The Church of England has been a constant feature of newspaper headlines this summer. Just in case the public was losing interest in the issues of women bishops, homosexuality and the GAFCON, in Friday's Times Henry Luke Orombi, Archbishop of Uganda raises the question of disestablishment. He believes that some of these Anglican structures are not serving the communion well, and in particular he argues that much of the Anglican communion's current difficulties relate back to the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who he suggests is de facto the only real 'instrument of communion', is not appointed by his peers but by a secular government. This, he says, is an 'insufficient' way of deciding on the spiritual leader of a global communion - and indeed it is an idiosyncrasy that one of my Catholic friends loves to regularly remind me of.

Although Archbishop Orombi raises an important question, arguments about the appropriate relationship between church and state should not be hastily reduced to this one issue. In 1994 Jubilee Centre published a Cambridge Paper by Julian Rivers looking at the Christian understanding of church and state, discussing various models for their interrelationship. You can read that Cambridge Paper here.

The paper concluded that reforms were desirable (and indeed picks out the issue of appointment of officers) but that overall the principle of Christian establishment was correct. This Cambridge Paper is as pertinent this summer as it was when it was written, and while I revisit my own thoughts on the issue, I'm interested to know what others of you think about this, and about the Archbishop's article.

Over the last few months, as some of the more conservative Anglican primates have expressed their concerns in interviews and newspaper articles, there seems to me to be two underlying themes that come across whichever particular issue they are writing or speaking about.

The first is that the Anglican Communion's internal structures have perpetuated a colonial feel to the organisation's culture. Over the last twenty years or so, this has resulted in some of the most numerically strong regions of the Anglican Communion feeling let down and somewhat marginalised by the western provinces of the church. Thankfully, the African bishops who attended this year's Lambeth seem to have left feeling listened to and understood, and we can only hope that this spirit of fellowship and mutual respect can be extended to those bishops who did not attend.

Secondly, and somewhat surprisingly when we hear so much about globalisation, it is clear that the Western provinces of the church are operating in a vastly different socio-political context than provinces in other parts of the world. While the Christian gospel is for the whole world, and the Christian church must strive to be a global community of faith, we should not underestimate the barriers to unity and dialogue presented by the hugely different cultural, material and religious contexts that the Anglican church operates in.