Much as we should welcome any protest against Mugabe's appalling regime, it is difficult to escape a certain sense of unease about this gesture. Condemning that which everyone else is also opposed to and for which you have no responsibility earns you effortless approval, but would it not have been much more genuinely prophetic if Dr. Sentamu had used the occasion to acknowledge the historic crisis engulfing the Anglican Communion? Making the same gesture as a promise of his personal commitment to restore the defaced identity of the Church of England in accordance with its classic formularies would have cost him popularity at home, but would have done much to restore his credibility with the Global South.

So while Anglican Evangelicals may be inclined to see Dr Sentamu's popularity as a sign of success, in fact the reverse is true. Like many of his fellow evangelicals, he is unwilling to face the uncomfortable realities bearing in upon the Church of England and I believe that much of the apparent progress made by evangelicals in the Church of England will soon be revealed as more apparent than real. Without help from the Primates of the Global South, the Church of England is going to end up on the wrong side of the fault line which is opening ever wider through the Communion as we enter 2008.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago what was to become a persistent weakness of the evangelical movement in the Church of England was revealed - an unwillingness to take action and break fellowship with ungodly leaders. Shortly after becoming Bishop of Durham in 1984, David Jenkins notoriously denied the physical resurrection and the virgin birth, yet continued to be accepted by most evangelicals as a bishop in good standing.

As an ordinand at an evangelical theological college in Durham during this period, I expected peers and tutors to respond with dismay, but instead the typical reaction of was one of weary tolerance. Subsequently much of the evangelical movement in the Church of England adjusted to living with an ever increasing level of compromise. Creedal statements became in practice optional and little of substance was done to counter the loss of doctrinal integrity - a survey conducted by Cost of Conscience in 2002 revealed, for instance, that a third of the Church's clergy doubted or disbelieved in the physical Resurrection and only half were convinced of the truth of the Virgin birth. And once the creeds have been emptied of shared meaning, biblical morality shares a similar fate.

Despite attempts by some stronger minded Evangelicals - and Anglo-Catholics - to reverse the revisionist programme, there is a structural bias which continually hinders. The price of the undoubted privileges of being the Established Church is subordination to a pervasive libertarian political culture. This has long been recognised as a factor in senior appointments and it is widely acknowledged that the House of Bishops supported the Government's landmark Civil Partnership Legislation in 2005, which gave homosexual couples the same legal recognition as marriage, through fear that otherwise they might loose their place in the House of Lords. Of course, a church that has spiritual power and conviction should be able to transform the culture rather than be overwhelmed by it, but the Church of England has lost its grip on the common doctrinal identity which could alone be the source of such strength.

Such compromise leads inevitably to confusion. This principle is clear in Proverbs 25:26 'Like a muddied spring or a polluted well is a righteous man who gives way to the wicked'. In an increasingly hostile cultural climate, doctrinal compromise leaves the Church very vulnerable. In 'Anglican Difficulties: A New Syllabus of Errors' (2004) Edward Norman, former Chancellor of York Minster and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge observes 'Institutions need to protect themselves from their ideological adversaries or they will be taken over by them or swept aside.

Truth has no built in device by which it is always recognized as truth: it requires institutional embodiment' (p14). The sad irony of the Church of England's Evangelicals is that a movement which set out to restore the Church's biblical and Reformed identity is itself becoming an ideological shambles. Despite growth in numbers, the movement is severely weakened by division, inconsistency and lack of overall vision.

A few recent examples serve to illustrate the point. Anglican Mainstream UK, an orthodox network of networks, was formed in 2003, precipitated by the proposal to make Canon Jeffrey John, a leading proponent of same sex relationships, Bishop of Reading. After a successful campaign the appointment was withdrawn, but later that same year the Archbishop of Canterbury was invited to open the 4th National Evangelical Anglican Congress in Blackpool and was warmly applauded, despite sharing the same theological convictions about same sex relationships as Canon John.

While a growing number are now recognisng that the Archbishop of Canterbury is incapable of providing sound leadership Reform and Church Society have managed to sustain a consistency and clarity. Both groups opposed the appointment of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury.

More recently, the Alpha Course movement based at Holy Trinity Brompton has partnered with a new theological college, St Mellitus which is described as a personal initiative of the Bishops of London and Chelmsford.

While the Alpha material teaches a biblical view of homosexuality, the current Bishop of Chelmsford is a Patron of Changing Attitude, a campaigning gay/lesbian group and there are a growing number of clergy in Chelmsford Diocese who are therefore not prepared to receive his ministry.

Participants on the Alpha Course could therefore feel some understandable confusion. Coming right up to date, Elaine Storkey, a leading member of the liberal leaning evangelical group 'Fulcrum' having already having won a £20,000 award for unfair dismissal against Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, is now seeking to extend the scope of religious discrimination law by arguing that it can be applied within a religion, in her case alleging discrimination by the 'conservative evangelical' management at Wycliffe Hall against her own 'open evangelical' position - a grievous example of how evangelical compromise leads to the hardening of division, not to mention the irony that someone who has sought to champion Christian values in the public sphere is opening the way for the secular 'rights' culture to trump Christian conviction by suing a bishop (James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool and chairman of the college council).

Despite this disarray in England, the wider picture of the Anglican Communion is becoming clearer as the Lambeth Conference approaches and will force on the Church of England the very choices its leadership has been trying so hard to avoid.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's determination to invite the TEC bishops who approved Gene Robinson's election as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 and his failure to exercise any form of meaningful discipline has precipitated the GAFCON gathering in Jerusalem just weeks before the Lambeth Conference.

The extent of the alienation from Canterbury felt by many in the Global South was reflected in the Rwandan Bishop's communique of 19th June 2007 announcing their decision not to attend Lambeth 2008 in which they stated that the Archbishop of Canterbury had issued invitations 'in complete disregard of our conscientious commitment to the apostolic faith once delivered.'

The existence of these two conferences and their timing exposes the reality that the Anglican Communion as presently constituted attempts to hold together an unstable amalgam of the genuine, Reformed Western Catholic Christianity, and a pseudo-Christianity which owes far more to secular humanism than Jesus Christ. Despite the misgivings of some within the Global South, GAFCON clearly has momentum and credibility as a genuinely global movement already representing most African Anglicans, Sydney Diocese and the Province of the Southern Cone. It is therefore inevitable that there will be a battle for the Anglican 'franchise' and it will greatly strengthen the claim of the revisionists if they can claim the Mother Church of the Communion as one of their own.

So the status quo, the kind of balancing act that the Archbishop of Canterbury has attempted at home and abroad, will be increasingly untenable, and it is equally clear that left to itself the Church of England's default position will be in the revisionist camp. It is in no position to reform itself - it's own Primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury is by any sensible reading of his publications a false teacher, its bishops, with a few honorable exceptions, are in thrall to the prevailing culture and the orthodox, including the evangelicals, are too fragmented and in the main too compromised to sustain reform and renewal on the scale now required.

The urgent need of the Church of England, therefore, must then be for overseas intervention by orthodox Primates who are willing unambiguously to break fellowship with the current Archbishop of Canterbury and act jointly to initiate a new Global Anglican missionary movement in England.

The GAFCON Primates would be the obvious point of reference so that overseas intervention in England would be genuinely global rather than somewhat piecemeal as has happened with the emergence of various parallel jurisdictions in the Untied States. Such an initiative would have credibility because it would be genuinely Anglican, yet free from the Erastian undertow which has now become a liability to the Church of England, and it would not be identified with any one 'party' or Province, but represent a common mind of growing Anglican Provinces around the globe.

Such a movement in England would therefore be a formidable challenge to revisionist bishops as they could not question the Anglican credentials of its members nor convincingly represent them as belonging to some sectarian tendency. The aim should not, of course, be to destroy the Church of England as an institution, but to come alongside and stimulate evangelism, spiritual awakening in the power of the Holy Spirit and faithfulness to the classic Anglican formularies, setting up parallel structures where necessary, but building strong relationships with those still within and always having in view the long term restoration of the Church's unity and identity.

So how could this to happen? Much of the groundwork for such intervention has already been accepted by the signatories to the Covenant for the Church of England published in December 2006 which encompassed evangelical and orthodox Anglicans of various persuasions.

There are also signs of encouragement emerging; Reform and Church Society are no longer alone in recognizing that the Archbishop of Canterbury is in the revisionist camp and the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir Ali, has indicated that he and up to a quarter of English Diocesan bishops are not willing to attend the Lambeth Conference. Nonetheless, so far few steps have been taken to put the covenant into practice - there is a strong impression that leaders at national level are waiting for grassroots initiatives and those at the grassroots are waiting for national level initiatives!

To break the logjam, I believe that we now need to look outside the Church of England and issue an urgent 'Macedonian call' to the GAFCON Primates to 'come over and help us' (Acts 16:9). Surely this would be fruit in keeping with repentance, an expression of humility and an admission of spiritual poverty on behalf of a Church which was once a hub of missionary enterprise, but is now so signally failing to fulfill God's purposes.

--The Rev. Charles Raven is Senior Minister of Christ Church Wyre Forest which is an independent Anglican congregation but located within Worcester Diocese.