Traditionalist Anglican clerics warned the US and Canadian churches on Monday that their liberal actions over gay rights were tearing apart the 450-year-old church and told them to change their ways urgently.
In some of the strongest language they have used so far in an already acrimonious dispute, churches from Africa, Asia and Latin America said they saw no evidence yet that US and Canadian Anglicans were responding to calls for "repentance".
The 77 million-strong Anglican church has been divided since 2003 when the US Episcopal Church (ECUSA) ordained a gay bishop and Canadian Anglicans began blessing same-sex marriages.
The move outraged traditionalists who dominate southern hemisphere churches, the so-called Global South. They say the Bible condemns homosexuality and that liberals in the West have introduced unacceptable "innovations" into biblical teaching.
"We recognise with regret the growing evidence that the provinces, which have taken action creating the current crisis in the (Anglican) communion, continue moving in a direction that will result in their walking apart," the group said in a communique issued on Monday after a six-day meeting in Egypt.
"We call for urgent and serious implementation of the recommendations of the Windsor Report," the group of 20 church provinces said, referring to an Anglican report which laid down steps to be taken in bid to resolve the dispute.
The Windsor Report included calls for the US and Canadian churches to express regret for their actions.
Archbishop Robin Eames, who led the Windsor task force, has said he believes the report's demands have now been broadly met. But conservatives say the US and Canadian churches only said sorry for causing hurt but did not say their actions were wrong.
"We see no evidence that both ECUSA and the Anglican Church of Canada are willing to accept the generally accepted teaching, nor is there evidence that they are willing to turn back from their innovations," the Global South communique said.
Officials say the final position of both churches will only emerge from US and Canadian conventions in 2006 and 2007.
African Anglicans have been among the fiercest critics of the liberal trends, fearing their followers could desert to other more conservative Christian denominations or Islam.
"(The communique) is a statement of warning that they (the US and Canadian churches) may, by their actions, force themselves out of the communion," said Nigeria's Canon AkinTunde Popoola. "This is one of the strongest collective statements."
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, urged the two camps in the debate to keep talking when he addressed the Global South meeting on Friday. But he has also acknowledged the depth of the rift.
Unlike the powerful Vatican in the Catholic church, the See of Canterbury of has no power to impose a solution.
The group said it backed an idea for an "Anglican covenant", proposed in the Windsor report. An Anglican official said such a covenant would involve member churches agreeing not to act independently of others in certain mutually agreed areas.
The church in Nigeria, home to a quarter of the world's Anglicans, said in September it had deleted references to Canterbury in its constitution, a move it said would open its doors to conservatives opposed to the advancement of gay rights.
The Global South said it was committed to recognising "networks" of conservative Anglicans in North America opposed to liberal trends in their churches.
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