Habgood takes his leave with a warning note

Andrew Brown reports from the General Synod in York

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood, yesterday warned the Church of England against drifting away into self-preoccupied irrelevance.

In his final speech to the General Synod, Dr Habgood, who retires this autumn after 12 years as Archbishop of York, admitted that there was a temptation for a church that was traduced when not ignored by the world to retreat from it.

"We frequently find our carefully balanced and nuanced judgements distorted and misrepresented and our Christian witness ignored because it has not been heard," he said.

In a reference to the public relations fiasco which attended the launch of Something to Celebrate, a recent report on marriage which said that "living in sin" was no longer a sin, Dr Habgood suggested that "we need the human equivalent of sniffer dogs to locate the hidden explosives and warn authors before publication".

However, he said, it was the peculiar gift of the Church of England to do its thinking in public.

The range and quality of the church's comments on public life might suffer as a result of the financial crisis, he warned. But the church must not retreat into a "counter-culture" detached from the world. "The whole world is the arena of God's action," he said. "A theology which does not treat empirical evidence seriously is not adequately equipped to address real issues in the form in which we actually encounter them."