POLITICAL infighting over homosexuality is “eating the heart out” of the Church of England, the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, said last night.

Dr Hope, addressing nearly 2,000 clergy and lay leaders of the Church’s fast-growing evangelical wing, said there was little hope that the Church’s “gospel of reconciliation” could ever be taken seriously in a church riven by controversy.

He spoke hours after a leading clergyman on the evangelical wing compared homosexuals to the Biblical character Jezebel and called for them to be punished.

The Rev David Holloway, Vicar of Jesmond, Newcastle, told a seminar: “Homosexuality is so clearly a scriptural issue. Sexual activity outside marriage is sinful and homosexual practice is especially condemned. Modern Jezebels have to be disciplined.”

Jezebel was a Phoenecian princess who tried to introduce worship of the Caananite fertility god Baal, associated with debased sexual practices, into Israel. She was opposed by the prophet Elijah but was eventually killed in a rebellion.

The fourth National Evangelical Anglican Congress is meeting in Blackpool three weeks before the 38 primates of the worldwide Anglican Communion meet in London to debate whether punitive action needs to be taken against the episcopal church in America over the election of a gay divorced father-of-two, Canon Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire.

Dr Hope’s address amounted to a spiritual and metaphorical “banging together” of the heads of the church leaders at the congress.

“If the Gospel, the good news of that abundance of life for all given us in Jesus Christ, becomes mired in our divisions and our fallings out, then we shall all stand condemned,” he said.

Quoting John Charles Ryle’s 1879 book Holiness he said: “Politics or controversy, or party spirit, or worldliness, have eaten out the heart of lively piety in too many of us.”

Dr Hope, a leading traditionalist from the Catholic wing of the Church, also criticised evangelical styles of worship and called for a restoration of the tradition of the “quiet time” for prayer and reflection.

He said: “The truth is that we have become altogether to busy and too noisy, too wordy and too chatty. Does our worship really have to be wall-to-wall words and music? Do our prayer meetings and Bible study groups have to be a series of monologues that the Lord will just do this, that or the other thing?”

“Where is the stillness, the silence, the listening — what used to be termed among evangelicals, the quiet time? Have we become so conformed to the ways of this world that we are no longer able to hear that word of God?”

He continued: “The time to stop, to look, to listen amidst the cacophonous clamours in both church and world, is even more essential today than ever.”

“If people out there, the world beyond the Church, are only able to perceive church in terms of politics, controversy, party spirit — then what hope is there that the gospel of reconciliation with which we have been entrusted is likely even to be heard let alone taken seriously.”

Dr Hope’s address was interpreted as a coded attempt to persuade evangelicals against engineering schism through a regard for biblical orthodoxy that left no room for listening.

A similar, although more subtle, call was also made by the Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev James Jones, a leading evangelical bishop.

Quoting Dr John Stott, a former rector of the evangelical flagship All Souls Langham Place in London and one of the founders of the congress, he said evangelicals should be “open to what further truth may break upon us from Scripture”.

However, the Archbishop of Sydney, the Most Rev Peter Jensen, one of the archbishops who is leading the opposition to liberalism in the Anglican Communion, said in effect that schism was already beginning.

In an interview with The Church of England Newspaper he said: “There is a re-alignment going on independent of any meeting in October. In New Westminster about ten parishes are already out of communion with their bishop. The re-alignment has begun.”

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