A senior adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned Anglicans that they risk the destruction of their Church if they insist on making homosexuality a “shibboleth”.

Canon Gregory Cameron, the most senior expert in religious law helping to run the headquarters of the worldwide Anglican Communion, drew parallels from scripture to present a stark choice between unity and “internecine warfare”.

In a lecture in the diocese of St Asaph, Wales, he 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.”

But he also expressed a surprising degree of sympathy with traditionalists in the developing world who are demanding a return to strict biblical teaching.

He said that a “dark side” of the Church, including senior Western clerics, was in danger of adopting an attitude of “intellectual superiority”.

Canon Cameron is the architect of the new Anglican Covenant to be debated at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury this month.