UGANDA: Anglican church warns on homosexuality

Could you even imagine a Church whose bishops have less insight into themselves and the world around them? This is stranger than fiction. The Anglican Church of Uganda is warning TEC not to consent to the election of Mary Glasspool as suffragan bishop of Los Angeles. After all, in Uganda, the Church advocates imprisoning or killing her. Truly amazing!

"We [in the Global South] will not be able to walk with the Americans," No s***, Sherlock! We in the Episcopal North will not be able to walk with the Church of Uganda either. And our LGBT members surely will have to run or fight for their lives. The stunning thing is that these people are for real!

"the Rev. Alison Barfoot, an assistant to Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, the head of the Ugandan Anglican church, ...as describing Glasspool's election as "unbiblical."
Right! Let's do the Ugandan biblical thing and imprison "homosexuals", where they can be beaten and raped; or let's be biblically merciful and just hang them. There is no question that TEC cannot co-exist with the Ugandan view of what is "biblical".

"Onono-Onweng ... said he did not wish to comment on the draft law until he had more time to study it." After all, he has only had three months to "study it." Three months can't be a long enough time to figure out if imprisonment and murder are the ways for a Church to address "homosexuality."

"The Daily Monitor also quoted Joshua Kitakule, '"Okay but it (the "kill the gays bill") has been misunderstood; we need to educate the people about it." Don't bother! We don't want to hear anymore from you. You make us weep for our brothers and sisters who are prisoners in your Church and your state, without a modium of human dignity ascribed to them. If this law passes, humane people will need to organize to rescue the LGBT people fromtheir murderers in the Anglican Church of Uganda.

Who would feel constrained to be in communion with this Church?

More time to study it? WHY?
How much study does it take to say - killing people is wrong and locking people up for life is wrong?
The Church of Uganda bishops are playing games with people's lives. It makes me sick.

This evidence - of the Anglican Church of Uganda's intransigence on the episcopal election processes of TEC - points to the impossibility of others of us forming any 'Covenant' relationship with such a prospective 'Partner'.

This indicates, beyond dispute, the foolishness of trying to negotiate any further the prospects of a corporate relationship between the Global South Partners and the rest of the Communion based on the covenantal model.

This outright rejection of the polity of any one of the partners by another must surely indicate the uselessness of further negotiation between GAFCON and LAMBETH. The blatent rejection of any liberating influence of Church Partners seeking to free the Anglican Communion of homophobia and misogyny - on the basis of modern scientific researh into gender and sexuality issues - gives little hope for future reconciliation of the Communion Partners.

Until, and unless, the Global South Provinces become more attuned to the needs of minorities within their own jurisdictions, there will be little hope of continuence of a working missionary partnership with other Provinces that seek to work for justice and peace.

What has worked in the past can obviously no longer be expected to sustain the relationships which were envisioned at the beginning of the Communion-wide expansion of the Anglican Mission.

No form of Covenant can be expected to restore the confidence we once enjoyed as a koinonia - based on the Good News of Jesus Christ to all the people of all the world. Devolution into a state of Local Churches ministering in context to the local social and cultural milieu would seem to be what is now needed, and indeed all that is now possible.

Perhaps even Rome will begin to see this as the only viable option in the modern world. Good News can be our only option, bringing hope to all people, regardless of ethnicity, race, class, gender or sexual orientation.

Is this the writing on the wall for the Anglican Communion?

"And this is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, and PARSIN. This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians."

Daniel 5:25-28

The tit for tat anger of the Global South vs Global North is leading us nowhere. Its clear in the words of one GS primate we are no longer one. We seem to reading from different bibles.

"Until, and unless, the Global South Provinces become more attuned to the needs of minorities within their own jurisdictions, there will be little hope of continuence of a working missionary partnership with other Provinces that seek to work for justice and peace. "
The GS will say the same actually they have been saying it. Unless the TEC repents there's no communion what so ever with them & others of the like.

"The GS will say the same actually they have been saying it. Unless the TEC repents there's no communion what so ever with them & others of the like."

Christianity, the religion of war and prison, the spiritual cop for the established order and its owners.

Taser those fags for Jesus!

Gosh, "I didn't have time to study it". Pontius Pilate could have taken lessons from this man!

I'm getting more and more lost in this conversation.
What does "in Communion" actually mean in practice?

What is happening now that will stop happening once some churches are no longer "in Communion" with each other?

What does this threat of no longer being "in Communion" actually mean for the day to day life of the national churches involved, for their mission and for their international aid programmes?

We share preciously little with the church of Uganda, whether we're officially in Communion with them or not. And on a purely personal level, I'd feel a lot happier if I was not in any way associated with it. Being in Communion with people like that is becoming a real taint.

Apart from those who see "unity" on paper as a theological good worth having - what is the point?

Out of the long, bitter struggle over the Colenso Affair came the Lambeth Quadrilateral, and a decision to define the terms of membership in the Anglican Communion in the broadest and most generous terms possible.

This long, bitter struggle will have a similar conclusion. If "being in Communion with" means "agreeing on issues of doctrine and discipline," then, no, there is no chance of holding the Communion together. If it can come to mean something else, something more generous in spirit, then there will still be an Anglican Communion, but it will not be the kind of centralized organization that the Anglican Communion Institute persuaded ++Rowan ought to exist.

That dream is dead. The Anglican Covenant is dead. I think everyone sees that now. Andrew Carey and I are in rare agreement on that point.

I believe that the future Anglican Communion may be expanded and enriched in all sorts of ways, through the participation of our Lutheran brothers and sisters in the US, Canada, and Continental Europe, for example.

We will forget our pain and travails and rejoice that Anglicanism has once more been reborn in the world.

"Kitakule was speaking after a meeting of about 200 Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventist and Muslim leaders in Kampala on Dec. 9."
Isn't inter-faith dialogue grand? All those religious leaders, having a meal together and conversing with each other. It warms the heart. Finding common ground -- in their despisal of GLBT folk. Oops.
The Anglican Church of Uganda demands that others respect its culture and policies -- while at the same time attempting to tell TEC what to do and interfering with TEC's culture and policies.
"Death to gay people!" is not something I can ever recall reading of Jesus of Nazareth's teachings in the Gospels. But then, I like the Jerusalem Bible and the NRSV editions. Maybe those nasty editors left that quote out.

"I believe that the future Anglican Communion may be expanded and enriched in all sorts of ways, through the participation of our Lutheran brothers and sisters in the US, Canada, and Continental Europe, for example." - Charlotte -

I'm inclined to agree with Charlotte here. In all of the recent brouhaha, we seem to have lost the original defining tenet of Anglicanism - based on the founding principles of Scripture, Tradition and REASON. In trying to over-emphasise the influence of a fundementalist reading of the Scriptures, some of the partners have given up on the precious character of REASON.

Tradition, of course, can be another problem. If and when it interferes with newly-revealed truth, which militatesd against past understandings of what the tradition has mistakenly observed as 'core doctrine'. This is so obviously the case where gender and sexuality have been subject to a 'closed shop' mentality - where exploration into their appropriate treatment is seen to be at odds with traditional understandings.

The emancipation of women and the LGBT community has required the application of sweet Reason - an unavoidable component of the spiritual and theological spectrum, which needs the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as Guide and Mentor in order to continue the journey of Faith. If we look only, or even mainly, to Scripture and Tradition for enlightenment, we may be avoiding what God wants to reveal to us of our emerging identity and commonality 'en Christo'.

Neither Uganda so far, nor Rowan Williams so far is able to stand firmly and clearly for global big tent Anglicanism. More and more often, each pursues narrow self-interests while rarely trying to cover up by paying smooth, glib lip service to such founding notions after the fact as 'communion' and 'human rights.' Not one appears to have taken even the Chicago Lambeth Quad seriously as our common grounds. I am less and less interested in having to answer the holier than thou claims of either Rowan Williams or Uganda; they say outright that they have no idea of the western church discernments that make VGR or Glasspool not only possible, but ethically and theologically attuned to the western cultural and church life situations.

Being orthodox means flat earthisms, all round. How odd that Rowan Williams the reputed Great Anglican Scholar should so easily end up presiding over a global Anglican Church that is defined by its blatant ignorance and flat earthism.

Irony alerts all round, indeed. These silly folks will proudly call themselves, Human Rights Leaders. Doing God's work on earth by imprisoning and killing queer folks, no questions asked, no questions possible. I will say again: This stuff is NOT quintessentially Anglican; it is nearly pure driven USA Conservative Christian Dominionist drivel. I still guess, when/if the sun finally sets on the global Anglican Communion, Rowan Williams will not like it one bit as he surveys the remaining first track over which his office will then preside.

Be of entirely good Anglican cheer, however; none of the rest of us need follow all this meanness as it runs itself to ground in violence and human rights violations, falsely preached as godliness.

USA National Public Radio does interviews in Uganda with local folks ... including some surfacing of the USA religious rightwing connections (financial, other) that are helping cue us to the USA Dominionist theology that heightens all of this antigay stuff to new violent levels, mainly by preaching flat earth ideas illuminated by dirt and danger narratives.

See NPR at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121485018&ft=1&f=1004

Closer to home, the canny similarities are also showing in the Catholic Charities plan to stop providing services because contracts with Washington DC for social services would require the church agency to offer health insurance to legally recognized same sex spouses (many of whom are parents, so note the silence about having to provide staff health coverage to those children, not just as children but as children of ... fill in the blanks).

See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121506547&ft=1&f=1014

What Catholic Charities and Uganda have clearly in common is the flat earth narrative they share about gender and sexuality, though actually there is little logical consistency in their double barrelled talk of innate settled and closed male/female gender on the one hand, and reducing queer folks sexual orientation to nothing but behaviors on the other hand while simultaneously retaining a completely different idea of sexual orientation/attraction that applies only to straight folks.

The elephant in all these believer rooms is deliberate ignorance of modern sciences that change our views of the key empirical terms gender, sexual orientation, and pairbonding; all rumbling along disruptively beneath the pat smooth surfaces of a traditionalist negative theological-ethical stream of unchange-able preachments, alas.

This, friends, is where all Anglicans are supposed to be headed, no hesitations. Lord have mercy.

30 min Interview with Rowan Williams by the great Simon Mayo on 5Live yesterday.

Mentions Uganda and his approach to the bill.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/mayo/mayo_20091216-1552a.mp3

Kennedy

"Mentions"?