Why all Anglican eyes in London are nervously fixed on a powerful African archbishop

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6716

[VirtueOnline] 19 Sep 2007--The most important figure today in the Anglican Communion, a worldwide federation of churches with some 75 million adherents, is probably a man few people in the West know anything about : Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola, of Nigeria. An uncompromising traditionalist, Akinola presides over the most vibrant and almost certainly the largest Anglican community in the world-at a time when the Anglican world's true center of gravity has shifted to Africa.

It was no small matter, then, when Akinola went public this past summer with blistering denunciations of proposals to consecrate openly gay bishops and to sanctify gay marriage. Commenting on the decision of the Canadian diocese of New Westminster to approve the blessing of gay unions, Akinola declared that the diocese had in practice seceded from the Anglican world. Reacting to a proposal in the Church of England to ordain a gay bishop (a proposal ultimately withdrawn after intense pressure from African and Asian leaders), Akinola thundered, "This is an attack on the Church of God -a Satanic attack on God's Church." And during the buildup to the U.S. Episcopal Church's controversial ordination of Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire, he announced, "I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. Even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don't hear of such things."

American and European readers may be inclined to dismiss such remarks as coming from a hidebound bigot, or perhaps from a demagogue seeking attention-but they would be wrong to do so. In his attitudes toward sexuality, and above all in his attitude toward religious authority, Akinola represents a deep-rooted conservative tradition in African Christianity that is flourishing and growing, and that is simply not going to vanish as levels of economic growth and education rise in Africa. The prospect of imminent global schism in the Anglican Communion is therefore real.

Matters may well have come to a head by the time this article goes to press: in October the Archbishop of Canterbury was scheduled to preside over an emergency session in London of the primates of his Church worldwide. Perhaps the session will turn out to avert open schism, but even the friendliest such meeting could not change the nature of the enduring conflict between the older and the younger Anglican churches, with those of Europe and North America set against those of Africa and Asia. Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians are watching these events with foreboding, because what is really at issue, of course, is competing conceptions of the nature of religious authority, of the relationship between the religious and secular spheres, and even of the possibility of coexisting peacefully with other faiths.