“I have had misgivings over the Church of Scotland for a number of years. I believe there is a general drift away from Biblical orthodoxy.”

An entire congregation has quit the Church of Scotland in the Bahamas after its minister resigned over the issue of the first gay ordination.

Around 800 members of the Kirk will hear at its annual General Assembly in Edinburgh this week that after the Reverend John MacLeod resigned from St Andrew’s in Nassau, the capital of the islands, his congregation has opted to leave the Church.

It is also expected that the 200-year-old parish will be followed by another in the Bahamas, Lucaya Kirk at Freeport, at a time when the Church of Scotland faces potentially its greatest schism in its 450-year history – over the issue of gay ordination.

The World Mission Council of the Kirk will reveal that the congregation in Nassau voted in favour of leaving the Kirk, almost immediately after approval of the assembly to join the fundamentalist Evangelical Presbyterian Church of America, which takes the position homosexuality is against the Scriptures and is opposed to women being ordained.

Under the evangelicals, the congregations will seek to create a new Presbyterian Church of the Bahamas. A spokesman for the Kirk insisted the split in the Bahamas had been planned for some time, but one source said the trigger came with MacLeod’s principled departure.

The Herald revealed that MacLeod, a married father of two, originally from Harris, was the first to leave the Kirk altogether when he gave notice of his resignation after the General Assembly last year.

The 2009 gathering in the capital was dominated by painful divisions across the Kirk over its first openly gay minister, Reverend Scott Rennie, who was then confirmed in charge of Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen.

Macleod, who has accepted a post at Allander Evangelical Church, said he resigned because of the controversy over the posting of Rennie in Aberdeen, the ban on public discussion of human sexuality and the Church’s move “away from Biblical orthodoxy”.

He said: “It wasn’t just the Scott Rennie thing, it was the general tenor of the General Assembly that I don’t think is the way a church should do business. I think it is a shame that the Church of Scotland has tried to stifle the debate.

“I have had misgivings over the Church of Scotland for a number of years. I believe there is a general drift away from Biblical orthodoxy.”