The way that the Bible is read in Church has driven him to despair: “I am often saddened by the inattention with which the Bible is read in worship.

“Only rarely, I am tempted to say, do I gain the impression that the person reading the Scriptures actually believes that what is being read means something.”

Bishop Forster expressed concern about the way that the Bible was being treated “more or less like any other book” and urged for the recovery of its “true place of honour in the life of the Church”.

Anglicanism must recapture a theological seriousness, which he argued has been significantly lost.

“The central message from the African Church to the Western Churches at the present time is that we are accommodating too much to an increasingly secular culture. But how will we resist this, without a clear and widely held appreciation of the distinct teaching of the Gospel?”

He suggested that the neglect of the Prayer Book has “gone hand in hand with a certain neglect of the seriousness and dignity of our worship”.

Sufficiently detailed attention is not being paid to fundamental doctrinal theology, the Bishop said. He added that the Bible “has been practically ignored to the point that many Christians no longer read it.”

Bishop Forster, who was among a group of bishops who sent a letter expressing concern over the appointment of the gay canon, Jeffrey John, to be Bishop of Reading, said that the current crisis owed much to the secularisation of modern Christianity.

“In our Anglican future I believe we need to rediscover in renewed ways what it means to live a Christian life, perhaps I should say the Christian life. We have become deeply secularised in modern European Christianity: that, I believe, is one lesson which we should draw from the current debates over human sexuality. It is certainly the lesson which the African Church has drawn.”

END