A senior adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned Anglicans against making homosexuality a "shibboleth" that could result in the destruction of their church.

Canon Gregory Cameron, the top canon lawyer who helps run the headquarters of the worldwide Anglican Communion, also criticised the "dark side" of western Anglicanism which assumes superiority over Anglicans in the developing world.

In a lecture about the crisis facing world Anglicanism, Canon Cameron said that senior clerics in the Western church were in danger of adopting a NATO-style attitude of "intellectual superiority".

He criticised the US church, which donates generously to the African and Asian evangelical provinces of the Global South, for placing "implicit obligations" on the recipients of their largesse.

Urging understanding of the conservative evangelicalism which led to a rival Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans being set up in Jerusalem last week, Canon Cameron said: "The average Anglican is a black woman under the age of 30, who earns two dollars a day, has a family of at least three children, has lost two close relatives to AIDs, and who will walk four miles to Church for a three hour service on a Sunday."

Canon Cameron, who was Dr Rowan Williams' chaplain when he was a bishop his homeland of Wales, is Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican and advises not just Dr Williams but all 38 primates of the worldwide communion.

Although his name is not widely known outside the church, he is arguably the most influential clergyman behind the scenes within it.

Canon Cameron, delivering the Hellins Lecture at the Dean's Library in St Asaph, Wales, said: "The challenge of the life of the Communion is such at the moment that if we cannot express the ties that hold us together, then we are condemned to a far more serious fate."

He said the ties of friendship in the Anglican Communion were still strong.

But he added: "Alongside these ties of friendship - the so-called bonds of affection which have been described as holding the Anglican Communion together – there has lurked an unconscious sense of superiority and dependency: a sense that all the really educated theologians find their homes in Oxbridge, and that all the really big money comes from the United States.

"It has been said, with a certain sense of irony, that in the Anglican Communion, the Africans pray, the Americans pay, and the English write all the documents."

Canon Cameron said: "The dark side to the life of the Anglican Communion is that too often the theological graduates of the seminaries of the NATO alliance do unconsciously adopt an air of

educational superiority, while many American church leaders do not even seem to notice, even while they often unconsciously rely upon, the implicit obligations which they place on the recipients of their largesse."