Africa, Akinola and AIDS
Apologies for the long silence over the summer. I had intended to keep posting a weekly blog in the course of my travels in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Kenya, but the logistics of doing so proved impractical. Now that I am back home in Wales once more, our conversations can continue . . . . .
This past week I’ve been in Kenya, teaching on the HIV/AIDS and Pastoral Care MA programme, which I had a role in designing. It has been invigorating to catch up with Kenyan students and colleagues again. However, working in this programme I’m frequently struck by the immense gulf that exists between these students who are Christian teachers, pastors and social workers who are at some personal cost making significant interventions into the pandemic, and the leadership of the churches which often seems far more concerned about ecclesiastical politics and the quest for personal power than with the suffering of its people.
So the Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Revd Benjamin Nzimbi has announced that his Church will accept no further funding through the Episcopal Church’s Relief and Development Fund because of the consecration, now distant history, of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. ‘They are going against the Gospel’ and ‘we cannot continue having fellowship and links with them’ said the Archbishop. His Provincial Secretary insisted that foregoing financial support from the USA ‘will not affect the operations of the Church’. Such a statement is disingenuous given the heavy reliance of most African churches on external funding.
At the same time it was announced that the Kenyan Church is proposing to petition the Archbishop of Canterbury to bar from the next Lambeth Conference all Anglican Churches which have ‘accepted homosexuality’. There has been no subsequent amplification to explain what exactly is meant by ‘accepted homosexuality’ but if this means welcoming gay and lesbian people as honoured members of the Body of Christ, as I suspect it does, the list of Churches no longer welcome to Lambeth Conferences will be a long one: the Canadian and American Churches, the Australian and New Zealand churches, the Churches of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and the South African church to start with.
Behind the Kenyan Church’s statement about US funding lies the long shadow of Archbishop Akinola, the Nigerian tyrant who has bullied many other African bishops into submission to his fundamentalist views, his intolerance, his arrogance and his racism. His ambition and strategy is to establish his hegemony first over the African churches, then over the churches of the ‘Global South’, and ultimately over the entire Anglican Communion. He is apparently convinced that he has a divine mission so to do.
There are signs that this strategy is having some effect. The offices of the Council of African Provinces in Africa (CAPA) are based here in Nairobi. It has been part of Akinola’s strategy to ensure that CAPA ceases to be representative of African theology as a whole to become an instrument of his own narrow theological propaganda. So in respect to CAPA’s HIV/AIDS programme, Akinola gathered sufficient support to have its Chairman, the Archbishop of South Africa whom he perceived as possessed by much too liberal a stance, ousted with no successor appointed. This downgrading of the programme’s work comes as no surprise in the light of Akinola’s steadfast resistance to addressing the issue of HIV and AIDS in his own country. His self-appointed global role evidently doesn’t allow time for that. He then insisted that the programme’s primary source of support from the Episcopal Church must be abandoned even though this means that one of Africa’s most successful initiatives in this field will be unable to survive very long. Next he plotted to secure the resignation of its General Secretary, who is African but not being a Nigerian is apparently not African enough, while at the same time urging that CAPA’s office be given diplomatic status, presumably so that he can staff it with his Nigerian cronies.
One hopes for Africa’s sake that this setback to real progress in the battle against HIV/AIDS turns out to be as temporary as Archbishop Akinola’s extremist views are destined to be in the history of Christian solidarity with the poor. It is certainly difficult to see now how there can be anything approximating to a Lambeth Conference meeting in 2008. With all western churches excluded as Archbishop Nzimbi is proposing, the conference will end up as a jamboree for fundamentalist churches of the Global South who without western funding, will be hard pressed to hold it anywhere other than Archbishop’s Akinola’s back garden. It could certainly never be representative of global Anglicanism.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has to shoulder some of the blame for this state of affairs. Representing as he does the liberal wing of the Church which amongst its many values emphasises that of tolerance, he has been far too accommodating to the histrionics and insults of persons like Akinola. One of the great human lessons to emerge from the Second World War was that the appeasement of bullies leads not to dialogue and compromise but to a hardening of views and even greater outrages.
I didn’t attend Church at All Saints Cathedral last in Nairobi last Sunday. When I became a member of the organisation InclusiveChurch I determined that I would no longer worship in those churches which are unashamedly exclusive. In adopting its uncompromising and unenlightened attitude towards homosexuality, and refusing to welcome gay and lesbian people into fellowship, the Anglican Church in Kenya has to my mind already separated itself from the Anglican Church’s theology, ethos and tradition.
This past week I’ve been in Kenya, teaching on the HIV/AIDS and Pastoral Care MA programme, which I had a role in designing. It has been invigorating to catch up with Kenyan students and colleagues again. However, working in this programme I’m frequently struck by the immense gulf that exists between these students who are Christian teachers, pastors and social workers who are at some personal cost making significant interventions into the pandemic, and the leadership of the churches which often seems far more concerned about ecclesiastical politics and the quest for personal power than with the suffering of its people.
So the Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Revd Benjamin Nzimbi has announced that his Church will accept no further funding through the Episcopal Church’s Relief and Development Fund because of the consecration, now distant history, of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. ‘They are going against the Gospel’ and ‘we cannot continue having fellowship and links with them’ said the Archbishop. His Provincial Secretary insisted that foregoing financial support from the USA ‘will not affect the operations of the Church’. Such a statement is disingenuous given the heavy reliance of most African churches on external funding.
At the same time it was announced that the Kenyan Church is proposing to petition the Archbishop of Canterbury to bar from the next Lambeth Conference all Anglican Churches which have ‘accepted homosexuality’. There has been no subsequent amplification to explain what exactly is meant by ‘accepted homosexuality’ but if this means welcoming gay and lesbian people as honoured members of the Body of Christ, as I suspect it does, the list of Churches no longer welcome to Lambeth Conferences will be a long one: the Canadian and American Churches, the Australian and New Zealand churches, the Churches of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and the South African church to start with.
Behind the Kenyan Church’s statement about US funding lies the long shadow of Archbishop Akinola, the Nigerian tyrant who has bullied many other African bishops into submission to his fundamentalist views, his intolerance, his arrogance and his racism. His ambition and strategy is to establish his hegemony first over the African churches, then over the churches of the ‘Global South’, and ultimately over the entire Anglican Communion. He is apparently convinced that he has a divine mission so to do.
There are signs that this strategy is having some effect. The offices of the Council of African Provinces in Africa (CAPA) are based here in Nairobi. It has been part of Akinola’s strategy to ensure that CAPA ceases to be representative of African theology as a whole to become an instrument of his own narrow theological propaganda. So in respect to CAPA’s HIV/AIDS programme, Akinola gathered sufficient support to have its Chairman, the Archbishop of South Africa whom he perceived as possessed by much too liberal a stance, ousted with no successor appointed. This downgrading of the programme’s work comes as no surprise in the light of Akinola’s steadfast resistance to addressing the issue of HIV and AIDS in his own country. His self-appointed global role evidently doesn’t allow time for that. He then insisted that the programme’s primary source of support from the Episcopal Church must be abandoned even though this means that one of Africa’s most successful initiatives in this field will be unable to survive very long. Next he plotted to secure the resignation of its General Secretary, who is African but not being a Nigerian is apparently not African enough, while at the same time urging that CAPA’s office be given diplomatic status, presumably so that he can staff it with his Nigerian cronies.
One hopes for Africa’s sake that this setback to real progress in the battle against HIV/AIDS turns out to be as temporary as Archbishop Akinola’s extremist views are destined to be in the history of Christian solidarity with the poor. It is certainly difficult to see now how there can be anything approximating to a Lambeth Conference meeting in 2008. With all western churches excluded as Archbishop Nzimbi is proposing, the conference will end up as a jamboree for fundamentalist churches of the Global South who without western funding, will be hard pressed to hold it anywhere other than Archbishop’s Akinola’s back garden. It could certainly never be representative of global Anglicanism.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has to shoulder some of the blame for this state of affairs. Representing as he does the liberal wing of the Church which amongst its many values emphasises that of tolerance, he has been far too accommodating to the histrionics and insults of persons like Akinola. One of the great human lessons to emerge from the Second World War was that the appeasement of bullies leads not to dialogue and compromise but to a hardening of views and even greater outrages.
I didn’t attend Church at All Saints Cathedral last in Nairobi last Sunday. When I became a member of the organisation InclusiveChurch I determined that I would no longer worship in those churches which are unashamedly exclusive. In adopting its uncompromising and unenlightened attitude towards homosexuality, and refusing to welcome gay and lesbian people into fellowship, the Anglican Church in Kenya has to my mind already separated itself from the Anglican Church’s theology, ethos and tradition.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 4:37 AM
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