An excerpt from Bishop N.T. Wright’s presidential address to the diocesan synod in Durham:

As followers of Jesus, invoking his Spirit at Pentecost, we should expect to have demands made on our charity, our forgiveness and our patience; not on our conscience. That is the key to how adiaphora works in the church.

And that, too, is why recent events in America are placing an ever greater strain on the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury is, I believe, in the process of writing a pastoral letter to all the churches, and I don’t want to pre-empt what he will say. But the point is this. Unlike the situation with children and Communion; unlike the situation with the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate; in the case of sexual relations outside the marriage of a man and a woman, the church as a whole, in all its global meetings not least the Lambeth Conference, has solidly and consistently reaffirmed the clear and unambiguous teaching of the New Testament. But the substantive issue isn’t the point here. The point is that the Church as a whole has never declared these matters to be adiaphora. This isn’t something a Bishop, a parish, a diocese, or a province can declare on its own authority. You can’t simply say that you have decided that this is something we can all agree to differ on. Nobody can just “declare” that. The step from mandatory to optional can never itself be a local option, and the Church as a whole has declared that the case for that step has not been made. By all means let us have the debate. But, as before, it must be a proper theological debate, not a postmodern exchange of prejudices.

The full text is here.
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This is an excellent article.  I like how +Wright points out that just because something is not a “first order” (creedal) issue, that does not mean it is adiaphora.  Only the Church can say that something is adiaphora, not an individual person. 

I would go so far as to say that Scripture determines what is adiaphora or not.  If the witness of Holy Scripture is against a practice or belief or if a council of the Church is against a practice or belief, then that practice or belief cannot be considered adiaphora. 
YBIC,
Phil Snyder

The theory is sound, but you wind up with some church’s claiming nothing is truly adiaphora (thinking of certain of my hyper-Calvinist and hyper-Roman friends).  For us the difficulty is where to draw the line in a Communion in which there is neither a council nor an office that can referee such matters, nor respect enough for claimed foundational authorities (Scripture, Tradition) to dispense with the need for a referee.

Bishop +Wright makes one astounding mistake, when he claims that clerical celibacy is “just as mandatory” from Rome’s point of view as the male-only priesthood. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him get Rome’s position wrong, but it’s a particularly glaring error, and one that he could have quite easily avoided by checking his remarks with a well-informed Roman Catholic!

I agree with the general point he is making.

Edwin