Yesterday, while many Church of England services were celebrating in time-honoured fashion the rituals of harvest festival, an altogether starker and more urgent message about the church's future was delivered from the pulpit of Southwark Cathedral by an African archbishop. It would do every practising Anglican good to hear it.

Admittedly Southwark may not be a place where there is a sizeable harvest to celebrate, apart perhaps from the diocese's most verdant and furthest reaches, beyond Tooting and Brixton, out towards the Surrey hills, but the sermon from Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane (which will be up in full on the Southwark diocese website , for those interested) spelled out the nature of the third largest Christian religious denomination today, where distrust and intolerance rule and ancient traditions are forgotten in the lust for a self-proclaimed and self-righteous conservative evangelical orthodoxy.

Archbishop Ndungane - Desmond Tutu's successor in Cape Town - warned that the extremes of conservatism and liberalism over the gay debate which is tearing Anglicanism apart are not the only options open to sensible church people to follow and that there does not need to be a split between the two sides of what was once a famously tolerant and open-hearted church.

He had come almost straight from a meeting of developing-world Anglican archbishops held recently in Kigali, Rwanda (subject of an earlier blog of mine here 10 days ago) which adopted a communique effectively banishing the American Episcopal and Canadian Anglican churches for their more open and liberal stance towards gay people, promising to set up alternative arrangements for conservative North Americans and threatening not to recognise the new US presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, at the next primates get-together in Tanzania next February for the unpardonable sin of being both a woman and willing to allow same-sex blessings for religiously inclined gay couples.

Ndungane, from a different Anglican tradition, disagrees with almost all of this. "I do not believe that the primates of the global south can issue statements in the name of our provinces without proper consultation," he told the congregation in Southwark. The archbishop left the Kigali meeting early, without being told of, or having a chance to debate or disassociate himself from the communique, which another of the 20 primates at the meeting - the primate of the Philippines - has also now repudiated.

The Kigali statement was rich in self-righteousness and has rightly been picked apart as schismatic in an editorial in last Friday's Church Times. It indeed mentioned the Rwanda genocide of 12 years ago, though without reflecting that it was the result of inter-tribal intolerance and bigotry, and then went on to expatiate at length about homosexuality and the shortcomings of the US church.

Curiously, the primates found no time whatever to address shortcomings much nearer to home, such as the corruption of the Anglican church in Central Africa and particularly the weird and deranged behaviour of the Bishop of Harare, charged by his own congregation with expropriating land, embezzling funds and, most extraordinary of all, inciting the murder of his opponents. Recently, the good bishop even ordered all churches within his diocese to devote their Sunday offerings to buying him and his wife 33rd wedding anniversary presents, rather than devoting their hard-earned money to more worthwhile and, one might have thought, urgent causes. But there we are, everyday life in the ever-so righteous Anglican church in Africa.

They must hope that even the most fervent or purblind conservative evangelicals in the rest of the world will ignore or overlook such minor peccadilloes in their pursuit of the much greater wickedness of those members of the church who wish to bless the long-term, monogamous and loving commitment of same-sex couples who, in the face of all provocation, actually wish to remain members of such an institutionally homophobic church as the Anglican communion has become.

There aren't any Church of England conservatives flying out, I notice, to raise their voices against the outrageous actions of the Rt Rev Dr Nolbert Kunonga of Harare, or to offer their outspoken support to his poor, benighted parishioners. Or to call for him to be thrown out of the church like the Americans and Canadians. It is all much too difficult and much less agreeable than accepting free trips to be feted by the conservative dissidents of the US Episcopal church.

We notice the Bishop of Rochester, who says he thinks the Americans are no longer Christians, is quite prepared to bless the iron-laden but allegedly health-giving spa waters of Tunbridge Wells and that Anglican clergy the length of the country are happy to bless vegetables, tins of baked beans and family pets. But if, like the retired Archbishop of Canada, Terry Finlay, they admit to blessing a gay couple they are cast into outer darkness.

Archbishop Finlay, with whom I shared a platform (and later dinner) at a conference in Toronto last May, acknowledged at the weekend that he officiated this summer at the blessing of two old and close friends, and for such an ourageous act he has now lost his licence to officiate at weddings in his old diocese of Toronto. He told the Anglican Journal: "The couple I married are very close friends of our family. I've known one since she was a small child; her father was one of my theological professors." He said he made his decision out of a "long journey of love, friendship, support and familial relationship" which drew him to the conclusion that their love for each other was part of God's divine love and that it was appropriate that it should be divinely blessed.

What a foolhardy, not to say dastardly, thing to do. The American conservative websites are already frothing with rage and fury - not to say a lack of Christian charity - at his temerity. But the archbishop's acknowledgement is actually the more powerful and affecting because 14 years ago he fired a priest named the Rev Jim Ferry when he revealed that he was in a long-term homosexual relationship. The decision caused a furore in Canada at the time. At the conference in May, the archbishop admitted to Ferry's face that he had changed his mind and offered him an apology. Now he has gone a step further and, for his pains, has been admonished and disciplined by his successor, Bishop Colin Johnson.

Now America and Canada are starting to walk apart from the Anglican communion and it is possible that other churches nearer to home will shortly be willing to do so. The Celtic bishops of the Anglican churches in Wales, Scotland and Ireland are meeting this week and are likely to express their refusal to accept the covenant proposal being touted by Archbishop Rowan Williams (formerly one of their number as a Welsh bishop, of course) as a way of binding the worldwide church together under an agreed doctrinal and disciplinary structure. The Celts won't agree to that and are already furious about the way their former colleague has trimmed to the conservatives' wind now he is nominal head of the worldwide communion at Canterbury. If they go, where does that leave the Church of England? Still blessing vegetables and spa water? Never mind, the latter at least will keep them pure.

As evidence grows that homosexuality is due to (Mother) Nature rather than Nurture, so 'God' rather than 'Man', so should the debate in the Christian Church most especially with those who choose to deny evolution and place their faith in Creativism, ID etc..

I'm sure there'll be an answer not logical or acceptable from certain Church leaders but given their position in communities one has to question their intelligence and morality or perhaps the lack of is an essential for the job.

I think most of us who have any interest in the church and religion simply want the church to accept that gay or straight, its the way we are and that is that. The church cannot keep punishing people for being human, god created us that way so the intolerant idiots in the church need to accept that, and the extremist liberals also need to accept that forcing issues down throats isnt going to win the debate.

This is cache, read story here