Local churches around the UK have a spiritual and moral responsibility to support the new Coalition for Marriage launched this week.
This campaign is a theological litmus test for the UK Church. Churches that refuse to support C4M demonstrate that they have abandoned the authority of the Bible.
C4M, which is backed by the Christian Institute, CARE, Christian Concern, the Evangelical Alliance, and the Family Education Trust, is gathering signatures for a petition against Mr Cameron's bid to redefine marriage.
If the leadership of the Church of England fails to get behind C4M, then that will be an indication that corrosive theological liberalism, so destructive of mission, has gained control of the institutional hierarchy.
Under that scenario, Anglican evangelicals would need to be pro-active both in supporting C4M and in denouncing their denominational leadership for failing to uphold the truth of God's Word.
Unfortunately, a fudge on marriage by the Church of England bishops would be indicative of the failure of the Anglican evangelical strategy since the 1970s. Back in the days of T-Rex and flared trousers, Anglican evangelical leaders started to encourage younger ministers to engage with the denominational structures of the Church of England. This led in the 1980s and 1990s to a greater number of evangelicals being appointed archdeacons and bishops. The idea was to transform the Church of England by the institutional route.
Some institutional transformation 35 years on if the House of Bishops cannot unite to stand up against same-sex marriage. The fragility of the bishops' collegiality behind the sanctity of heterosexual marriage was exposed when the Bishop of Salisbury Nicholas Holtam broke ranks earlier this month with supportive noises in The Times in favour of homosexual 'marriage'.
Lord Carey, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1990, was a product of the post-war Anglican evangelical inside strategy. He is the most prominent public figure behind C4M. It is significant to note how much more bold and clear he has become in speaking up for biblical truth since he stopped being Archbishop in 2002.
He never abandoned the biblical convictions he learned from the Dagenham vicar who led him to the Lord Jesus Christ as a teenager in the early 1950s. But freed from the straightjacket of leadership in a theologically eclectic denomination he now feels free to express them. The rapid advance of political correctness in British national life in the past decade has roused him to speak out from his platform in the House of Lords.
