A formal split in the Anglican Church worldwide moved closer yesterday after clergy and laity in the US voted to allow the consecration of openly gay bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury expressed “regret” over a decision by Anglicans in the US that represents a blow to his hopes for Church unity. Dr Rowan Williams made clear his concern after the Episcopal Church voted at the triannual General Convention in California to overturn a moratorium on gay ordinations.

Clergy and laity in the US backed a motion that “acknowledges that God has called and may call any individual in the Church to any ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church, in accordance with the discernment process set forth in the Constitution and Canons of the Church”.

This means that anyone will be able to be ordained regardless of sexuality if the US bishops back the move when they vote on it in the next few days, making formal schism inevitable.

The vote represents a snub to Dr Williams, who flew last week to the convention and pleaded in a sermon on Thursday for the Episcopalians not to do anything to “push us further apart”, thereby jeopardising the fragile Church unity he has struggled so hard to maintain.

Dr Williams has found his time as Archbishop dominated by having to deal with the fallout from the consecration of the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, an event that has taken the worldwide church to the brink of schism. Only last month conservative Episcopalians set up a new province, the Anglican Church in North America, which is seeking recognition from Dr Williams and the General Synod of the Church of England.

Anglican leaders requested the moratorium five years ago in an attempt to prevent schism. The Episcopal Church General Convention three years ago urged “restraint” over the election of bishops whose “manner of life” would cause offence to the wider Anglican Communion.

But Dr Williams’s hopes of maintaining unity seemed increasingly futile as the Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori, warned the Church of England that it should not recognise the new province, arguing “schism is not a Christian act”.

About a quarter of General Synod members, including four diocesan and two suffragan bishops, back a private member’s motion calling on the Church of England to declare itself “in communion” with the American conservatives.

Earlier Bishop Jefferts Schori “threw a hand grenade” into proceedings, as USA Today’s Faith and Reason blog put it, when she said that the tendency to focus on individual salvation in the debate over sexual ethics was “heresy” and “idolatry”.