Harvesting intolerance
The extremes of opinion over the gay debate are tearing the Anglican church apart, an archbishop has warned.
Stephen Bates
October 2, 2006

Yesterday, while many Church of England services were celebrating in time-honoured fashion the rituals of harvest festival, an altogether starker and more urgent message about the church's future was delivered from the pulpit of Southwark Cathedral by an African archbishop. It would do every practising Anglican good to hear it.

Admittedly Southwark may not be a place where there is a sizeable harvest to celebrate, apart perhaps from the diocese's most verdant and furthest reaches, beyond Tooting and Brixton, out towards the Surrey hills, but the sermon from Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane (which will be up in full on the Southwark diocese website, for those interested) spelled out the nature of the third largest Christian religious denomination today, where distrust and intolerance rule and ancient traditions are forgotten in the lust for a self-proclaimed and self-righteous conservative evangelical orthodoxy.

Archbishop Ndungane - Desmond Tutu's successor in Cape Town - warned that the extremes of conservatism and liberalism over the gay debate which is tearing Anglicanism apart are not the only options open to sensible church people to follow and that there does not need to be a split between the two sides of what was once a famously tolerant and open-hearted church. the rest