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CHRISTIAN HISTORY

Saturday, June 28, 2003
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In This Issue

The African Lion Roars in the Western Church

Anglican liberals are fretting, conservatives rejoicing, and all are scrambling to their history books: whence this new evangelical force on the world scene?
by Chris Armstrong

Five summers ago, the lion of African Anglicanism roared. This
week, it has bared its claws.

The summer of 1998 saw the every-ten-years Lambeth Conference of
the worldwide Anglican communion absorbed with issues of human
sexuality. At its meetings, African Anglicans led a campaign
against the liberalizing of the church's teachings on
homosexuality.

Joining in the African "roar" was Bishop John Rucyahana of
Shyira, Rwanda, who issued this warning to the liberalizing
contingent in Western Anglicanism: "We don't like your First
World way of speaking ambiguous words and not being straight on
the issues." Rucyahana and his colleagues were heard, and heeded:
the conference passed a resolution (526 to 70, with 45
abstentions) that homosexual practice is "incompatible with
Scripture."

In the wake of Lambeth, liberals in American Anglicanism (the
Episcopalian Church) resented this new voice of "African
fundamentalism," while a conservative like bishop Jack Iker of
Ft. Worth, Texas could observe with some satisfaction: "No longer
does the United States or England speak for the Anglican
Communion but the church in Africa and Asia does."

This week, one branch of African Anglicanism seems to be moving
from rhetoric to action in the conservative cause. In a letter to
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of the
Nigerian Church (Anglican Communion)--a church representing 17
million of Anglicanism's 70 million members--has threatened to
break communion with the worldwide body over the same issue that
dominated discussion at Lambeth: Williams has supported the
appointment of the openly gay Dr. Jeffrey John as Bishop of
Reading, in England.

Said the Nigerian Archbishop, Peter Jasper Akinola: "We cannot
continue to be in communion with people who have taken a step
outside the biblical boundaries."

How did this lion of African Christianity come on the scene? Our
August 2003 issue of Christian History will tell the story
of sub-Saharan Africa's "Christian explosion" in the twentieth
century--a century that brought Africa from the periphery to the
center of the Christian world, largely through the efforts of
native African evangelists. This untold story involves, at every
step, tensions between Western and indigenous African Christians
at every step--none so vivid as those that beset Samuel Ajayi
Crowther, Anglicanism's first African bishop.

Finish this article from the Christian History website.http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2003/jun27.html

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