I rather like the Church of England’s new prayers. Some of them read well. “Oh God, you know the disorder of our sinful lives, set straight our crooked hearts,” goes one. “Bring us out of the prison of our despair,” is another. “Rescue us from the chaos of sin,” and “Help us to turn away from those habits which harm our bodies and poison our minds” — just the kind of thing we expect to hear in church.

But that was not what made the front pages yesterday. Instead, it was a sudden lurch into gender-correctness. The collect for Epiphany edits out a reference to the “three wise men” and substitutes instead “the Magi”, a term which may not mean much to parishioners, but avoids being gender-specific. The General Synod explained that the word probably came from the Greek and referred to officials at the Persian court. While it was unlikely that any of them were women, it added, the possibility could not be ignored. The visitors who came to see the Christ-child were, as a spokes- person put it, “not necessarily wise and not necessarily men”.

How true, how very true. Indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more one realises that this may be the start of something very big indeed. History and religion are, after all, littered with references which, in our lazy male-orientated way, we have assumed to refer to men, but which may, on closer study, be far more inclusive. One must doubt, for instance, that the Knights of the Roundtable were all male — for one thing, it was very hard to tell beneath all that armour, and there was that rum business of King Arthur’s parents, who seem to have contracted a same-sex marriage after Merlin cast a spell and made his mother look like his father. I admit that evidence suggesting Lancelot was a woman, and that his relationship with Guinevere was therefore of the lesbian variety, are remote, but it cannot be ruled out.

And this, surely, is the point. Without definite proof to the contrary, one has to reappraise everything. The Venerable Bede — does that sound like a man’s name? The Men of Harlech — would “Warriors famed in song and story/Coming from the mountains hoary” have simply left all the women behind? King Canute? Rubbish. Only a woman would have done something as daft as pretending to stop the sea coming in (or, sorry, been wise enough to show her courtiers it couldn’t be done). Henry II was widely misreported when he assembled juries consisting of “12 good men and true”. He originally meant to include women, but his secretary was off that day, and it would have meant redrafting the entire scroll.

Oh yes, this is going to be fun. When it comes to the Bible itself, where do you start? Well, of course, someone already has. There is now an inclusive version of the Good Book which has deleted all unnecessary references to men or male-related subjects. It is here, incidentally, that we encounter the first use of “the Magi” instead of the three wise men, and if the synod wishes to progress further down this route, it will find no lack of helpful advice. God the Father becomes the “father-mother”, as in “Our father-mother which art in heaven”, and the “Son of Man” is “the human one”. Lord and king become ruler and sovereign, and the kingdom of heaven, with all its sexist implications, becomes simply “the dominion”. Women no longer “submit” to their husbands, but are “committed”, and, in a riot of political correctness, references to darkness and light are expunged, while the blind and the lame, become “those who are disabled”.

Exciting as all this undoubtedly is, one has to report a drawback. Literary merit has been forced to take a back seat. Gender-specificity does not, it seems, go hand in hand with good or even comprehensible English. Take this, for instance: “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only child so that everyone who believed in that child may not perish but may have eternal life.”

King James it isn’t, and if the Church of England is intent on taking its campaign for correctness any further, now is the time to pause for thought. A prayer which offends nobody may be admirable in one way, but if nobody can follow it, what’s the point?

The idea that people no longer want to hear inspiring language or to pray in sentences that lift the spirits is surely absurd. If congregations continue to fall, it may well be because of the deadening effect of new translations which satisfy the purists but do little to warm the heart.

The synod would do well to heed the good advice of Richard Bancroft, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604, just as work was beginning on the King James version of the Bible. “If every man’s humour were followed,” he warned, “there would be no end of translating.”

Contribute to the Debate at comment@thetimes.co.uk