuality and same-sex unions.
One of the favourites to replace Williams is the Bishop of Durham Justin Welby, 56, a former oil executive who trained as a priest after the death of his infant daughter in a car crash.
Perhaps the best known candidate is the Archbishop of York John Sentamu, 63, a traditionalist and the Church’s second most senior cleric.
Other frontrunners include the Bishop of Coventry Christopher Cocksworth, 53, a father of five who is a popular figure among more liberal members of the church.
The main traditionalist candidate is the Bishop of London Richard Chartres, 65, who opposed the blessing in Anglican churches of “civil partnerships”, a formula that gives same-sex couples legal recognition.
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