Bishop Hathaway: Distractions Hinder African Outreach

From here:

For 10 years I have been going to East Africa, taking solar equipment to electrify homes and schools, orphanages, offices, hospitals, clinics, and whole villages in the rural hinterlands of Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. I have 10 years of experience leading teams of American young people and African youth into the bush to install the equipment and to witness what a transformation electricity makes in the lives of people and the development of their communities.

On our first mission trip, we went to the verge of the impenetrable forest to install small solar units in two cinderblock houses the government had built for some resettled pygmies. These strange little people sang, “You came all the way from America to bring us the light. ‘Tukutendereza Jesu’.”

Over those years we have seen and done a lot. More than 2,000 installations have been subsidized by the charitable gifts of individuals and churches from all over America. It has been a collaboration of church, private enterprise, and government working together in local settings to make things happen and turn on the lights. With a commercial firm in Kampala, Solar Energy Uganda, we are partnering to build the first solar fabricating plant in East Africa.

But the most important fruit of these 10 years is the nearly 200 American kids, with a nearly equal number of Africans, who have caught a vision; who, in the words of our patron, First Lady Janet Museveni, have become true “internationalists.” They are future leaders in this emerging global civil society we are witnessing— political, economic, spiritual.

But I have seen some other things that trouble me, including the pressure of Islam. A large and beautiful new mosque dominating downtown Kampala has just been built with oil money from Libya. Sub-Saharan Africa is the target of expansive Islamization. We are finding that Chinese solar products are more economical for our installations than American-made products. It is as if we as a nation don’t care about Africa. The U.S. is losing influence to these other powers, economic and cultural. They have the vision to see that it is in Africa that the great culture wars of the 21st century are to be waged and won. We have got to get our heads out of the sand.

And for us as church? It is getting harder to raise the funds that could empower mission to respond to the great opportunity for service and development that is opened to us. Our outreach is complicated by the theological and ideological battles that are consuming imaginations and energies, and therefore our resources.

Conservative groups are uniting with African churches and building excellent relations of witness and support. But they are also tied up with building domestic ecclesiastical infrastructure.

The Episcopal Church has made a seminal commitment to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. It has a well-designed and costly promotional campaign, with conferences and high profile celebrity leaders committing TEC to underwrite this major project to rid the world of abject poverty within 15 years. All well and good, but I worry that it will be just another over-organized foreign aid bureaucracy, and very little help will ever filter down to my pygmy friends emerging from the impenetrable forest.

What the church must do is what the church does best. That is to transform the hearts of individual men and women and connect them with their African brothers and sisters who love the Lord Jesus and desire to do his will. Then pray the Holy Spirit will inspire them to build a genuine global civil society. That has been the mission of Solar Light for Africa these past 10 years. And, by God’s gracious providence, it will continue. Tukutendereza Jesu!

Tukutendereza Jesu: An East African expression of praise and thanks to God through Jesus.

Our guest columnist is the Rt. Rev. Alden M. Hathaway, Bishop of Pittsburgh, retired. He lives in Tallahassee, Fla.

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Episcopal Leftists Have Hit Rock Bottom and Started to Dig On The Decency Scale

Greg Griffith outlines it all. What is truly sad about all this stuff is that I know most of these people personally. I’ve had drinks with these folks, laughed with them, and in some cases shared a meal with them. They really aren’t like this in real life in face to face contact. But, when the mask of the Episcopal left slips on the internet, well, for me, my heart just breaks. On the other hand, what drives me the most crazy about these folks is that they complain to me about folks like me not making room for them at the table, as if they don’t know the fact that they control the table, and that they can hurt anyone they want and say “get over it” but if you commit the slightest slight, they bleed all over you. It makes no sense.

Archbishop Orombi: What Is Anglicanism?

From here:

With this knowledge of the centrality of the authority of Scripture in Anglicanism, therefore, we understand ourselves to be in the mainstream of Anglicanism—from Thomas Cranmer to John Stott. The evangelical tradition in the Church of England produced William Wilberforce, whose lifelong mission to eradicate slavery and the slave trade liberated our people. It produced Charles Simeon, who inspired the beginning of mission societies that shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with us and many others. It produced Bishop Tucker and other missionaries, who risked their lives to come to Uganda. These and many more Anglican evangelicals brought us the legacy of the Protestant Reformation in England. Their commitment to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ as revealed in Scripture has continued among us to this day.

Such a commitment—to the authority of Scripture as a defining mark of Anglican identity—was why the vast majority of bishops from the Global South and I insisted that Lambeth Resolution 1.10, the 1998 decision on human sexuality, include the words “incompatible with Holy Scripture” when describing homosexual practice. This standard of Holy Scripture is why we continue to uphold Lambeth 1.10 each time we meet.

In the current Anglican crisis, we are at risk of losing our biblical foundation. As bishops, we are constrained, in the words of the 1662 Ordinal, “to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word,” and we are determined “out of the same Holy Scriptures to instruct the people committed to [our] charge and to teach or maintain nothing, as necessary to eternal salvation, but that which [we] shall be persuaded may be concluded and proved by the same.”

From Thomas Cranmer to Richard Hooker, from the Thirty-Nine Articles and the 1662 Ordinal to the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the authority of Holy Scripture has always held a central and foundational role in Anglican identity. This is true for the Anglican church in Uganda; and, if it is not true for the entire Anglican Communion, then that communion will cease to be an authentic expression of the Church of Jesus Christ.

The Archbishop goes on to say this about the Lambeth conference:

In December 2006, the House of Bishops of the Church of Uganda unanimously adopted “The Road to Lambeth,” a statement drafted for a council of African provinces. Among other things, it stated, “We will definitely not attend any Lambeth Conference to which the violators of the Lambeth Resolution [1.10] are also invited as participants or observers.” Accordingly, if the present invitations to the Lambeth Conference stand, I do not expect the Ugandan bishops to attend.

It is important that this decision not be misunderstood as withdrawing from the instruments of communion. On the contrary, our decision reflects the critical importance of the Lambeth Conference: Its value as an instrument of communion is greatly diminished when the persistent violators of its resolutions are invited. If our resolutions as a council of bishops do not have moral authority among ourselves, how can we expect our statements on world affairs to carry weight in the world’s forums? An instrument of communion must also be an instrument of discipline in order to effectively facilitate meaningful communion among its autonomous provinces.

The Church of Uganda takes its Anglican identity and the future prospects of the global Anglican Communion very seriously. Our thoughtfulness in how we participate in the instruments of communion reflects our fundamental loyalty to our Anglican heritage. Likewise, our devotion to the Word of God—expressed through our martyrs, revival, and the historic episcopate—reflects our commitment to the ongoing place of the Church of Uganda as a province of the Anglican Communion.

Reading this brings to the fore of my mind once again the fact that many Anglican provinces have a much stronger view of Anglicanism that those in the West. For bishops like Orombi, Akinola (who head the Church of Nigeria-ANGLICAN COMMUNION), and others, Anglican is their identity, and what we do in the West affects them whether we like it or not. I truly wish the leadership of TEC would take Anglicanism more seriously rather than cavalierly.

Papers From the Wycliffe Hall Consultation

Radner, Seitz, and Turner of the ACI, as well as others.

Turner hits the nail on the head here:

These four points are taken by the progressive defenders of the actions of TEC as an adequate guarantee of its integrity, its adherence to the apostolic tradition. However, at each of the four points, the progressive leadership of TEC gives a remarkable spin to their interpretation. Thus, for example, the claim that The Holy Scriptures contain “all things necessary for salvation” and are “the rule and ultimate standard of faith” is qualified (if not contradicted) by the common assertion that revelation is “ongoing” in a way that makes available new truths either not previously known, not properly understood, or in direct contradiction to well established tradition. The witness of the Holy Scriptures is further qualified by claims that there are truths of reason and/or experience that may contradict the seemingly univocal witness of scripture. (Thus, for example, the assertion that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life is contradicted by the experience of God in other religions just as the univocal scriptural condemnation of homosexual relations is contradicted by the experience of loving relations between members of the same gender.) In short, within TEC, tradition, reason, and now experience can operate independent of and in contradistinction to the witness of the Holy Scriptures. Further, novelty in respect to doctrine and practice receive generous license because (so it is claimed) the Holy Spirit acts most normally in doing new things—things that need not accord with former things!

Similar issues arise with the claim that the integrity of TEC is assured by the continuing authority of the historic creeds. However, the progressive clergy who now hold the levers of power within TEC insist vehemently that the creeds are not to be used as binding confessions that exclude from fellowship people whose experience of God or whose beliefs about God are different from or even contradictory to those normally associated with the creeds as tokens of Christian identity and sufficient statements of Christian belief. The progressive position in respect to the creeds is that Christians in the U.S. now live in a pluralistic society; and, in response to this fact, its advocates agree with our former Presiding Bishop who is fond of saying we should tolerate the contradictions because they will find a final reconciliation within the pleroma of divine truth. The prevalence of this view recently received vivid illustration when a Priest of TEC announced that she is now both and Muslim and a Christian. The response of her bishop was that he welcomed her decision because it would do wonders for interfaith relations!

A more fundamental problem arises when one looks hard at the meaning and use of the two sacraments on the part of TEC’s clerical leadership. It is no secret that in a significant number of dioceses and parishes Baptism is no longer thought to be a necessary precondition for participation in the Supper of the Lord. To be sure, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord are sacraments found throughout the dioceses and parishes of TEC. However, use is changing the meaning of both in ways most Christians within the Anglican Communion and within the other churches would not recognize as faithful to Christ’s intention. How is one to understand this remarkable novelty? One can come the Supper of the Lord without Baptism because one does not have to die and rise with Christ in order to come to the Father. As a consequence, Baptism is not an effective sign of dying and rising with Christ and the Supper of the Lord is not a participation in that death and resurrection. Both sacraments are simply ways of offering hospitality to a diverse humankind and so manifesting the welcoming love of God to all.

We now come to the fourth element of the quadrilateral—the historic episcopate locally adapted. With its arrival, we are presented not only the question of Episcopal authority but also the question of diversity. How is the truth of the Gospel of Christ to be proclaimed and lived faithfully in circumstances very different from those that obtained in first century Palestine? And how is the common life of the church to be ordered within the tensions produced by the meeting of the truth about God made known in Christ Jesus and the particular circumstances in which Christians witness to that truth? The answer given by the leadership of TEC is, at the moment, through allowing the greatest possible autonomy not only on the part of each province of the Anglican Communion but also on the part of the various dioceses and parishes of TEC. Within TEC this is known as local option. Each province, diocese, parish and mission is to maintain loving relations with all others, but each is to pursue the truth of God in Christ in its own way and in its own place. In short, the historic episcopate which once was thought to guarantee that Christians throughout the world held to one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all is now to see that the particular way in which the Gospel is received and lived in his or her particular location is not threatened or impinged upon by Christians from beyond the borders of a particular jurisdiction. The locally adapted episcopate within TEC has become thoroughly local in all matters save a range of moral imperatives that enjoin hospitality, mutual aid, mutual respect, and love, but not common faith and practice. On this view, bishops function in large measure to enforce not the belief and practice of the church catholic but local canons that protect diocese or parish from foreign intervention or defection by anyone who oppose the progressive views of those who hold office.

Unfortunately, however, I am pretty sure an Anglican Covenant is going to be rejected by TEC. That will ultimately lead to a breed of confessional Anglicanism and a breed of liberal Anglicanism, and the Anglican Communion will be over as we know it. The main problem – in all of this – is the fact that everybody pretty much does what they want and don’t worry about who else it bothers, citing conscience. Anglican conciliarity may not be dead yet, but the old boy is barely breathing. I know my Bishop is a big believer in it, as I know the good folks at the ACI are. For my part, however, I am cynical, when conciliarity is essentially akin to capitulation in most people’s minds. Further, the ACI essays mention the bounds of diversity, and while a Muslim Episcopal priest may get asked to stand down for a year, we have no discipline in TEC to enforce the bounds of diversity, only the canons and the will of those in leadership. BLD