Editor's Note: There are four ACNA parishes in Central NY: St. Andrew's in Vestal, St. Andrew's and Westside Anglican Fellowship in Syracuse, and Good Shepherd in Binghamton.
African Province in full communion with Anglican Church of North America (ACNA)
News Analysis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/24/2009
"As Anglican Christians we continue to be distressed by the spiritual crisis within our own family of faith in other parts of the world. Since 2003 the unilateral revisionist actions of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church Canada have torn the fabric of our common life. While the Church of Nigeria stands resolutely and uncompromisingly on the truth of the Holy Scriptures and the Lordship of Jesus Christ endless meetings and repeated communiqués have done nothing to bring restoration of our beloved communion."
With these words, the Anglican Church of Nigeria's Standing Committee and its Archbishop, Peter Akinola blasted the American Episcopal Church and its Canadian counterpart for arrogantly going against God's Word and for putting the flimsy tide of Human Rights against the proscriptions of Holy Scripture.
Pansexuality has torn the Anglican Communion asunder. What remains now, post-Alexandria, is a shell of a communion held together, not by the bonds of affection, or the creeds but the memory of what was and because there is no mechanism for formal schism.
Recently, the Nigerian General Synod, consisting of one 155 bishops, 150 clergy and 139 laity, came together to affirm the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to repeat their denunciations of North American Anglicanism that has strayed far from that faith. Also present on this occasion was Bishop Martyn Minns, CANA representative, and Bishop Robert Duncan, Common Cause Moderator and the anticipated leader of the new North American Anglican Province. Akinola and some of his fellow bishops will be at the inaugural provincial Assembly of the Church in June in Fort Worth, Texas, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, TEC presiding bishop.
On this occasion, the Nigerian province pledged its full support, saying they were in full communion with the emerging Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) praised the unanimous decision of the Church of Nigeria Standing Committee to be in full communion with the emerging Anglican province. The Church of Nigeria is the first Anglican province to formally accept the emerging province as a branch of the Anglican Communion. CANA is a founding member of the Anglican Church in North America, which includes about 700 congregations.
Lest one thinks that Nigerians are cultural and technological Neanderthals, the theme of the meeting was "The Youth of our Church" with the Standing Committee recognizing that the youth of today are living under very different conditions from older generations. "The ease of access to the global village afforded by Information Technology has a profound impact on what they believe and how they behave. We will do all that we can to secure the commitment of our youth by involving them fully in the task of nation building through the transforming mission of the church. We will challenge them, guide them, listen to them and assure them of our support. "We acknowledge the essential role of education in enabling the youth to identify and fulfill their vocation. We congratulate those States that have returned to the original owners some of the schools founded by mission organizations and then taken over by the government. We call for a full return of all schools in this category. We believe that this will help in no small measure in the crusade for national rebirth and the restoration of moral fiber and academic excellence."
The Nigerian church is at least grappling with the problem of youth in their country. Youth in The Episcopal Church are a dying breed. "We have relatively few youth involved in our churches, which poses some issues for what happens in the next 20-30 years," noted church consultant Kirk Hadaway. Indeed. With the average age of Episcopalians being in the early to mid-Sixties, there won't be much of a church in 30 years.
It is irony upon irony that revisionist Episcopal bishops continually blast African Anglican provinces because they say they are consumed by homosexuality. In point of fact, it is the Western church that is consumed by the subject and is in fact slowly strangling on it. Here is what the Nigerian HOB concluded,: "In the present global economic crisis, when serious minded nations of the world have taken urgent steps to invest their resources in other viable sectors of their economies, Nigeria continues to sell her oil but is not investing the huge profits from these sales wisely in productive sectors of our economy. It is a matter of grave concern that our political leaders have been and remain more concerned about exorbitant remuneration packages, excessive allowances, and payment for highly inflated and hardly completed contracts; this despite the unacceptable fact that more than seventy percent of our population continues to live in poverty."
While most Episcopal bishops kept silent through the Bush years of incompetence and Wall Street greed, here is what the Nigerian Anglican leaders said, "The war against corruption has become mere rhetoric. The day of reckoning may not be far away. If Nigeria is to avoid an economic catastrophe, we call on our leaders and citizenry to wake up and cultivate a new mindset of transparency and accountability. We also must chart a new economic course by developing viable non-oil sectors for sustainable wealth creation and the development of the country."
Recently, 126 TEC bishops met at Kanuga offering up a Lenten "repentance" citing "unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, rampant consumerism amplifying domestic and global economic injustice." In sermonic tomes, the bishops bewailed their manifold sins arguing that the crisis in the world is both economic and environmental, "causing us as a people to ignore the Gospel imperative of self-sacrifice and generosity, as we scramble for self-preservation in a culture of scarcity." Too little, too late. These bishops were more concerned that the Church Pension Fund made millions of dollars for their pensions in the year of plenty and now the lean years has gotten them thinking. How disingenuous can they be, and how stupid do they think we are?
ISLAM IN NIGERIA.
The bishops also addressed the religious crisis in their country. "For more than twenty years, there has been an unrelenting religious crisis in Nigeria. The Christian Church has been the target of attack and has suffered irreparable losses in many parts of the North. At different times various reasons have been advanced: unemployment, poverty, politics and sectarian tensions. However, those who have perpetrated these destructive actions have never been brought to justice, operate with impunity and appear to be motivated by the conviction that if they persist they will be able to claim entire sections of Nigeria for their faith. We reject this claim."
And how has The Episcopal Church helped this? By throwing an incendiary bomb called Gene Robinson into the mix making it possible for radical Islamists to hunt down Christians and kill them while screaming that TEC is the gay church. Why should Nigerians convert to Christianity, if he is their foremost American representative?
SEXUALITY
Akinola has been described as an uncompromising, bold and exemplary leader, by his fellow archbishops and bishops who have been fighting homosexuality, and will continue to lead the church in the course of propagation of the gospel of Christ. Indeed.
Akinola has regularly been accused of being homophobic, inciting homophobia, hatred of and responsible for the "statutory brutalization" of homosexuals by a number of liberal Anglican and non-Anglican bloggers. Some say he should be rebuked. Nothing could be further from the truth. The one person who has gone after him is Davis Mac-Iyalla, a Nigerian homosexual activist who fled Nigeria saying he was persecuted by the church for being a homosexual. It was not true then and is not true now. He is nothing more than a sexual predator who was exposed by VOL. http://tinyurl.com/dcq8j8 and here http://tinyurl.com/dhab9q
Akinola has supported anti-gay legislation in Nigeria. He has said that "Same sex marriage apart from being ungodly is also unscriptural, unnatural, unprofitable, unhealthy, uncultured, up-African and un-Nigerian. It is a perversion, a deviation and an aberration that is capable of engendering moral and social holocaust in this country. It is also capable of extincting mankind and as such should never be allowed to take root in Nigeria. Outlawing it is to ensure the continued existence of this nation. The need for doing this is urgent, compelling and imperative. The time is now."
Akinola dares to speak the truth. In Canada, he would probably be thrown in jail for saying this. He would be protected under First Amendment rights in this country, but he would be vilified for telling the truth. What health has sodomy brought in this country? HIV/AIDS is on the rise, especially among the young. It is a death sentence only protracted a few years by a cocktail of drugs. It is emptying Episcopal churches across the country. Nearly 50% of ALL Episcopal congregations, (and there are some 7,000 of them) report serious conflict over the ordination of homosexual priests/bishops. If that is not a wake-up call to the state of the church, nothing is.
To call Akinola's statement "murderous rhetoric recalling that toxic blend of imperial/nationalistic/pietism that begins with efforts to dehumanize a class of persons and ends with their systematic elimination..." as one blogger did, is to put sodomy in the same camp as anti-Semitism. This is an outrage. To put a person's personal behavior, which many psychiatrists now believe can be redirected and changed, into the same category as people who believe Jews should be incinerated would be libelous in any civilized country.
The truth is neither Christianity nor Islam condone homosexuality, long regarded as taboo in Nigeria. Because they are Nigeria's largest religions along with the Roman Catholic Church, condemning it is in complete accord with their national consciousness. It is a small, shrill, strident and vitriolic group that want it brokered in.
Where is the outrage about female genital mutilation? An estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. Why is there little or no outcry by Mrs. Jefferts Schori or the Archbishop of Canterbury on this pressing issue? Why is sodomy being allowed to destroy the Anglican Communion while our leaders are silent about this absolute horror to women's bodies.
As one columnist noted, the mere mention of homosexuality is guaranteed to drive many Nigerian Christians and Moslems up the wall in revulsion.
These issues came to the fore recently when a bill to ban same sex marriages in Nigeria was tabled before the National Assembly. An attempt to obtain public reaction to the bill turned into an occasion of high drama. A group of young people, under the lugubrious name of Queer Alliance, stormed the House of Representatives in Abuja to protest what they say is discrimination against their fundamental human rights if a bill banning same sex marriages in Nigeria was passed. They have been joined by Amnesty International, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch and some Lesbian organizations which argue that if the bill were passed, Nigeria's obligations under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights would be undermined.
Naturally, this aroused the outrage of the Very Rev. Peter Akinola and his Anglican province, the Roman Catholic Church, and Daughters of Sarah Ministry. They warned that same sex marriages would destroy the will of God for mankind as He created us male and female. They totally reject same sex marriages as ungodly, unprofitable, unhealthy and un-African.
Akinola opined that Nigerians are all too eager to copy the latest fads from the western world. Not every product from the West is good. The well-heeled homosexual lobby is one such example.
CULTURE
Africans are looking at the issue of same sex relationships from the prism of their own culture. Why shouldn't they? The Episcopal and Canadian churches are doing exactly that - seeing sodomy through the eyes of a handful of aggrieved persons who feel ostracized and unloved and who are pushing for laws that are increasingly discriminatory of people who dare oppose their behavior.
What about Western respect for African culture? The truth is more American Episcopal bishops think that African Anglicans live in the Dark Ages and most would agree with Bishop Spong's Lambeth '98 rip at them. Former Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, on more than one occasion, has said the Africans will one day catch up to the West in their understanding of homosexuality. Really. Why the hell should they?. Bishops like Griswold scoff at St. Paul. Rowan Williams believes that Old Testament attitudes towards homosexuals are Bronze Age thinking.
For the African, the idea that a man can be married to a man or a woman to a woman is anathema. The culture of marriage is predicated on the union between a man and a woman. All traditional practices and normative values regarding marriage are based on the assumption that the other member is of the opposite sex, wrote one blogger. That is still essentially true in the West, though Human Rights have triumphed over Biblical proscription.
African parents, we are told, prepare their children from birth through adolescence for marriage to the opposite sex. Too many things would be upset if it were possible to upturn age-old customs and practices.
"Those who argue that opposition to homosexuality amounts to a violation of universal human rights, may well need to realize that the dislike of homosexuality is not inconsistent with the observance of human rights. Nigerian homosexuals are not pilloried for being gay. They have a choice: they can marry members of the opposite sex or stay single. They only draw unfavorable attention to themselves when they threaten the safety and security of the majority," said a newspaper columnist.
Africans have a right to say "no" to a movement whose ultimate outcome will be the destruction of the family. Homosexuals are claiming that men can marry themselves. If everyone followed their example, they would have never been born.
If the Anglican Communion has foundered on the shoals of post-modern attitudes on human sexual behavior and is reaping the whirlwind of increased rates of sexually transmitted diseases, don't blame the Nigerians. They have every right to say what they say as a nation and a church. They should not roll over to Western pansexual attitudes because Changing Attitude sodomists like Colin Coward or Davis Mac-Iyalla think they should. They can go to Hell all by themselves. They should not be permitted to take others with them.
END
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