Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings are more spiritual than much Church of England worship, the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, said yesterday.
In a sermon in York Minster, he told members of the General Synod that the Church too often lacked the imagination to generate the wonder and mystery that was so appealing in the popular books and films.
Instead, he said, bodies such as the Synod spent too much time on introspective issues such as what clothes to wear in church, a reference to a debate today on whether clergy should be allowed to dispense with their formal robes during services.
"What is the Harry Potter mania saying to us?" Dr Hope asked. "The midnight waiting for the latest book - the lengthy queues for the box office, both for Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.
"And not only young people, but parents and grandparents as well. It is surely the invitation into a world of wonder and mystery - an invitation where we might just have expected the Church to have been at its most fascinating, not least with respect to our worship.
"And yet so many acts of worship are evacuated precisely of that experience which they might have been expected to provide, namely something of a glimpse of the beauty, the splendour, the glory of God - the invitation into a world of wonder and mystery."
In a sharp criticism of the inward-looking nature of much Church debate, Dr Hope, a long-term critic of bureaucracy, warned Synod members "to beware lest we fail to discern the signs of the times because we're too busy talking about whether we're wearing the right kind of clothes in church or not".
Dr Hope said that when Dr George Carey became Archbishop of Canterbury 11 years ago, he had announced three priorities of his ministry, one of which was to make the Church more outward looking.
"It is a challenge that remains," said Dr Hope. "So the question must surely be how far we as a Church, as a synod, as congregations, as individual Christians, how far are we attuned to the effecting of that fully aliveness of every human person out there."
Meanwhile, Dr Carey sought to assuage concerns among Muslims and other faiths that the Church had decided to launch a heavy-handed campaign to convert them following a synod decision on Saturday to encourage Christians to share their faith.
Dr Carey said the Church had affirmed that the Christian message "includes a gracious invitation to others to hear the words of Christ. That is not to be understood as a directive to coerce others to believe what we believe."
Amid mounting speculation about who would succeed him at Canterbury, Dr Carey has instigated an inquiry, together with Dr Hope, into the apparent leak of the name of the Archbishop of Wales, Dr William, as the Church's first choice for the post.
There is growing concern among supporters of Dr Williams, the leading liberal candidate, that the media furore surrounding him might convince him to reject the post if offered it.
He came in for renewed criticism yesterday after it emerged that he had agreed to address a conference of gay clergy organised by the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.