Dr Nazir-Ali was answering questions after addressing the Assembly on “Shaping a confused Church”. In the current crisis, discipline was required because people had departed from the unchanging scripture. “In our own situation, any discipline that is enforced must be about maintaining fellowship between Churches.”

It was not the sinner that was the object of condemnation, but the church leaders who had “actively encouraged sin”.

Dr Nazir-Ali went on: “If I ordained someone who should not be ordained, the greater responsibility is mine. There are degrees of responsibility that will have to be recognised.”

Dr Nazir-Ali had just returned from Pittsburg in the United States. There he found that people had not moved away from traditional faith. “Why should we penalise them? I don’t think that we will. Our task is to encourage them, and I think that they are encouraged.”
Members of the Assembly were divided over the way forward. The Ven. Paul Gardner, chairman of the Church of England Evangelical Council, said that the council wanted to pull together “a practical, measured unity” that would draw people who opposed the liberal developments in the Communion.

“Be grateful for that part of the world that is speaking what we dare not speak,” he said, referring to Anglicans in Africa, Asia and parts of the Americas. God had been raising up a body of believers who could now respond to the crisis, he said. They had “stood up for what is pure, holy, good in the light of scripture”.

Loyalty to the Church of England lay deep in the Evangelical psyche, Mr Gardner went on. “But we must ask: who are the false teachers who despise those parts where the Church is growing?” The Church suffered “under the onslaught of liberalism”.

Canon Chris Neal, international director of CMS, said that there was no guarantee that the Anglican Church would survive. The Church was entering a “period of liminality — a time of melt down”.

He went on to challenge parish and diocesan structures. Picking up the theme of a “mission-shaped” Church, he said that people were trying to “think outside the box”. But he warned: “There is a massive black hole in the centre, with an immense gravitational pull,” from which it was very hard to break free.

Two youth workers, Ali Cambell and Lucy Plumb, urged Evangelicals not to overlook the ministry of older people.

“It is nonsense to put out to pasture the old dear who has been doing it for 70 years and employ a professional,” Mr Cambell said. “What matters is to be authentic. The professional may be good at ticking the boxes but not have his heart in it.”

He went on: “Jesus had more to say about pride than he did about sexual morality. But if you slip up about sex, then you are out. If you are proud, and think that you are God’s gift, you strut around in church.”

The Revd Bob Key, general director of CPAS — the Church of England’s largest patron — said: “God will be faithful and will not leave himself without witnesses, but will that witness be Anglican?” What was needed, he said, was more spirit, less system; more liberty, less law; more people, less power.

Large churches, full of people, were not necessarily a sign of hope. And he quoted Danny DeVito: “You know you are in trouble when you have a growing share of a declining market.”

END