HEART AND SOUL (BBC World Service, Friday) was centred on Emily Buchanan’s interview with “Appiah”, a pseudonymous former Anglican cleric in Lagos State, Nigeria, who had been dismissed from a post in parish ministry for being gay.

Appiah had a troubled childhood. His family discovered him viewing gay pornography on the internet while he was still an adolescent, and he was subsequently disowned by his parents and left home at 16. He moved in with gay friends, but continued to attend church regularly, and eventually entered ordination training, where he discovered an active gay “clique”.

He reported an intensely homophobic culture in Nigerian Anglicanism, in which clergy were expected to make annual public oaths of abstaining from homosexual activity. After an anonymous report to his bishop that he was having an affair with a student teacher, he was sacked. He moved to the Cherubim and Seraphim Church, where he is a pastor. He is also involved with pro-LGBTQ NGOs, albeit while still “in the closet”.

The programme lost energy in its latter half, when it used material recorded by the BBC at GAFCON’s meeting at Abuja in March (News, 13 March). GAFCON was described as “strongly represented in Africa” and determined to “reshape the Anglican Communion itself”. That it had not been so successful in doing so since last autumn was not mentioned. Indeed, Ms Buchanan referred to it as “the new global Anglican Communion”.

The Cherubim and Seraphim Church was mentioned in passing and never revealed as one of the oldest African-initiated denominations in Nigeria.

The power of the human-interest story could have introduced at least a little discussion of the ways in which recent months have not proved as fruitful for GAFCON as it hoped. This was an opportunity missed — not least for the World Service’s large and often theologically aware audience in Anglophone Africa.

Sunday Sequence (Radio Ulster) did not miss the chance to report on the Anglican Consultative Council meeting held on its patch last week (News, 3 July). Eve Rosato interviewed the Archbishop in Jerusalem, Dr Hosam Naoum, for 15 minutes.

While almost every Province sent a delegation, Dr Naoum acknowledged that some of those attending were “not participating fully” in proceedings, and “we are still far from unity in its fullest sense.” He hoped that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals represented “a new description of what the Communion will look like in the future”.

Dr Naoum disavowed simple comparisons between the conflict in the Middle East and Northern Ireland or South Africa, but was inspired by the story of Richard Moore, whom he met in Derry. Mr Moore lost his sight after being hit by a rubber bullet in Derry, at the age of ten, and in recent years had sought out and been reconciled with the soldier who shot him (News, 10 July).