Nigerian Anglicans May Control the Future of the Church

With 18 million members The Church of Nigeria is the Anglican Communion’s second largest province after the Church of England itself, and its fastest growing one. It boasts the President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, among its congregation. However, the relationship between the Nigerian Primates and their mother Church has not lately been a happy one.

The opposition of Nigerian Bishops and their congregations to any softening of attitudes towards homosexuality has made them increasingly uneasy with the notion of being in full communion with overseas churches which allow - in their view - an unacceptable latitude in sexual matters. The size and faithfulness of this province means that in any ensuing schism, to be able to claim communion with the Church of Nigeria will be invaluable for a body seeking to present itself as the genuine inheritor of the Anglican tradition. As British, Australian and North American churches fight within themselves over the status of women Bishops and active homosexual clergy, the Church of Nigeria, along with the other African provinces such as South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, finds itself courted by traditionalists and reformists, Anglo Catholics and Evangelicals, as a fountain of legitimacy for whatever schismatic or unifying agency can claim it. In an extraordinary moment of thwarted ecumenicism the low church, evangelical, and frequently anti-Catholic African Anglicans even found themselves rejecting an advance by Pope Benedict XVI, who wanted to bring them into his newly formed Personal Ordinariate, where they would have been permitted exceptional latitude in liturgy and practice, including the ordination of married men.

The irony of this is that the Church of Nigeria itself is relatively untroubled by internal dissent. The old debates between Anglo Catholicism and Evangelism which wracked British and North American Churches in the 19th century barely touched the African Provinces, where Anglicanism was always defined by its distance from both the Catholic Church on one side and the Baptist and Pentecostalist movements on the other. In the 20th century the Church seemed contentedly traditionalist on the ordination of women (which they do neither practice themselves, nor oppose in other Anglicans) and collectively conservative in sexual matters. This relative theological unity owes much to the Church’s rapid growth through the 1990s, which means that many of its members are converts, prepared to take Nigerian Anglicanism as they find it. In addition, the issue of homosexuality is unlikely to prove a divisive one in socially conservative Southern Nigeria.

To read more, click here.