There is an industry saying that people uncritically accept media reports, except in their area of expertise. Then the media gets it totally wrong. Although I have been a journalist for 30 years, my time in the GAFCON pressroom proved that old adage.

As well as being responsible for Archbishop Jensen's media liaison, I was privileged to be a part of the GAFCON media team, a group made up of Anglican press officers from around the world: Uganda, Canada, Nigeria, the US and Kenya plus a Norwegian fellow traveller.

Our job was the press releases, media briefings and news conferences that took place over the seven days of the conference. As you may have noticed in the papers, we met with varying success. But it was a fascinating study in modern journalism and shared ignorance.

It is not entirely the journalists' fault. 

Anglicanism is deeply complex. Add to that the deadlines and restrictions under which some of these people work and you begin to see why we get the results we do.
The journalists who were there grasped the enormity and significance of what was happening and generally presented things fairly " with a few exceptions.

For example, there was the reporter from one of the local Israeli newspapers who arrived with no knowledge at all of the Anglican church, yet a headline in his head: "Anti-gay gathering in Jerusalem".

He spent 20 minutes in the building, heard only bits of what I said and left his photographer to get a photo.

Contrast that with the Jerusalem Post reporter, a highly intelligent and experienced journalist, who spent half an hour with me on the first day, and despite being Jewish with no background knowledge of Protestantism, asked perceptive questions. He was there at all the significant moments. I wish some Australian media had been that attentive!

A number of the Australian and British reporters were Jerusalem-based foreign correspondents, not religion specialists. They are so used to battlefields and Middle East politics that they reported our conference through that lens.

In the first days "schism' was the word bandied about most often. We managed to put that to rest by day three, in fact so effectively that some media lost interest. "Well if it isn't schism, we don't want to know about it…." was the attitude.

One of our biggest challenges was a bright and eager journalist, who had little experience in religious reporting and was from a background that meant that she was opposed to Christian evangelism. She was also young and, if I can say this without sounding like a patronising middle-aged man, had a lot of life yet to experience.

How the world viewed what was happening at GAFCON was in the hands of this motley lot " as well as a host of others who weren't even there but relied on the phone and internet. The whole conference had no right to succeed: put together in six months, across geographical and cultural lines and on a very tight budget.

Many in the Anglican world were willing it to fail. Some of the journalists only made last-minute decisions to come and expected it would be a shambles.

But by the end, even those naysayers were astonished at the achievements of GAFCON. The negative reaction in some quarters has been so flustered and panicky because its opponents were expecting they would only have to bury a pile of ashes rather than grapple with a new and living voice within world Anglicanism.