Updated Tuesday
First, we had Uganda’s Anglicans hail boycott of Lambeth meeting from Reuters on Sunday.
And the BBC Sunday programme had a segment on Uganda which you can listen to here (9 minutes audio):
Uganda shuns Lambeth Conference
The Anglican Church of Uganda has announced that its bishops will not be attending this year’s Lambeth Conference, the meeting of worldwide Anglicanism that takes place once a decade. The Ugandan bishops cited what they called the “crisis” over homosexuality. The Most Reverend Henry Orombi, the Archbishop of Uganda, talked to Sunday.Stefan Stern writes about business and management issues for the Financial Times. In a recent column he turned his attention to the challenges facing the Archbishop of Canterbury. He discussed his take on the Anglican ‘brand’.
Now, today, we have Uganda’s Anglicans threaten to secede from global church from Associated Press today.
And allAfrica.com republishes from yesterday’s Kampala Monitor Homosexuality – COU May Secede.
This morning we also had Ugandan Anglicans in ultimatum to US church over gay marriages in the Guardian.
This afternoon, ACNS reports Church of Uganda Still a Part of Anglican Communion.
Hate to be trivial, but this is the second news story I’ve seen today (the All Africa report) that gives Leviticus 19:22 instead of 18:22 as the clobber verse. The other was a 2003 interview with Tony Jones and Peter Jensen of Sydney.
Seriously, though, these reports strike me as similar to the Cold War brinksmanship and “sabre-rattling.” I don’t think the penny has dropped for the Global South: they are “walking apart” from the rest of the Communion, as the Windsor Report said some would choose to do.
This is the first really clear and practical solution for “mission” from +Orombi as he has much to do at home with on the ground desperation and immorality. Civil wars, murdering, outcasting of tens of thousands, starvation, disease and this guy wants to preach/pop slanderous anti-Christian blanks at queerfolk who love one another…btw, did Orombi miss blaming Canada because none of our “neighbors to the North” are paying his bills with fat contributions inspired by hate?
“Uganda’s Anglicans hail boycott of Lambeth meeting”
And Reuters asserts this on the basis of…
…3, count ’em, *3* quoted Anglicans! (One of whom is “Anglican Secretary of Uganda’s Central province”, and another is a “prominent comedian”)
If one were to ask the Anglicans of Uganda—perhaps on a Wednesday?—“What’s important to you?”, how many issues/problems, individual and societal, would they list BEFORE they got to “The bishop of New Hampshire, USA”?
Sloppy, sloppy “journalism”. >:-p
Surely the Ugandan church leadership must know that their demand is impossible! Is that the intent? “You forced me to do this!”
The Episcopal Church hasn’t forced anything on anyone — it is the Boycotting Primates who have forced themselves into the territory of The Episcopal Church (yes, of course, because we “gave them no choice”) — now if the PB & the Bishop of NH had been jetting around Africa consecrating schismatic gay bishops & blessing same sex unions, they might have a point, but they haven’t & they don’t.
The Uganda situation — manifest especially in the article in The Monitor — is both sad and revealing. They will stay “Anglican” as long as “Anglican” suits who they want to be. They will send a paper to Lambeth about the Covenant, but won’t come to talk about it. They plan to leave, but they want to tell the Communion what to do.
FWIW, I ranted a bit more over on my (new) blog:
http://www.sevenwholedays.org/2008/02/18/reformation-redux/
Pax,
Scott