The Uniting Church of Australia's president, Dean Drayton, called it "a really dramatic statement of intent and hope" that could not have happened anywhere else in the world.

Australia's Catholic ecumenical leader, Townsville Bishop Michael Putney, said: "It's not rhetoric or pious talk. It's a commitment to act. This is a very significant ecumenical event in Australian church history."

The churches are members of the National Council of Churches in Australia. They comprise the Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, Lutheran and Congregationalist churches, the Churches of Christ, Quakers, Salvation Army and seven Orthodox churches.

The council's general secretary, John Henderson, said not every church had signed every section of the covenant, such as intercommunion. Communion is still the biggest challenge: the Catholics and Orthodox churches do not allow people not baptised into their churches to take the sacrament. Few of the 15 churches have signed that. But the churches have committed themselves to recognising each other's baptism and ministries, sometimes sharing property and clergy, and developing closer relations.

"We are trying to tease out what churches mean by common faith and common cause," Mr Henderson said. He said the public would notice when churches started sharing property and clergy, which was already happening. "I recently visited a church near Perth that had both Catholic and Uniting Church signs out front, and which share equally."

All but four Orthodox churches agreed to share physical resources, such as church buildings, and eight churches agreed to pursue common mission and ministry. Anglicans agreed to share ordained ministers with the Lutheran and Uniting churches, and the Uniting Church with the Churches of Christ and Lutherans.

All 15 churches agreed to join in common prayer, and to seek a more visible expression of unity.

Dr Drayton said it was an enormous step for all the national churches to say they want to work towards union in the future.

"It's distant, but the intention is there," he said. "I don't think this could have happened in any other country in the world.

"Since the [16th century] Reformation, churches have more commonly kept on dividing and dividing again. But here are representatives of the church saying let's work towards a common goal. That's a really dramatic statement of intent and hope."

The conservative leadership of the Anglican church in Sydney is likely to ignore the move towards unity taken by its colleagues around the country.

The conservative Baptist, Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches are not among the National Council of Churches.

But Bishop Putney, chairman of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference ecumenism committee, said the covenant was "a serious commitment we make to each other to acknowledge where we have reached and commit ourselves to go further". Recognising each other's baptism was the foundation for everything else.

END