A backlash against the Uniting Church in Australia's policy on ordaining practising homosexuals is developing in the wider church.
The moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, the Reverend John Wilson, yesterday questioned whether a church that affirmed the practice of homosexuality was still a church.
In a letter to the editor of The Age, Mr Wilson, without naming the Uniting Church, asked how a church could condone something that God had condemned?
"The Bible condemns the homosexual lifestyle. Nature teaches the same. Even a common understanding of anatomy demonstrates the absurdity of it," he wrote. "A church that affirms the practice of homosexuality has departed from the gospel of Jesus. Is it still a church?"
Mr Wilson said last night he had not set out to attack another church. "I've asked a logical question, and I'm asking readers to draw a conclusion."
The Presbyterian Church comprises churches that did not join the merger of Methodists, Congregationalists and some Presbyterians that formed the Uniting Church in 1977.
Prominent Uniting Church minister the Reverend Fred Nile resigned from the church yesterday in protest at the policy on homosexuals, saying the church national assembly in Melbourne last week had rejected the authority of the Bible.
The Anglican diocese of Sydney also warned last week that the new policy might retard moves for closer ties between the Uniting and Anglican churches in Australia.
The assembly passed the resolution that unmarried people should be celibate, but that there was no bar to people in committed same-sex relationships being ordained.
Mr Nile, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party and a NSW MP, said the assembly had broken with the tenet that faith and obedience are regulated and nourished by the Bible.
Mr Nile said he had renewed his affiliation with the evangelical Fellowship of Congregational Churches, in which he had been ordained a minister in 1964.
The president of the Uniting Church, the Reverend Dean Drayton, said: "Of course it's Fred's right to resign, but I'm sad that he has. The proposal that went through the assembly was explicitly designed to make space for a person like Fred within the church."
Dr Drayton said the proposal sought to acknowledge the integrity of every participants' position.