Dissident members of the Uniting Church last night gave the leadership a petition with more than 20,000 signatures in a "last-ditch" attempt to avoid schism.
The petition urges the church's standing committee to reverse last month's decision by the national assembly in Melbourne to approve ordaining practising homosexuals, and to reform the assembly to make it more representative.
If the standing committee, which meets in Sydney this weekend, does not act, tens of thousands of members will leave the church, according to the evangelicals' spokeswoman, Mary Hawkes.
"We're in a last-ditch action here," Mrs Hawkes said. "The average politician given a petition of 20,000 would be somewhat distressed - it would be a call to action. Whether it will be for the average church politician, I don't know."
The president of the Uniting Church, the Reverend Dean Drayton, said yesterday the committee would receive the petition.
"The church obviously hears when people are in pain, and I believe it will be a creative response," he said.
But the committee would have to weigh the petition against the rest of the church, which hadn't made a specific response. "There's always a tension in the life of the church between the holiness and justice movements," Dr Drayton said.
Mrs Hawkes said the 20,000 signatures were gathered in just three Sundays, despite some ministers refusing to allow the petition into their churches.
She said the assembly should be recalled so it could send the question back to congregations, then restructured to reflect the whole church.
"Assembly is clearly unrepresentative and out of touch. It's making decisions, which are abhorrent to the people of the church," she said.
The 20,000 petitioners are a significant proportion of the church. In the 2001 census, 1.2 million people claimed affiliation with the Uniting Church, but the National Church Life Survey says about one-10th of that attend a Uniting Church each Sunday, while Dr Drayton put the figure at 200,000 or so.
Mrs Hawkes said she was still encouraging evangelicals to stay in the Uniting Church, but warned that if the standing committee did not act, "huge numbers of people will say, 'that's it, we're going' ".
Some have already left. The main options seem to be the Anglican church in Sydney, returning to the Presbyterian, Wesleyan and Congregationalist churches from which the Uniting Church was formed in 1977, joining a looser network of churches or forming a new denomination.