Homosexuals have long served in the Christian church, their sexual inclinations either ignored or unobserved. Over the past 30 years however, Christian denomi-nations across the world have started to openly ordain gay men and women – appointments which cause as much controversy today as they did in the 1970s.

BBC News Online looks at some of the key dates in homosexuals’ battle to join the priesthood.

1961 – The Vatican declares that all those "affected by the perverse inclination" towards homosexuality must be barred from taking religious vows or being ordained within the Roman Catholic Church.

June 1972 – Rev William Johnson becomes the first openly gay candidate to be ordained in a Christian institution, the United Church of Christ.

September 1972 – The Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Netherlands becomes the first European Christian denomination to decide that lesbians and gays could serve as pastors. Over the next 30 years it is joined by a dozen other Protestant churches on the continent.

1988 – The United Church of Canada authorises the ordination of homosexuals, the first Christian denomination in the country to do so.

1989 – The US Anglican bishop John Spong ordains Robert Williams, a homosexual. Mr Williams later loses his job after denouncing monogamy and making untoward remarks about Mother Theresa.

1994 – The Old Catholic Church of Austria opens the way for gay clergy along with other European Catholic churches which split with Rome in the 19th Century, including those in Germany and the Netherlands.

2000 – Norway’s minister of churches upholds the appointment of Jene Torstein Olsen, the first openly gay clergyman hired to preach in the Church of Norway.

January 2003 – The Vatican’s Congregation for Worship publishes an open letter stating: "The ordination to the priesthood of homosexual men, or men with homosexual tendencies, is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from a pastoral point of view, very risky."

June 2003 – An acknowledged homosexual living a celibate life is appointed bishop of Reading, in England. He declines to take up the post after his appointment causes a bitter row within the international Anglican Church.

July 2003 – The Uniting Church in Australia, the country’s third largest church, becomes its first mainstream denomination to accept homosexual priests. It also prompts bitter criticism from the Anglican Church.

August 2003 – The rank and file of the Anglican Church in America vote to elect an openly gay bishop, Rev Canon Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Church leaders approve his appointment, but not before allegations of "inappropriate conduct" were made against him.

The Assemblies of God (AoG) Church General Council in the US has approved a controversial resolution giving its 33,000 ministers more authority to officiate at weddings of people who have been divorced.

"This is not a statement in favour of divorce," said Michael Jackson, a pastor from Janesville, Wisconsin, who sponsored the resolution. Instead, Jackson said, the resolution empowers pastors to make their own decisions about who should marry for the 2.7 million-member Pentecostal denomination in the US.

Under current church law, ministers can only officiate at the weddings of church members who were divorced because of adultery or abandonment. – MCJ online

A new government ministry in Sri Lanka has compiled a list of officially recognised churches. However, only the Roman Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations were included on the list, while independent and evangelical churches were excluded.

Evangelical Christians comprise less than one percent of the population in Sri Lanka, numbering about 120,000, according to the Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka (EASL). "If a church is not included in this list, it will become a ‘rebel’ organisation as far as the government is concerned," said a member of the EASL.

The announcement by the ministry follows a series of violent attacks against churches in recent months. – Compass

India’s coalition government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is about to introduce fresh rules to prevent religious conversion across the nation. Entitled "Change of Religion of the Members of SC/ST (Regulation and Approval) Rule," the law will come into effect once published in the official gazette. Framed by the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the rule has no approval from the Indian Parliament.

The BJP is vigorously opposing conversion of backward Hindus to Christianity and Buddhism. "This will effectively deny a large section of Indians their right to religious faith ensured by India’s Constitution," said Oliver D’Souza of the All India Christian Council. "This judgment and the present rule can be questioned on the grounds of fundamental rights. We will make sure that religious rights of the minorities are protected."

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) and the Micah Network are creating a global evangelical campaign – called the Micah Challenge – to mobilise millions of evangelical Christians against poverty. The campaign’s goals look both inwards, to a deepening of evangelical commitment to the poor, and outwards, to influence leaders to implement policy changes that could dramatically and sustainably reduce poverty.

Micah Challenge will target policy change at all levels needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a universally-agreed roadmap towards the halving of key poverty indicators by 2015.

Progress towards the achievement of the MDGs is being carefully bench- marked and tracked by the United Nations Development Program, while the contribution made by evangelical Christians and Christian organisations will be indicated by a register of churches, communities, organisations and individuals who have signed the Micah Challenge Declaration and participated in advocacy activities.

The global campaign will kick off with a series of international events in late 2003 and early 2004. The launch of national campaigns will follow.