Just this week in Canada, two retired bishops were brought back to active duty, but under the authority of Gregory Venables, archbishop of the Southern Cone, which encompasses much of South America. The move coincided with the launch of a parallel national Anglican church, the Anglican Network of Canada, designed to represent the interests of a small, conservative group. In May, the Anglican archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, installed a bishop in Virginia, snubbing the U.S. Episcopal Church.

By doing so, he planted the seed of a more conservative brand of Anglicanism in America's backyard. Archbishops Venables and Akinola have worked together against the consecration of openly gay bishop Gene Robinson in the United States and the performing of same-sex blessings. "All these people brought Christianity to us, but now the Church is growing here [in Africa] like wildfire, it's spreading everywhere while the Church in England is withering, the Church in the States is going completely, and there has been a cry, 'Why don't you come? You should have come here a long time ago to evangelize.' "

Archbishop Bernard Malango, the Anglican primate of Central Africa, told a U.S. newspaper earlier this year.

"We need to send missionaries; even to Britain, we need to send missionaries to the United States, and we need to send missionaries to Canada, because those who brought the church here have lost what their intention was, and the same Bible they brought to us is being misinterpreted. "We find it very odd."

For John Stackhouse, a professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, it is no surprise the Global South retains conservative religious values.

"Theologically conservative Christianity resonates much better with cultures around the world that take the supernatural seriously," he said.

"Liberal Christianity's message of individual freedom and personally defined spirituality has little to say to these cultures."

Ephraim Radner, an Episcopal priest who teaches at Toronto's Wycliffe College, a theological school and seminary, said Anglicans here and in the U.S. can only look at the startling growth of Anglicanism in Africa and wonder what they are doing wrong.

Since the 1960s, the number of Anglicans in Canada has fallen by half to 640,000, while in the United States membership declined 32% to 2.2 million over a similar period.

"In the 1960s, everyone was writing Christianity off in Africa and thought Islam would take over the continent as the colonial powers left because Christianity really hadn't taken root," said Rev. Radner, himself a missionary to Burundi in the 1960s.

"Instead, places like Nigeria now have 17 million members, Uganda has eight million members. As a result, conservative Anglicans in the West have wondered what's going on with their churches and they've looked to Africa as a place of energy and faithfulness."

More than half the Anglicans in the world, about 41 million, are now in Africa.

"It's almost like a backlash," said Ellen Aitken, dean of the faculty of religious studies at McGill University in Montreal.

"Now we're the ones in power. We have the numbers. We're going to be missionaries to the beknighted West."

Prof. Aitken and others said the conservatism of the Global South is in part a result of the teachings brought by missionaries in the 19th century, who taught that scripture had "privilege over other sources of authority."

In the West, the trend has been to give equal footing to reason, which has led to more liberal views about such things as evolution and sexuality, she said. That may put the African Church at odds with liberals in the West, she added, but is a perfect selling point when competing with the other dominant religion: Islam.

"Many African bishops are anxious about the spread of Islam and they see wishy-washy views around sexuality coming from the West as weakening Christianity."

Rev. Radner believes the bloody sacrifices that Africans have made to keep their faith alive also lends an appeal to conservatives here who want a more authentic church. He pointed to Christians who, in recent memory, have been killed for their faith in such places as Burundi and Uganda.

Indeed, Janani Luwum, the archbishop of the Church of Uganda, was murdered by Idi Amin in 1977.

"The influence of these martyrs on the faith of Anglican Christians in Uganda cannot be underestimated," the current archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi, wrote recently in the U.S. magazine First Things.

"The Church of Uganda has been built not only on the apostles and prophets ... but also on its martyrs."

Rev. Radner said: "They feel they've paid with their blood for their Christian faith. North American conservative Anglicans look to that and say, 'Wow. This is the real thing.'

"There are Western Christians who yearn for something more real and lively, sacrificial about their faith. Their faith is real but it hasn't quite fulfilled itself. So they look for other examples. "There's a certain romanticism involved but it has some basis in the truth."

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