This week sees a meeting of African Anglican bishops in Nigeria.
The BBC provides a preview of the meeting.
The Scotsman has a PA report under the headline African Anglicans May Breakaway in Gay Row
From Nigeria, Lagos’s Daily Champion also has a preview, Africa’s Anglican Bishops’ Meeting Starts ‘Morrow…
Due principally to the threat from homosexual-ism among their Western brethren, Anglican bishops in Africa seeking to eke out a separate identity for themselves, converge on Lagos tomorrow for a continental conference on burning issues in the church.
Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, is quoted as saying:
“We send our men to theological school abroad but we have discovered that there are a lot of unwholesome things that happen,”
Akinola, who was flanked by the church’s primates in Uganda, South Africa, Kenya and some Southern African countries disclosed that the African bishops will fashion out ways by setting up a theological educational centre to help train her clerics.
“We will come up with the road map for the development of African Theological Centres of Excellence that are accessible and affordable with comprehensive and realistic curricula,” he remarked.
The Daily Champion report also says:
Only recently Rev. Akinola demanded an unreserved apology from the 50 bishops in the church who attended Robinson’s ordination.
However, Robinson’s ordination was a fall-out of the 2002 Lamberth conference in the USA which formally approved of gay ordination.
though perhaps this is the sort of inaccuracy which any journalist might fall into.
I hear much of Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola is saying, but isn’t it interesting the influence of the African cultural context on African theology and practice. Akinola is quoted as saying: “Men and men are cohabiting, which is taboo in African culture,” he said. Those in the West also seem to be grappling with theology “worked out” in their own cultural contexts – surely as missionally prudent as are cultural considerations in Africa and other locations around the world. I realise that the Windsor report isn’t intended to address this issue in any significant measure. I’m simply listening to… Read more »
Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Prof of Divinity at Oxford, in an article in the Church Times today, assumes that the Anglican Communion is already a loose federation: ‘we should stick with the loose federation that has enabled us to work together…’ She attacks the Windsor report strongly: ‘So far from a way forward, this proposal is pernicious.’ With Jack Spong in The Times, it seems that some hard line liberals can see that the Windsor Report has teeth… Peter Jensen, also in the Church Times today, wants to move to looser ties and asks ‘why not accept that we are… Read more »
But should there be only one province in each geographical area? Should some Anglicans who agree with the North American position be allowed to form an extra province, and the same for North Americans opposed to the policies of ECUSA? Coudl the Anglican communion hold together without having a tyrrany of the majority within provinces?