A NEW battle over homosexual clergy erupted in the Church of England yesterday after a South London church imported an African bishop to conduct an ordination service.

The ordinations are seen as an act of defiance against the Bishop of Southwark, the Right Rev Tom Butler, who normally performs all ordinations in his diocese but who some conservatives regard as too liberal on the issue of homosexuality in the Church.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is expected to be drawn into the row over the “valid but irregular” ordinations, which could mark the beginning of the formal split in the Church over gays. Significantly, the ordinations have the backing of the conservative evangelical grouping Reform, which endorsed them at its conference this week. Reform insiders are predicting that many similar actions could follow in the dozens of Church of England parishes aligned with Reform throughout the country.

The ordinations of three men by Bishop Martin Morrison, from the Church of England in South Africa, signify a crumbling of the formal parochial and diocesan structures of the established Church because of the crisis on homosexuality.

The Rev Richard Coekin, minister of Dundonald Church in Wimbledon, southwest London, who organised the ordinations on Wednesday, admitted yesterday that they represented a “break with church tradition” but said that they were an “historic move” and that Bishop Butler had refused to perform the ordinations himself.

He now faces the loss of his licence to minister in the Southwark Diocese but intends to carry on. The Bishop had already threatened to remove Mr Coekin’s licence if the ordinations went ahead.

If Mr Coekin is not reinstated he will become a martyr for the conservative evangelical wing in the same way that Dr Jeffrey John — a celibate gay priest who was forced to stand down as the Bishop of Reading and subsequently appointed as Dean of St Albans — became a martyr to the liberal cause.

When that row erupted Dr John was a canon in Southwark Cathedral, which is also in Bishop Butler’s diocese. The ordinations came as the archbishops and bishops of the “Global South” churches of Africa, Asia and the West Indies prepare to publish plans for a formal structure after a meeting in Egypt last week.

One province, Nigeria, has already deleted all reference to Canterbury from its constitution. The proposals will create a structure that will allow the Global South bishops, who are from the conservative evangelical wing, to offer alternative oversight to evangelical parishes that find themselves in opposition to a liberal bishop.

Mr Coekin said that the last straw for him had been Bishop Butler’s recent pastoral statement on the Government’s civil partnerships law. “We are concerned by the disregard for the Bible in the name of political correctness.”

He said the bishops’ statement had effectively forbidden clergy from inquiring into the nature of the relationships of gay couples who registered their partnerships. “In other words, we are not allowed to teach them the Bible,” he said. “The Christian faith is being reformulated to follow secular government policy.”

Two of the three men ordained, the Rev Andy Fenton and the Rev Richard Perkins, trained for the Church of England ministry at the evangelical Oak Hill theological college in North London. The third man, the Rev Loots Lambrechts, who will lead a bilingual Afrikaans-English congregation in Wimbledon, trained in South Africa.

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