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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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David A. Harris and C. Peter Molloy
This past month, leaders of the Anglican Church from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, representing over two thirds of the Anglican Communion, met in Egypt to discuss the most pressing concerns of the Anglican Communion. Their topics included HIV and AIDS, corruption in the developing world, violence, theological education, spiritual leadership and the “current Crisis provoked by North American Intransigence.”
The primates and other leaders meeting for this third south-to-south meeting were addressed by Archbishop Rowan Williams who spoke clearly on a number of significant questions.
Now despite the significance of this meeting you will be hard-pressed to find mention of it on the Anglican Church of Canada webpage, the London-based Anglican Communion webpage, or the Episcopal News service, ECUSA’s news agency.
Where you do find any mention, it is in reference to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wonderful sermon. The Cairo meeting is mentioned briefly only as the backdrop.
This is of course a standard practice in western Anglicanism and has been for some time. So why is the West ignoring the church of the Global South? The reasons most often given are fairly straightforward: (1) Church leaders in the Global South are not as well educated, and so quite “backward” in their approach to modern questions. (2) The English Reformation established the principle that national churches are autonomous, so the Global South has no authority in North America. (3) Besides these “obvious” reasons, there is the fact that leaders in the Global South serve in a completely different cultural context, so they cannot possibly have anything meaningful to say about what is going on in our particular context.
Well, how do these “reasons” stand up under scutiny? First, what about those uneducated Africans, Asians and Latin Americans? I am sure most of us remember the controversy at the last Lambeth Conference when the Anglican Communion clearly upheld the traditional understanding of Human sexuality. Certain North American bishops consoled themselves by deriding the education of the African Bishops, describing them as being “pre-Copernican” and “fundamentalist” in their thinking. Fortunately that wonderful publication First Things looked closely at these assertions and compared the theological acumen of North American bishops and African bishops. So what did First Things discover? They discovered that not only were African bishops up to snuff, but they were in fact heads and shoulders above the American bishops academically: more earned doctorates, more degrees, and generally higher standards set for Episcopal ministry. You can see this for yourself by comparing the published writings of African and American Bishops on the Internet. The African mind is a gift to the church.
Second, what about that “Reformation principle”? Well it is a bit rich to hang on to that Reformation principle while jettisoning most other ones. Even so, this is a misreading of our Anglican heritage. While provincial churches are entitled to be the church in the culture they find themselves in, they still have to be The Church. Article XX makes clear the scope of freedom that a local Church has. The parameter given is submission under the word of God. It is true that neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Archbishop of Nigeria have authority over North America. But if we desire to be a part of one communion together as The Church, we all have to submit to the same authority, which is the word of God. How else can it work?
Finally, what about our differing cultural contexts? Without a doubt, it is important to understand the context of our ministry and to communicate the gospel message appropriately and meaningfully. The danger, though, is that we can too easily allow the culture to inform the message and not the other way around. Remember St. Paul’s great warning to the church in Rome: “do not be conformed to the ways of this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind…that you might know the will of God.” Who better to warn us when our gospel message is being shaped by the culture around us than our partners around the world. Through their distance they are able to see through so many of the trappings of western society which blind us. Their different context does not limit their ability to understand our mission, but rather gives them the fresh eyes to look insightfully at the problem.
It would appear that, under scrutiny, these reasons lose their weight. Perhaps the real reason we disregard the words of the Global South is that we just don’t want to hear what they are saying.
Some of the best Anglican minds in the world met last month in Cairo and their message needs to be heard. Their message is this: the North American Church needs to return to biblical faithfulness. Now the blood is on our head. |
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December 2005|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2005 |