HARARE, Zimbabwe: (Associated Press) - A Russian Orthodox Church official has complained that a council representing hundreds of millions of Christians is dominated by liberal Westerners, and said his church was being isolated.

The Rev. Hilarion Alfeyev, who leads a five-person Russian delegation at the World Council of Churches assembly in Zimbabwe's capital, said the possibility of Orthodox Church delegates walking out was not a threat, but "an outcry of pain."

"We do not want to leave, but we want the WCC radically transformed," he said.

The Orthodox churches of Bulgaria and the Georgian republic have already quit the council, and senior Russian Orthodox Church officials did not attend the assembly, which met in early December.

The council has a total constituency of 350 to 450 million non-Catholic Christians. The assembly, with 960 delegates from 112 countries, is the WCC's highest deliberative body.

Alfeyev said his church is the largest in the WCC, putting its membership at more than 100 million. "Many Protestant churches have adopted the tendencies of liberal western society," Alfeyev said. "The WCC agenda is dominated by a western Protestant ethos.... We are becoming more and more isolated."

Orthodox leaders have said many on the council take too liberal a stance on key issues including homosexuality and the inclusion of women in the clergy.

The Orthodox pleas drew a testy response from several Protestants at the assembly, including a bishop from Germany who expressed irritation that the Russian had cited his church's size.

In remarks that drew the day's warmest applause, one of the first generation of women priests in the Church of England, Rev. Rose Hudson-Wilkin, also complained about the threatened walk-outs.

"You say I'm bigger than you are, or we have this great tradition. This is all about power," she said. "Let's not wrap it up in theological language."

"We live a strange world. On one hand modern technology has created a global community, yet it seems everywhere we look we see anything but harmony. Instead envy, strife, hatred and even war, almost as though there was a hidden desire within the human race toward the 'clan mentality,' the my country, my race, my religion syndrome. It has permeated nearly all aspects of our world, no matter where we live."

The lone area where one would think we might find some degree of harmony would be in modern so-called Christianity. After all, Jesus taught that God is love. In fact, on the night before He died He made it clear that we can tell who His disciples are by the love they share for one another. "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13:35). Yet what we see is a different pattern-one of splits and divisions-and a parting of the ways. It will take the return of Christ to put it all back together.