He is talking matter-of-factly about the faux-Christian path -- "post-Christianity," he calls it, not admiringly -- that he believes Anglicans in Canada, the United States and Europe are wandering along.

Of the relationship between post-Christians and Christians like himself, he says, "We are not speaking with each other, we are not communicating."

His analysis does not bode well for the 70-million-member World Anglican Communion. Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon represents a contemporary face of Christianity that has yet to register fully in Western thought: The faith that the West exported to the rest of the planet (whether the rest of the planet liked it or not at the time) is now primarily a Third World faith.

Britain's second-most-senior religious leader, David Hope, the Anglican Archbishop of York, underscored that fact in a BBC interview a few days ago. "I'd be a bit hard pushed to say we were a Christian country," he said of the motherland of Anglicanism.

The Archbishop of York pointed out that while the overwhelming majority of Britain's population defines itself as Christian, only a small fraction is actually engaged in the life of the church. Most Christian church leaders in Canada could say the same.

Not so in Nigeria. The Nigerian Anglican Church is the second largest in the Anglican Communion. And unlike the members of the nominally larger Church of England, Nigeria's 17 million Anglicans pretty much all practise their faith.

Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon was educated in the West. Along with degrees in theology, he holds a doctorate in Islamic studies. He is comfortable engaging in Western-style theological and cultural debate.

The most visible fault line in his view of the split between Western Anglicanism and the church in the rest of the world is homosexuality.

The Episcopal (Anglican) Church of the United States has appointed a practising homosexual bishop. The Canadian Anglican Church has spoken of the sanctity of committed homosexual relationships.

Several dioceses in the two churches have approved rites for the blessing of same-sex unions.

The overwhelming majority of Anglican leaders in the rest of the world, meanwhile, have condemned the actions as heretical -- or what passes for heresy in Anglicanism -- contrary to scripture and even sinful.

The issue is symptomatic of a larger, more profound problem, says Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon, who has been the Nigerian church's representative on two commissions the Anglican Communion convened to try to hold the church together on homosexuality.

He speaks of a neocolonial mentality among Western Anglicans -- particularly in the U.S. Episcopal church -- who think that a liberal Christian tail can wag the rest of the Christian dog.

He talks of a Western "cultural" Christianity that does not understand the activist Christianity of the rest of the world, and a Western church that has let itself drift to the margin of public life and public discourse -- "a problem I find with Canada, in particular" -- unlike the very activist moral-watchdog role played by his own church in Nigeria.

He talks about a Christianity outside the West that is in muscular competition for adherents against other faiths, particularly Islam.

In Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon's state of Kaduna, with a population of four million, there are roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. Pentecostal Christians are a significant presence, as are practitioners of traditional religion.

More than 70 per cent of his Anglican following has come to the church through conversion, he says. "For us, in Africa, you cannot be a cultural Christian," he says.

"You must have a personal encounter with Jesus Christ."

And he says: "In my own culture . . . we have no word for homosexuality."

Practitioners of traditionalist religion consider it a spiritual illness. "So if I have a tendency to feel attracted to the same sex," Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon says, "I will go as a non-Christian to the native traditional medicine man and, because it is a spiritual problem, he will heal me out of it."

In Islam, of course, it is forbidden.

Thus, he says bluntly: "If you now ask us as [Nigerian] Christians to accept same-sex relations as a lifestyle, we have no gospel to proclaim."

His church, in other words, would be dead in the water.

It is why Anglicanism -- having prided itself throughout its history on accommodating theological differences -- is today on the lip of schism.

Or as British religion sociologist David Martin put it recently: "Traditional Anglicanism, based on reasonableness, tact and forbearance, [has now] run into the atmosphere of culture wars . . . where everything is disagreeably explicit.

"With Islam as an immediate neighbour and competitor -- and competition with Pentecostalism, which is the world's most rapidly growing faith, bar none -- African mainstream Christians could not embrace Western liberal views even if they wanted to."

Which, in Nigeria, they certainly don't. Nigerian Anglicanism is absolutely evangelical, and fundamentalist in its interpretation of biblical scripture.

"For us, the Bible is very clear. It says homosexuality is not right," Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon says.

The theology of liberal Anglicanism -- that scripture is always to be interpreted in the light of new knowledge -- doesn't wash.

"The post-Christian paradigm believes that we have gone beyond the superstition we have in the Bible, that some of these things the Bible talks about are as a result of limited knowledge, and now we are in a technological age, we are in a scientific age, and therefore certain things no longer apply.

"And we say no. The word of God is final."

Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon points out that the Anglican Church in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa has had to deal with other cultural practices at odds with scripture, such as polygamy.

He admits polygamists to the church in Kaduna, but they can't be leaders; if they take on another wife after conversion to Christianity, he refuses them the Eucharist.

The Anglican Communion's most recent effort to resolve the church's division over homosexuality -- the Windsor Commission, of which Archbishop Oduwu-Fearon was a member -- concluded wistfully that Anglicans in the future may no longer be able to walk together.

The Archbishop could be one of the leaders to take that step, but he says it is not yet inevitable. Many Christian leaders outside the West understand the cultural presence of homosexuality in Western society, he says.

"Everybody knows it's there. In the past three years, I've learned a lot about homosexuality. I've gotten to know about the Canadian and American churches. I was able to educate my own colleagues."

He says attitudes about homosexuality in the Christian church outside the West are changing.

"In the Nigerian church, there's been a paradigm shift. We've moved a long way from saying that you cannot be a Christian and a homosexual.

"But what irks the African Christian is this: Now you are promoting it as a lifestyle. That for us goes against our understanding of the Bible. What is creating the problem is the way the West is flagging it, is promoting it as an intelligent lifestyle. For us, it does not have the force of the Christian Gospel.

"And when you have a family [the Anglican Communion], there are rules. There are do's and don'ts. If you want to remain a family, there are boundaries. So you ask, Will this rupture the family, will this create discomfort for members of the family?

"The Canadians and Americans defaulted, by taking a decision that ruptured the family. They did not wait. It didn't matter how the rest of the family feels."

Who speaks for world Christianity these days? Certainly the Anglican Archbishop of Kaduna does.

"I wouldn't have done anything to rupture my family," he says.

Michael Valpy writes on faith and ethics for The Globe and Mail.