Mourners approach a demonstrator who stood outside the L. Douglas Wilder Performing Arts Center at Norfolk State University, where a memorial service for Sean Williams was held Wednesday. The sign that he and another demonstrator held denounced homosexuality. CHRIS TYREE/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

The Virginian-Pilot © April 6, 2007

Norfolk State’s concert choir sang in tribute to Sean Williams, a freshman music student who was stabbed after he tried to aid a friend on campus Saturday.

They filled the L. Douglas Wilder Performing Arts Center with songs about salvation during a memorial on Wednesday.
Even without Williams’ tenor voice, it was heavenly to hear them fill the hall.
Then I went outside, where there was a dispiriting display of faith.

A crowd had gathered near two preachers who stood on the sidewalk and held a sign that said homosexuals need not apply at the Pearly Gates.
Williams, as you may have read this week, was gay.

Some young people could not bring themselves to turn the other cheek. They criticized the preachers for being there. A few folks shouted.
A man tried to step between the preachers and the crowd, but the whole thing blew up. People rushed in and grabbed the banner, carried it to a trash can and stuffed it in.
Young men tried to light it on fire. It wouldn’t burn.
When I looked around, I didn’t see the preachers.

Roderic Powell, the man who tried to calm things down, chastised the young people who had snatched the sign.
“I’m Sean’s uncle,” he said. “You owe me an apology…. You can’t act like this. Regardless of what the man had to say, we need peace.”

I rode with him to another building. Musicians practiced. A collage showed pictures of his nephew.
He said Williams’ family is a Christian one.
“We loved him…. He was a good kid. He had a good heart…. I don’t condone homosexuality because the Bible says it’s a sin, but I love my nephew.”
Fortunately, Sean’s mother, Lisa Bland, didn’t see the disturbance.
“What we were doing had nothing to do with anything other than celebrating my son’s life,” she told me later.
“Sean was the best child. I have to say it was an honor to be his mother.”
She knew he was gay.
“It did not define him.”

Wednesday night, I walked back and pulled the sign out of the trash. Warning, be not deceived… No fornicator, or idolater, or homosexual… shall inherit the Kingdom of God. I stuffed it back.
A man drove up. It was one of the preachers.
“That’s my banner.”
He got his sign out of the garbage. He agreed to talk, but not there. We drove a bit.

The preacher said he and two others tried to deliver their message here last week but got turned away.
I asked him why he timed his return to the memorial.
“We knew that he was a homosexual. The banner is addressing moral law.”
He said it was about more than homosexuality. It was about murder, too. He talked, but I didn’t buy it.
He knew exactly what he was doing when he held that sign in plain view of people feeling a loss.

I asked his name.
“Michael.”
Last name?
“I’d rather not.”
Are you a pastor?
“I preach the Word.”
Like some kind of ghoul.

· Reach John Doucette at (757) 446-2793 or john.doucette@ pilotonline.com.

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=68 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=67 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=67#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:45:14 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=67 Examples of Racism on Fox

Thanks to Dick Atlee

Check out:

http://foxattacks.com/

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=67 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=66 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=66#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:51:05 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=66 Archbishop of Wales:

Easter Fights Racism, Militarism, Nationalism, Sexism and Poverty

By Ekklesia staff writers 8 Apr 2007

To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to be incorporated in a spiritual and political struggle for life against death, empowered by God’s love rather than by the forces of oppression and division, says the Anglican Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, in a tough-talking Easter Message.

“Jesus preached about the forgiveness and graciousness of God and sought to free people from everything that enslaved and oppressed them,” declared the Archbishop, highlighting the radical impact of the Gospel. “For him there were no prior conditions for being accepted by God, whatever your sex, status or position. You were a child of God made in his image. His resurrection was a triumph over the forces of evil – the forces of racism, militarism, nationalism, sexism and poverty.”

He continued: “To be ‘in Christ’ then is an invitation to join in that struggle, to take part in Christ’s mission and to fight against everything that enslaves and de-humanises human beings and, of course, to do so non-violently.”

Dr Morgan elaborated: “There are enough issues in our world, country and church that show clearly that men and women are still being oppressed and treated as slaves. Not just child soldiers in Angola or Korea, sweat labour in Thailand and China, and the oppressive regime of Mugabe in Zimbabwe. But also here in Wales where in 2005 there were 20,000 homeless people, 7,000 of whom were children. Sexual trafficking in young people and women is still rife in this country, and foreign nationals are often forced to live on the poverty line because their employers take back for their keep the little they pay them in wages.”

His message also hit tackled the problems of the Christian community. “[W]e still live in a church where it is not possible for women to be bishops and in a church too where most worshippers are women but all the major committees and councils of most dioceses and province are run by men and in a[n Anglican] Communion where gay people feel increasingly isolated and marginalised and even persecuted.”

Concluded the Archbishop of Wales: “In the end it is not enough to believe in the resurrection as a proposition or as an article of faith, because resurrection is not just about a dead Jesus coming to life again, it is about us allowing God’s spirit to work afresh in us as he worked in Jesus. Resurrection means joining in God’s recreation of his world as and when and where, we can.”

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=66 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=65 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=65#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2007 14:41:52 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=65 Jesus’ descent into the underworld

Something strange is happening- – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness.

The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.

The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began.

God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep.

Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve.

The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory.

At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.”

He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake.

I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image.

Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.

For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you.

See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image.

On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back.

See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise.

I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven.

I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God.

The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager.

The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open.

The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.”

From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday (P.G. 43, 439, 451, 462-463)

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=65 3 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=64 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=64#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:35:26 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=64 Lesbian Couple in Wyoming Denied Communion

By KATHLEEN MILLER The Associated Press Thursday, April 5, 2007; 2:22 PM

GILLETTE, Wyo. — Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson, a lesbian couple who got married in Canada last August, sent a letter recently to their state legislator decrying a Wyoming bill that would deny recognition of same-sex marriages. The lawmaker read the letter on the floor of the Legislature.

Soon after, the local paper interviewed the couple on Ash Wednesday and ran a story and pictures of them with ash on their foreheads, a mark of their Roman Catholic faith.  It wasn’t long after that that the couple received a notice from their parish church telling them they have been barred from receiving Communion.

“If all this stuff hadn’t hit the newspaper, it wouldn’t have been any different than before _ nobody would have known about it,” said the couple’s parish priest at St. Matthew’s, the Rev. Cliff Jacobson. “The sin is one thing. It’s a very different thing to go public with that sin.”

Catholics deemed sinners in the eyes of the church are sometimes taken aside and privately advised not to take Communion. But Cheyenne Bishop David Ricken, gay Catholic organizations and a national church spokeswoman said they could not recall any previous instance of a U.S. bishop denying the sacrament to a gay couple in writing.

Now Huskinson and Vader say they are struggling to reconcile their devotion to the church with their devotion to each other.  “You spend half your time defending your gayness to Catholics,” Vader said, “and the other half of your time defending your Catholicism to gays.”

The couple, who regularly attended Mass and took Communion, have not been back to St. Matthew’s since they received the letter a month and a half ago. Vader said they did not want to make a scene.  The 46-year-old newlyweds _ Vader is a supervisor at a recycling center, Huskinson a coal miner _ ran afoul of a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on the church’s part.

“I told my wife in good conscience that if I had known those ladies, and we’d have been having a beer, I’d have just told them to keep everything to themselves,” parish music director John Chick said. He added that once news like this hits the papers, “someone’s forced to deal with it now, aren’t they?”

The parish priest said that after the couple put their engagement and marriage announcements in the local paper, he ran reminders of the church’s teachings in the parish bulletin as a warning.  After the Ash Wednesday story, the priest sent this letter: “It is with a heavy heart, in obedience to the instruction of Bishop David Ricken, that I must inform you that, because of your union and your public advocacy of same-sex unions, that you are unable to receive Communion.”

The bishop said the couple’s sex life constitutes a grave sin, “and the fact that it became so public, that was their choice.”  Last fall, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops overwhelmingly approved new guidelines that say parishes should welcome gays while telling them to be celibate because the church considers their sexuality “disordered.” The bishops said that anyone who knowingly persists in sinful behavior, such as gay sex or using artificial contraception, should refrain from taking Communion.

Professor Carl Raschke, chairman of religious studies at the University of Denver, said of the Cheyenne bishop’s decision: “It’s no more surprising that the Catholic Church would deny Communion to an openly gay couple than a Muslim mosque would deny access to somebody who ate pork.”

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the church allows local bishops to handle decisions on who may take Communion, so there is no record of how many have been barred from receiving the sacrament.  Walsh said most cases she has heard of involved public figures. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the St. Louis archbishop Raymond Burke said he would deny Communion to John Kerry, a Catholic who supports abortion rights.

Vader said the couple never made any secret of their relationship. She pointed to statuettes of two kissing Dutch girls in front of their single-wide trailer home. She also said that the couple posed for a church directory family photo with Vader’s children from a previous marriage, and that the church has sent mail to both of them at the same address for years.  Huskinson questioned why Catholics having premarital sex and using birth control are not barred from receiving Communion, too. But the parish priest said the difference is this: The other Catholics are “not going around broadcasting, `Hey I’m having sex outside of marriage’ or `I’m using birth control.’”

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=64 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=63 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=63#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2007 19:04:16 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=63 Do Something Useful for the Majority

By Martha Burk

The new Congress has been busy, what with scandals in the Justice Department and votes to reign in war spending with some accountability and better training for the troops. Both are good things, and rightly priorities. But both are likely to end with standoffs as they go head-to-head with the White House, no doubt because the 2008 election season is already well underway, and the President is determined not to give Democrats an edge with voters.

But some members of this Congress are already looking ahead to boost the party’s stock with the majority of voters – women. They are going beyond non-binding resolutions and bills that won’t get past the President’s veto pen. They are now talking about passing The Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA states that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Recently renamed the Women’s Equality Amendment and introduced March 27 by its chief sponsor, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) to a standing-room-only news conference, the ERA would grant equal constitutional rights to women — something we have yet to achieve. A simple concept that had the blessing of both political parties until the Republicans struck it from their platform in 1980, with the Democrats following in 2004.

The ERA was first introduced in Congress in 1923, but was not passed and sent to the states for ratification until 1972. Unlike the 27th amendment, ratified after hanging around for 200 years, the Equal Rights Amendment was passed with a time limit of only seven years for approval by the states. In that brief time it was ratified by 35 states, but was stopped three states short by millions of corporate dollars backing Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-woman storm troopers, who feared unisex toilets more than they valued freedom from discrimination. (Schlafly always resurfaces at the Republican platform committee hearings leading a band of zealots campaigning for their own constitutional amendment banning abortion. She says Republican women want to ban abortion. A few do. We saw just how few last November, when 100% of anti-abortion ballot initiatives were defeated.)

Much has changed in the 35 years since Congress first passed the ERA. Women have become the majority of the population and of the electorate. Most are now in the work force full time, including nearly three quarters of mothers with children between six and eighteen. Women head one third of all households, and a whopping 61% of single parent families.

While much has changed, little progress has been made. On the average women still make only 76 cents to a man’s dollar, working full-time and year-round. They hold 98% of the low paying “women’s” jobs and fewer than 15% of the board seats in major corporations. Three quarters of the elderly in poverty are women. And in every state except Montana, women still pay higher rates than similarly situated men for health, annuity, disability, and auto insurance.

Congress, only 16% female, has stifled the ERA year after year, even though it has been reintroduced in every session since time ran out on ratification. But now with renewed energy and front-page coverage of the new ERA push, John Conyers (D-NY) Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, promises fast-track hearings and reporting the amendment to the floor for a vote.

The framers of the Constitution could not have foreseen the modern political posturing, but surely they would cringe at a body that is so willing to soapbox on such sham amendments as gay marriage, yet unwilling to release one that directly affects the well being of 52% of the population.

Nine out of 10 Americans believe that the constitution should make it clear that women and men should have equal rights. The Equal Rights Amendment won’t cost taxpayers a dime, and it will benefit not only the women of America but also the men, in this and all generations to come. That would be a real legacy for the new Congress.

Martha Burk is the Money editor for Ms., and Director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=63 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=62 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=62#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:26:19 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=62

In spite of what Peter Akinola tells Rowan Williams the Anglican Communion will not break up.

What is the future of the Anglican Communion?

I was asked this recently by a thoughtful observer of our laundry yard. Two things convince me that the Anglican world will not break up. After all it was founded in the USA by the first “Anglican” church that was not “Under” the Archbishop of Canterbury.

1) The following statement by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in the USA on March 20, 2007 is a great statement of the gospel for Holy Week and Easter.

We proclaim the Gospel of what God has done and is doing in Christ, of the dignity of every human being, and of justice, compassion, and peace. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that stands against any violence, including violence done to women and children as well as those who are persecuted because of their differences, often in the name of God.

2) The Bishop of Botswana offers a more Anglican prespective than the Archbishop of Uganda.

 

LOUD voices from Africa, aided by the “almighty dollar” and internet lobbyists, are distorting the true picture of what Africa’s 37 million Anglicans really think about sexuality and the future of the Anglican Communion, says the Bishop of Botswana, the Rt Revd Musonda Mwamba.
Bishop Mwamba was hopeful for the future:

“I hear the voice of grace embraced by the majority of Anglican Africans. It is a still small voice. . . This is grace — the only way that can help us overcome the problems that bedevil our Communion today.”

For the entire article CLICK HERE.

 

 

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=62 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=61 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=61#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:46:39 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=61 Progress Halted on Same-Sex Bill in Nigeria

By Ekklesia Staff Writers 30 Mar 2007

The progress of a bill in Nigeria that that would impose brutal penalties on shows of affection between lesbian and gay people has been halted in the face of national elections in the country.

It has been suggested that the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act 2006 which was debated on 22 March by the Nigerian House of Representatives may be lost if the Nigerian election takes place soon.

The Nigerian Federal elections are scheduled to be held on 21 April and the ceremonial opening of the new session of Parliament on May 29, 2007, which the constitution recognizes as the hand over date to a new government.

Allafrica.com reported on Sunday, 25 March 2007 that the House of Representatives would soon be prorogued but this has yet to be confirmed by other sources.

If the election takes place as timetabled however, the present House of Representatives will be officially dissolved in May and the handover to the new House will take place.

The present sitting of the House has finished. Politicians asked the panel of Human Rights which continues to meet, to go and review the bill again.

However Changing Attitude Nigeria (CAN), a group of gay Christians in the country, say it is difficult to say categorically that the current House has been totally suspended because a lot of ‘manoeuvring; is still taking place ahead of the election.

Nigerian Anglicans including Archbishop Akinola have faced international criticism from Christian leaders and human rights groups around the world for giving their backing to the bill.

The new measures would impose brutal penalties on all relationships, activism, advocacy, and shows of affection among lesbian and gay people. It would introduce criminal penalties for any public advocacy or associations supporting the rights of lesbian and gay people, as well as for same-sex relationships and marriage ceremonies.

“What we are hearing from CAN members in Anglican congregations in Nigeria is that the church leaders have been feeling big pressure on them and some are very angry because they expected the bill to be voted on prior to the end of this session. There are also rumours that money has exchanged hands, American money, and yet it has not proved easy for the Anglican Church leaders to push the bill through the House of Representatives. Corruption remains widespread at every level of Nigerian society” Changing Attitude in Nigeria said in a statement.

It is also theoretically possible for the next government to reintroduce the bill. But campaigners against the bill say this would be unlikely to happen in the first term when they would be trying to satisfy many different expectations. It remains a possibility that the bill could be reintroduced in the next government’s second term.

Davis Mac-Iyalla, Director of Changing Attitude Nigeria, said: “Because of the continuing uncertainty, Changing Attitude Nigeria will not celebrate the defeat of the bill publicly until after May 29. We are quietly confident and feeling more happy, but there is still the potential for lobbying in favour of the bill to take place by the Church of Nigeria and for the Government to spring a surprise. However, if the Church was confident about the success of the bill, we think they would be issuing a confident public statement now, which they are not.”

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=61 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=60 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=60#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:14:48 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=60 Day Care Debate Misses the Point

By Ruth Conniff March 28, 2007

From the headlines about the latest day care study you’d think something big had happened. For the report click here;

The Fox News story was typical: “Study Links Child Care and Bad Behavior”. Click here for Fox story:

 Local television news ran teasers like “Day Care Takes a Beating,” and “Today’s Hot Topic: Are You a Bad Parent If You Put Your Child in Day Care?” Click here for story.

Instead of focusing on the rather modest results of a study that shows the difference between kids in child care and those not in it, the media would do well to focus on the extreme scarcity of quality care, and what a huge difference there is between the good and bad places for parents to leave their children.

So ready are U.S. audiences for a rehash of the stay-at-home versus working mom debate, the story fit neatly into a media niche: Score one for stay-at-home parenting–down with day care!

It might come as a surprise, then, that the National Institutes of Health press release describing the study actually led with the good news: Children in high-quality day care score significantly higher on vocabulary tests than their peers. The headline was “Early Child Care Linked to Increases in Vocabulary, Some Problem Behaviors in Fifth and Sixth Grades.” With all the recent emphasis on testing and grade-schoolers academic skills, you’d think that this news might jump out at people.

The long-term, NIH-funded study recruited new mothers of 1,364 babies in hospitals at ten different locations in the United States, and monitored their child care until they were four and a half years old. “Child care” was defined as care by anyone other than the child’s mother — including fathers — for at least ten hours a week. Researchers followed up with tests that showed vocabulary gains in the children from higher-quality child care backgrounds in grade school, and with teacher surveys that showed greater aggressiveness and other problem behaviors in all kids who came from some kind of child care.

Keep in mind that the types of child care arrangements measured included families in which children stay with their dad or a grandparent for two hours a day, go to an enriching morning preschool program, and those who are in low-cost, high-turnover, chain day care centers from seven in the morning until seven at night. It’s quite a range. Children who had been in center care scored higher on teacher evaluations of aggressiveness and disobedience.

“The study authors suggested that the correlation between center care and problem behaviors could be due to the fact that center-based child care providers often lack the training, as well as the time, to address behavior problems,” the NIH press release notes. “For example, center-based child care providers may not be able to provide sufficient adult attention or guidance to address problems that may emerge when groups of young children are together, such as how to resolve conflicts over toys or activities.”

On the other hand, in high-quality child care settings, these are exactly the skills that children learn.

How often do we parents marvel at our favorite preschool teachers’ calm, patient, skilled handling of toddler tantrums and scuffles over toys? A good teacher not only shows little children how to use their words, master their emotions, and solve conflicts peacefully, she (or, less frequently, he) models these critical social and emotional skills for parents. Having the support and good example of someone who really knows how to handle children is a precious resource for parents. After all, how often do stay-at-moms and working parents alike go to bed feeling guilty because they lost their cool when their willful tots tested their patience one last time after a long day? And how often does the image of the calm, good-humored, professional child care teacher float into our heads to help us remember the right way to deal with our children? Use your words, don’t yell, calm down, take a break, keep your sense of humor–above all, when confronted with toddler rage, remember that you are the adult. All of that is a lot easier said than done. But if we want our kids to learn to control themselves and turn into the kind of people others can live with, we have to give them a good example. Good preschool teachers do it every day, under battle conditions.

But here is the real news, obscured by the flap over the NIH study: there aren’t enough good preschool teachers. The chaotic center environment that the researchers postulate might account for children’s anti-social behavior is the norm in this country. So much the norm, in fact, that it would be hard to find a significant number of truly high-quality child care settings even in a group of 1,364 children.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children has a set of standards for judging quality and awarding a kind of Good Housekeeping seal to centers that meet its criteria. But the child care centers that meet NAEYC standards represent only about 10 percent of all child care in the United States. For standards click here.

 More common is the revolving door of overworked, underpaid staff who receive little or no training in children’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. The harried staffers at the average for-profit center, or the family day care providers with little training or support who take on tons of kids whose parents rush to work all day, are not
necessarily great models for parents.
But in our nonsystem of child care in the United States, the kinds of places where kids are stashed while parents go to work is of very little interest. Instead of focusing on the rather modest results of a study that shows the difference between kids in child care and those not in it, the media would do well to focus on the extreme scarcity of quality care, and what a huge difference there is between the good and bad places for parents to leave their children.

Instead of talking about stay-at-home motherhood versus child care, reporters and policymakers should take a look at what we are doing for a group of kids who have received a lot of media attention in the last two decades–the children of women on welfare.

Under welfare reform, supports for child care in states across the country have been frozen or are going down. In some states, the government will dock child care payments if a child doesn’t attend at least half time in any given week–which can happen easily due to illness and other temporary problems. As federal pool of money for child care has been shrinking, parent co-pays and child care rates are going up. Without adequate child care, welfare reform is nothing but punishment for parents and children alike.

Aggressiveness and inadequate social, emotional, and intellectual stimulation and learning are bigger problems for kids from the poorest families. But the lack of good child care is a problem that reaches way up into the middle class.

If only our society could get more interested in that problem, instead of an imagined cat fight between working and stay-at-home moms, which, in my experience, ended a long time ago.

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=60 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=59 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=59#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:31:21 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=59 What’s Going to Happen

As we Start Running out of Cheap Gas to Guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

Thanks to Dick Atlee

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that “people cannot stand too much reality.” What you’re about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

It has been very hard for Americans — lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring — to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life — not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense — you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

The term “global oil-production peak” means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world’s all-time total endowment, meaning half the world’s oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there’s a big catch: It’s the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

The United States passed its own oil peak — about 11 million barrels a day — in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West’s ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.
Some “cornucopians” claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat center of “abiotic” oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other place.

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

It will change everything about how we live.

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn’t easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.
The widely touted “hydrogen economy” is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen’s nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with “renewables” are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can’t be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.
Virtually all “biomass” schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What’s more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas “inputs” (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser — you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.
Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks — as a contributor to greenhouse “global warming” gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world’s second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China’s surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places — the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia — and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world’s remaining oil in the process.

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not “services” like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart’s “warehouse on wheels” won’t be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores’ 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a “cottage industry” basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower — and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don’t refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than
our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities’ problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
I’m not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope — that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, and reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=59 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=58 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=58#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:37:10 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=58 From Apology…to Moral Action on Slavery

By Pearl Duncan on Ekklesia 28 Mar 2007

Duncan lives in New York is Author of the book-in-progress, “DNA Birthright Says Nobles, Slaves, Rebels & Roots.” You can visit her website at: http://www.pearlduncan.com/

My ancestors had a folk saying, “One hand don’t clap.” In that respect, words without actions do not uplift the boats, the little people who’ve been left behind.
On March 12, 2000, Pope John Paul II said a Day of Pardon Mass, and asked forgiveness from the descendants of the oppressed people of the world, for the atrocities committed against their ancestors by the Church. These were very moving words, but no actions by the Church followed his words.
On Wednesday, February 8, 2006, the Church of England, leaders of Anglicans and Episcopalians, apologized for its role in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and for slavery on American soil. This time, with this apology, if enough of us speak up, we will find enough voices and hands to help lift the boats, the little people, who were sunk or left behind.
How many people have we heard say, especially on T.V.’s talking head shows, “I bear no responsibility for slavery – moral, historic, economic, or otherwise, for my ancestors were not in America when the business of slavery happened”? But today, the consciousness has been raised, and we know now that the slavery that plagued America was a worldwide war.
So, unless some of us have ancestors who came from Mars or Venus, they participated in churches, synagogues, mosques, businesses, families, colleges, and other institutions that were involved in trading, owning, profiteering from slaves, and whose people were having children with the slaves who were brought to America.
I found records of my own ancestors, both African slaves from Ghana and other places in Africa, and burgesses, noble merchants and traders, from Glasgow, Scotland. The records I found in the Archives of the Church of England. The ministers who kept these records were threatened and called, “ministers to the slaves.” My African American ancestors were slaves and free people who rebelled and escaped the institution of slavery and lived in the wilderness. The rectors and curates traveled under threats against their lives to assist these Maroons.
A few years ago, during Princess Diana’s funeral ceremony, I remember calling my father, a Baptist minister, and asking him, “Why are they singing the same hymns we sing in our church and Sunday School?” Even though I’d uncovered records of my ancestors from the Church of England files, I did not make a connection between the living history of my family and the religious groups that led slavery.
My African ancestors’ records from 1655 to 1838, prior to the years when they were emancipated from slavery in the Jamaican Colony, I found in the Church of England Archives under the heading, “Dissenters Births” “Dissenter Baptisms, ” “Dissenter Marriages,” “Dissenter Deaths.” Prior to Emancipation, these ancestors and others were banned from registering their children’s births or their marriages and deaths in the government’s civil records.
Church leaders sanctioned the trade of African slaves by royals, nobles and merchants until the legal slave trade was suspended in 1807. (The illegal slave trade continued.) Church of England leaders owned thousands of slaves on vast plantations in Barbados until the 1834 Emancipation, and with other leaders of churches and colonial governors, set the tone for how slaves should be treated in the Colonies. The Church of England’s slave-owning leaders, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which thought it was mandated by God to own slaves, branded each of its slaves’ flesh with fire-red-hot-irons, so that others would know that humans with the letters, S O C I E T Y, were theirs.
Now, as in Colonial times, actions not words, of people, brought about change, even on a tiny scale.
A few Anglicans shared the Church of England book of hymns in 1707 with Africans, who were not allowed in the church, but who worshipped outdoors. Quakers and Moravians were the first to build schools to teach African settlers to read and write, and record the documents of their lives. The Catholic Church, in 1667, gave permission to the Danish government in the Virgin Islands to minister to African slaves. Ursuline nuns from 1720 to 1834 organized a Catholic mission, school and hospital for African Americans in New Orleans. The Lutherans ministered to slaves in 1757; the Methodists, nonconformists to the Church of England banned slaveholding in 1780 and 1784 and formed a mission for slaves in the South in 1820. The Baptists ordained a Virginia freed slave and minister, Rev. George Leile, who built and led the first African church in America, in 1775.
And earlier, Puritans defied the penalty of the Colonial regime and, some, like Cotton Mather, published an article in 1706 saying Africans were full human beings. The Quakers, Society of Friends, protested slavery in Pennsylvania in 1688; and the Huguenots protested in New England in 1641. Presbyterians helped shelter and defend Maroons and the children of escaped slaves such as my Scotts Hall Maroon ancestors in Jamaica in the 1600s and early 1700s. But it was the charismatic styles of the Baptists and Methodists Great Awakening in Massachusetts in 1734 that blended with the Africans’ spiritual styles, and assisted those who built a free life on the run, in hiding, and with seared flesh on the plantations.
The Church of England of Anglicans was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, but the Archbishop of Canterbury had no representatives in the Colonies, so ministers of various denominations did the moral thing, among the human devastation. After the American Revolutionary War in 1776, both the Church of England’s missionary arms, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, were established, but they too owned slaves and plantations.
The ministers who registered my African slave’s and free people’s records in the 1700s in the West Indian Colonies did not have to get the permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There were no bishops in the Colonies, not until a Scottish bishop set down in Connecticut in 1783, then two more in New York and Philadelphia in 1787. They were consecrated by the Archbishops of Canterbury in 1792, and one more in 1824 in the West Indies Colonies. Episcopalians organized in Philadelphia in 1789. The people who did the moral thing did not need leaders to do so.
So the vote by the Church of England’s General Synod, its national assembly, apologizing for the Church’s role in slavery, in anticipation of the 200th celebration of the legal end of the slave trade, should serve as a wake-up call to all of us to get involved in the solutions. The Church’s leaders voted 238 to 0.
But legal, moral and historical actions must follow an apology. In 2005, after I applied to Scotland’s Court of the Lord Lyon, a Parliamentary group formed in the 13th-century to review and verify the ancestry of the kings, queens and nobles of Scotland, and presented civil certificates of my post-Emancipation ancestors, and the will, property lists and Church of England records of my pre-Emancipation ancestors, Scottish burgesses, nobles, merchants, who had children with my African ancestors from Ghana and other places, the Court granted me a coat of arms. I like to think that my requests for national, church, archival, and ancestral families’ records motivated some of these leaders to apologize. That’s the first step.
The second step to airing the history and researching-telling-and-acting on what happened requires searching the records. The next step is granting these ancestors what they lost, that they are due.

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=58 1 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=57 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=57#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:58:13 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=57 Reports from the Provinces

The Facilitator of the Listening Process has collated relevant research studies, statements, resolutions and other material on human sexuality from the various Provinces. Summaries of the responses are here available for study, discussion and reflection across the Communion.

For the summaries click on: http://www.aco.org/listening/reports/provinces.cfm

This was called for by ACC 13 and commended by the Primates in their communiqué of their meeting in February 2005.
Background
The 1978 Lambeth Conference recognised “the need for deep and dispassionate study of the question of homosexuality, which would take seriously both the teaching of Scripture and the results of scientific and medical research.” It also said that “While we reaffirm heterosexuality as the scriptural norm, we recognise The Church, recognising the need for pastoral concern for those who are homosexual, encourages dialogue with them.”
In 1988 the Conference reaffirmed these calls and urged “that such study and reflection to take account of biological, genetic and psychological research being undertaken by other agencies, and the socio-cultural factors that lead to the different attitudes in the provinces of our Communion” and called “each province to reassess, in the light of such study and because of our concern for human rights, its care for and attitude towards persons of homosexual orientation.”
The 1998 Conference recognised “that there are among us persons who experience themselves as having a homosexual orientation. Many of these are members of the Church and are seeking the pastoral care, moral direction of the Church, and God’s transforming power for the living of their lives and the ordering of relationships. We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ.”
The Process of Monitoring
The monitoring process to discern the fruits of the processes requested by the Lambeth Conferences has taken over a year. Letters have been sent out to each of the Provinces asking for information. In many cases a province has asked someone to liase with the Facilitator. The responses have been received by the Facilitator. Many of those include official statements of provincial bodies such as statements form a house of Bishops, official reports, resolutions of general synods and similar such items. Also included are press releases and statements of Primates. These are held at the Anglican Communion Office.
In many cases the information contained in the summaries has been passed on orally in conversations between the Facilitator and individual Primates or their appointed representatives.
For each of the Provinces of the Communion the Facilitator has then written a short summary reflecting any studies and seeking to reflect on the commitment to listen to the experience of homosexual people. These summaries have then been presented to each Primate and amended by them. Every summary is thus the work of the Facilitator, but endorsed by the Primate of the Province concerned. They are not reports on, but reports with, each Province.
An Overview of the Summaries
The summaries indicate that some of the churches of the Communion the process of study of homosexuality and dialogue with lesbians and gays has a long history. In the 1950’s Archbishop Michael Ramsey committed himself to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in England. In the 1970’s the Anglican Church in Canada and the Episcopal Church in the USA studied homosexuality, entered into dialogue with homosexuals. The Canadian Bishops in 1997 said “We are thankful to see a new sensitivity emerging towards gay and lesbian persons in the Church. No longer can we talk in the abstract. We are experiencing a growing awareness that the persons of whom we speak are among us. They are our sons and daughters. They are our friends and relatives.”
The results of the monitoring process shows that the straightforward division of the Communion into “liberal” provinces in the “North” and “conservative” Provinces in the “South” is simplistic.
Churches of the “South” such as the Anglican Church of Southern Africa and the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil have entered into extensive listening. For example: the statement of the 2002 Rio consultation on homosexuality declared: “Any kind of exclusion contains worms of death. Love is inclusion and life in its fullness.” A statement which would be more commonly connected with the “North”.
In Westernized countries of the so called “North”, listening has not been easy. One spokesperson for a diocese in Australia said: “The ‘listening process’ in his diocese became a time of ‘shouting’ rather than listening.” And the Primate reflects that the Anglican Church in Australia may need to reflect seriously on this situation and consider how it can overcome such insensitivity. Australia is not the only Province of the “North” which has faced the difficulties involved in creating safe places.
Other provinces have been unable to find the words and the space in which to discuss such issues. In cultures as diverse as Korea and West Africa sexuality is not talked about at all in society. Similarly the report from Japan states: “The culture does not allow for talking about sexuality and so there is little awareness in the congregations of the presence or otherwise of lesbian or gay people and no need, or way, of talking about that. In this context it is hard for listening to happen, but the church is continuing to accept and value all people.”
In other places the issues facing the church have been so enormous that they have stretched the church to the limit. Wars in Sudan and the Congo and the difficulties faced in Burundi have meant that talk of the listening process is someone else’s external agenda, a luxury which cannot be afforded.
Other Churches have stressed the need to faithfulness to Scripture and tradition. The Church of Uganda says “Concerning homosexual behaviour and relationships in particular, from a plain reading of Scripture, from a careful reading of Scripture and from a critical reading of Scripture, it has no place in God’s design of creation, the continuation of the human race through procreation, or His plan of redemption.” Such sentiments are echoed in the reports from Provinces such as Nigeria and Kenya.
The Church of Uganda has responded to the commitment to listen to homosexual persons saying: “We believe that God is calling the Church of Uganda to seek continual transformation from the Word of God written, in preaching repentance and faith in Christ and develop ministries of pastoral care that don’t ostracize, shun, or reject those tempted by homosexual desire” and developing the growth in numbers of well trained (to masters level) Christian counsellors who live out the Church’s mission to offer love for all, including those who are homosexual.
Churches, such as the Church of Wales and the Church of Ireland set out the range of opinions held by their members, each one emerging from a reading of scripture which has integrity of interpretation. For them the period of discernment and careful listening needs to continue.
Some Provinces, such as the Indian Ocean and Melanesia are only now beginning to engage in study and listening. In some places new primates have injected new energy, in others there is a growing awareness of the need to engage in a pressing issue for our mission in the world.
Some Provinces are aware of other pressing concerns in the area of human sexuality. The issue of violence towards women is pressing in the Province of Papua New Guinea and supporting marriage vital for The Church of Hong Kong and Myanmar.
Continuing the Monitoring Process
The Facilitator is committed to continuing to monitor and report developments in all Provinces. He is also keen to support the process of listening in each of the Provinces as they continue to study, to listen to the experience of homosexual people and to listen to one another.
Developing Resources
In preparation for the Lambeth Conference the Facilitator For the Listening Process has been asked by the Primates to prepare materials to enable us to hear the Spirit of God speaking to us through the Scriptures, our tradition and reason. This will be done through careful study of the Bible, and tradition and the sharing of interpretations, stories as well as the study of science and cultures. The aim is to hear God and engage in his mission to all people in evangelism, discipleship, service and striving for justice. 

]]> http://www.katrinasdream.org/?feed=rss2&p=57 0 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=56 http://www.katrinasdream.org/?p=56#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:43:35 +0000 George Swanson http://www.opinion.katrinasdream.org/?p=56 The Anglican Communion: Crisis and Opportunity

MAR. 26, 2007 – The following is the text of a speech by Bishop Musonda Trevor Selwyn Mwamba of Botswana, delivered at a recent meeting of the Ecclesiastical Law Society.
Far too many preachers and speakers find themselves in the position of having too much material and too little time in which to deliver it. One such preacher began his sermon with: “My dear friends, I feel somewhat like a mosquito in a nudist camp. There is so much to do and I don’t know where to begin.”
I feel the same way. Perhaps a little story out of Africa would be the ideal way to begin.
Once upon a time in an African forest a blind rabbit and blind snake met. And since they could not make out who the other was they decided to feel each other and say who they were. So the snake went first and begun to touch the rabbit. It said, “You are furly. You have long ears. You have a short stumpy tail. Ah! You are a rabbit. The rabbit responded enthusiastically, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Then the rabbit proceeded to explore the snake. It said, “You have a forked tongue. You are long and rather cold blooded. You have beady eyes. You are slithery and you have no means of self locomotion. Ah! You must be, you must be a Consultant”!!!
I should hastily add if they are any consultants in our midst that some of my best friends are consultants, lawyers, politicians and a few bishops.
I am most grateful for having been invited to present my views on the position of the African Church on the issues of homosexuality and same sex unions that have engulfed the Anglican Communion and threaten the survival of the Communion itself.
You know this issue of homosexuality is as old as the hills. I remember reading in the Guardian Weekly (UK) some years ago that in 1957, 50 years ago. The Wolfenden Committee, when about to publish its report on homosexuality and prostitution in Britain, realized it had no collective noun for prostitutes.
The Committee approached several eminent people for suggestions. “ A tray full of tarts”, was the chef’s offering. “ A fanfare of strumpets,” said the conductor. The poet said, “ an anthology of prose” and “ a novel of trollops”.
The Committee didn’t think much of these and turned to Sir Hartley Shawcross the distinguished lawyer. “Call them anything you like,” he said, “ but not on any account a firm of solicitors”.
Now, it would be presumptuous for me to claim that I know everything that is going on in the African church regarding these issues but they are so serious that they make us ask a fundamental question “where are we heading to in the Anglican Communion?”
In this paper I shall examine what we might call “a view from Africa”. The questions asked are: “Is there a unanimous view from Africa”? or “are there different voices”? “If there are different voices, what are they saying? And, of course, one of the most important questions is “How does the future of the communion seem from Africa?
A brief history of the Anglican Communion in Africa
The Church in Africa claims to have been planted in the first century of the Christian era, during the apostolic period. If the story of the Ethiopian eunuch is anything to go by, then it can be argued that he was the first African Christian. The missionary activities of St. Mark in the streets of Alexandria and that of St. Barnabas as well ensured not only the Christian presence in Africa but its permanence in historical records. Both the Egyptian and Ethiopian Churches kept the light of Christ burning on the African continent until the missionary era began in earnest in the 19th Century.
From the perspective of the Anglican Church, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Church Missionary Society and the Universities Mission to Central Africa laid strong foundations planting churches in many parts of Africa. From its inception in the 19th Century to the present day, the Anglican Church in Africa has grown rapidly and constitutes today one of the fastest growing parts of the Anglican Communion.
Today, I can assure you that Anglican Christians in Africa speak with one voice in professing that Jesus Christ is their Lord and personal Saviour and that they have been called by God into his Kingdom. The impact of the Anglican Communion in the life of ordinary Christians and the society has been tremendous in areas of education, provision of health services, democratic values, a deep spirituality based on the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and above all the unity of God’s people across ethnic, tribal, national and regional boundaries. But beyond this, through their membership in the Anglican Communion, Anglican Christians in Africa are united with their brothers and sisters across the globe as they strive to work together to proclaim the Kingdom of God with its message of love, forgiveness, compassion and care. Some of our provinces cut across national boundaries and they create and foster a truly united spirit of all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and God. This is the unwavering spirit of our people and here they speak with one voice. We derive our spiritual strength in our unity as Anglicans in the Communion.
The Anglican Communion in Africa since the events of 2003 in America
The events that led to the present crisis in the Anglican Communion are clear to everyone and we shall not belabor the point. Our focus is on Africa where some of the strongest criticisms have come which threatens the existence of the Anglican Communion as we know it today.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams recently said that ‘ECUSA is not a monochrome body, and contains ‘a full range of conviction’. I agree but would also draw a parallel with Anglican provinces in Africa. The African provinces are not a monochrome body as popular belief would suggest. There are different points of view in the various Africa provinces. To think that there is one view is simplistic and a distortion of the truth. We need therefore to give space and credit to the diversity embraced by the African provinces.
I submit to you that there are three voices expressing different views in regard to their relation to the Communion. Here is a brief overview of some of the different voices and the theological basis on which they are based as well as the factors that seem to inform their decisions.
In trying to make sense of these voices I am reminded of some wise words that Mr. Justice Holmes, once said in regard to the life of the law.
He said, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellowmen, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”
This judicious comment is applicable to theology. Our understanding of faith and its expression is formed through experience within a given context. Consequently, the African voices reflect their context.
1. The Conservative voice:
(a) The Anglican Church in Nigeria
The first African voice we consider is what we may call the conservative voice. The Anglican Church in Nigeria best exemplifies this voice. The Nigerian Church strongly believes that the issue of homosexuality in the Communion is a cancerous growth which needs to be removed in order to save the Communion from collapsing. It’s a voice of protest and one which advocates separation rather than reconciliation.This is the voice that many people hear coming out of Africa. If we have to put a face to this voice then it would be that of the Metropolitan and Primate of All Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola, CON, DD.
The position of the Anglican Church in Nigeria is well known. It has spoken out loud and clear against homosexuality and same-sex marriages or civil unions. The Nigerian church broke relations with ECUSA after it consecrated an openly gay man, Eugene Robinson of New Hampshire, as a bishop in 2003. The Nigerian church also broke relations with the Anglican Church of Canada after the diocese of New Westminster blessed civil unions of gay couples.
This conservative voice emphasizes the Bible over tradition. It opposes anything that is incompatible with the Bible and to this conservative voice homosexuality is contrary to the Bible. The inspiration behind this conservative voice is not only the Bible but other factors kick in such as cultural, religious and legal considerations.
Homosexuality in most African societies is seen as an abomination. Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe claimed homosexuals were “worse than pigs and dogs. It is perceived to be against the order of nature. Sex is between man and woman. Not man and man or woman and woman. So in African culture homosexuality was not talked about and any expression was suppressed. In Uganda, for example, the practice – referred to as “carnal knowledge of another against the order of nature” – has been outlawed by president Museveni, it is also illegal in most African countries. ”
So the conservative voice echoes the cultural abhorrence of homosexuality. The conservative voice also echoes the political and legal context in which it speaks.
For example, the Nigeria government is in the process of debating a bill which will criminalise same-sex marriage, as well as the “Registration of Gay Clubs, Societies and organizations” and “Publicity, procession and public show of same-sex amorous relationship through the electronic or print media physically, directly, indirectly or otherwise”, on penalty of up to 5 years imprisonment.
Archbishop Akinola has welcomed and defended this bill. In Februaryy 2006, He issued a communique on behalf of the Church of Nigeria Standing Committee stating “The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality.”
The conservative voice is, perhaps unconsciously, also influenced by interfaith strife. Nigeria is a country split between Christian and Muslim population – this is undoubtedly a factor in the Church wanting to maintain a conservative position on personal and sexual morality as defense against Muslim attacks of permissiveness.
So, the tenor of the conservative voice embodies various streams of influence. The result of the conservative voice is that it has declared the existence of an impaired communion with its counterparts and talks of splitting from the Anglican Communion if the erring provinces do not repent.
The Church of Nigeria two years ago amended its Constitution by redefining its relationship to the Anglican Communion by replacing all former references to “communion with the See of Canterbury “ with “communion with all Anglican Churches, Dioceses and Provinces that hold and maintain the ‘Historic Faith, Doctrine, Sacrament and Discipline of the one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church’.”
The implication of this is that it rejects the primacy of the See of Canterbury which is regarded in the Anglican Communion as one of the defining characteristics of Anglicanism.
The Constitutional change also allowed the Church of Nigeria to create convocations and chaplaincies of like-minded faithful outside Nigeria. This effectively gave legal teeth to the Convocation of Anglican Nigerians in Americas (CANA).So, Akinola’s influence goes beyond Africa to the USA where he has encouraged like-minded Episcopalians to consider cutting ties with ECUSA and organizing themselves under the banner of the Nigerian Anglicans with their more literal views on the Bible.
(b) The Church of the Province of Uganda
Apart from the Church of Nigeria, the Anglican Church in Uganda has also taken a strong stand against the issue of homosexuality. In 2003, the House of Bishops officially broke communion with ECUSA and a year later the Provincial Assembly affirmed that position.
Recently, the Archbishop of Uganda, the Most Revd Henry Orombi, stated that he will not sit together with Katherine Jefferts Schori at the forthcoming meeting of the primates in Dar-es-Salaam Tanzania next month.
(c) The Church of the Province of Tanzania
Mention should also be made here of another strong voice of protest from the Province of the Church in Tanzania. On Decemberr 7, 2006, the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church in Tanzania issued a statement saying that its “communion with the Episcopal Church (USA) is severely impaired in the light of the 75th General Convention’s response to the Windsor Report.
This is the conservative voice from Africa. A voice prepared to exclude those voices or views deemed incompatible with the Bible and its position. A voice relatively quiet on speaking out on life and death issues of poverty, AIDS, and responsible governance.
We must bear in mind that within this voice they are bishops, clergy and laity who do not accept all that this voice represents who are silenced and carried away by a strong undertow.
B. The Liberal Voice
The Anglican Church in Southern Africa
The second African voice we explore is what we may call the liberal voice. The Church of the Province of Southern Africa best exemplifies this voice. And the Most Rev. Njongonkulu Winston Ndungane, the Primate of the Province of Southern Africa is the face to this voice.
A statement of the Synod of Bishops of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa issued in Septemberr 2003 on the divisions in the Anglican Communion around issues of human sexuality, and concerning homosexuality in particular sums up the liberal voice.
Let me share this statement with you. Inter alia, the statement acknowledged the deep divisions of conviction and understanding in the Communion since the Lambeth Conference of 1998 and that the Bishops of the CPSA themselves were not of one mind on these important matters as well.
The statement outlined the areas of agreement amongst the Bishops. These are the areas. The bishops were of one mind in their desire to be loyal to the mind and heart of our Lord Jesus Christ as well as respect for the Scriptures as the authoritative foundational text of their Faith in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They were of one mind in their desire to search and interpret the Scriptures under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, “bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation” as well as their respect for each other’s integrity of faith, and each other’s commitment to this search together. They were of one mind in their desire to dialogue and facilitate such dialogue and listening among all their members. The bishops were particularly determined to ensure that members of both homosexual and heterosexual orientation (and practice) were included in such dialogue. They were of one mind in their belief that this is how Jesus would want them to handle this divisive, emotive, and as yet unresolved issue. Concluding the areas of agreement the statement highlighted the bishops conviction that God was leading his Church, and would in his loving way and time bring the Communion through to his light and truth.
The statement then addressed the actions already taken by some Provinces and expressed the mind of the Bishops on these actions in four clear statements.
First, that “the Lambeth Conference is, for the Provinces of the Anglican Communion, the highest body which has over time helped both to reflect and evolve the teaching and policy of our Church on issues of doctrine, faith and morals. As such it behoves all Provinces to treat its decisions with solemn respect.” This is the position of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa and shares the concern of the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he said in a letter to 38 Primates, that “any individual Diocese or even Province that officially overturns or repudiates this Resolution (of the Lambeth Conference) poses a substantial problem for the sacramental unity of the Communion”.
The Bishops acknowledged that the Lambeth Conference is not a Legislative Body. It does not purport to lay down “Anglican Law” or “Rules” for the Provinces.
Thus, while most may regard it as profoundly regrettable, and even undermining of our Communion, for any Province to act contrary to the Resolution in question, it cannot be said that they are acting uncanonically.
Secondly, they stressed that as a Communion of Provinces it was fundamental to our life as Provinces in one Anglican Communion, that we respect the autonomy of each Province. Accordingly they endorsed the resolution of the Lambeth Conference of 1988: which states “This Conference… affirms that it is deemed inappropriate behaviour for any bishop or priest of this Communion to exercise episcopal or pastoral ministry within another diocese without first obtaining the permission and invitation of the ecclesial authority thereof.” (Resolution 72.2 of 1988).
Thirdly, the bishops urged the need to respect the integrity of the processes in each Province acting in accordance with their respective Canons and Constitutions.
Finally, the bishops recommended that the issues of doctrine and morals which have arisen, and which are so disturbing to so many of our people across the Communion, must be handled through the structures of our Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates’ meeting, the ACC, and the Lambeth Conference.
The penultimate section of the statement focused on what they termed the mystery of human sexuality. The bishops were of the view that there was a great deal that needed to be learned concerning the gift and mystery of human sexuality, and therefore supported all efforts to promote further study and research. This they counseled needed to go hand in hand with deeper theological reflection on the Scriptures, as well as reflection on unfolding insights into human nature created by God.
The statement also gave support to Archbishop Njongonkulu’s call for an All Africa Conference on Human Sexuality.
In conclusion the statement called and I quote, “on the Provinces, Bishops and Dioceses, and in our Parishes, to be focusing more on God’s Mission to the poor and needy “at our gate”. We are confronted with life and death issues affecting the overwhelming number of our people. We need to be bringing the hope and healing of Jesus to God’s people. Let us look to ourselves as we ponder the challenge of Jesus, spoken to us in Matthew 25:31-46. This is how God will judge his Church, including ourselves.”
The liberal voice in Africa sees the current crisis in the Anglican Communion as diverting the attention of the Church from the major life and death issues in the world. These include, hunger across the world, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the HIV and AIDS pandemic, debt and others.
The context in which the liberal voice speaks was formed in the evils of the Apartheid era which sought to discriminate and dehumanize people. Within this context and experience arose a voice of people steeped in black and post-colonial theology, the theology of liberation, and black consciousness.
In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority…. I could not myself keep quiet whilst people were being penalized for something about which they could do nothing, their sexuality. … To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as Apartheid ever was.”
The Constitution of the rainbow nation of South Africa is based on values of dignity, freedom and equality and does not permit ordinary citizens to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Human rights and equality in South Africa’s Constitution obviously influences the churches theological thinking on gender and sexuality. There is another subtle influence that of the concept of Ubuntu which simply means that a person is a person because of others or the community. In other words all people are equal.
The liberal African voice as exemplified by the Church of the Province of Southern Africa acknowledges and gives thanks to God for the role played by gay and lesbian members and encourages the welcoming and affirmation of all members regardless of their sexual orientation, in all the churches of the CPSA.
3. Moderate voices
(a) The Anglican Church in Burundi
The third African voice we discern is the moderate voice. Nicely, snuggled between the conservative and liberal voices. The Anglican Church in Burundi is a good example of this moderate voice in the Communion. In their statement on the issue of homosexuality and same sex-unions, the church has categorically stated that they remain committed to the Anglican Communion and to endeavouring to work with all the Primates who have been entrusted with the leadership of its provinces. In the statement they also indicated that they are committed to the Gospel imperative to maintain unity and communion that is rooted in truth and love. They emphasised their theological understanding of the authentic nature of the Church as being one, holy, catholic and apostolic and affirmed their loyalty to the authority of Scripture and the traditional teachings of the Church.
They expressed their hope in prayer that ways will be found to move forward with renewed commitment to “keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”
Although the Anglican Church in Burundi abhors the events that led to the present crisis in the Communion they have expressed the need to continue to prayerfully encourage understanding and dialogue and re-assess structures and ways of drawing closer to each other rather than walking apart. Their position is one which seeks reliance on the Holy Spirit that will lead to repentance, forgiveness, revival, and healing and urge others in the Communion to work for a Church characterised by justice, and compassion that strives to be a sanctuary of care where truth can be told in love so that Christians can walk together in a way that honours the name of Christ and witness to his reconciling love in a hurting and fragmented world.
Here ends the lessons on the African voices.
Other Factors
There are two factors I seek to draw your attention to that directly or indirectly are influencing the tone and volume of the African voices. The first factor or voice is that of the Global South. The Global South as a body is concerned with a range of subjects, such as social action and economic empowerment. It came about to address some of the power imbalances between North and South that exist within the Church. So the rationale for its existence is commendable.
A worrisome development is the issuance of the Kigali Communiqué by the Primates of the Global South in September 2006 in Rwanda. This caused a theological earthquake measuring 8.6 on the richter scale. It evoked mixed feelings across the Anglican Communion reflecting both the extreme right and extreme left of Anglicanism.
The communiqué claimed to be a unanimous statement presumably speaking for a majority of Anglicans who live in the southern hemisphere!
In the communiqué, the Primates noted that they had asked the Global South Steering Committee to develop a proposal identifying the ways by which an Alternative Primatial Oversight can be set up within the Anglican Communion in order to oversee the work of some of the dioceses in the USA which are not happy with the existing Primate and other bishops. They also indicated that at the next meeting of the Primates in Februaryy 2007 some of the Primates would not recognize Katharine Jefferts Schori as a Primate and that others would be in an impaired communion with her as a representative of the Episcopal Church in the USA. In this regard, they suggested that another bishop should be present at the meeting so that they could listen to the voices of the dioceses which, in their estimate, abide by the teaching of the Communion.
There are some comments i would like to make regarding this communique.
First, not all Primates associated themselves with the Statement. The Archbishop of Cape Town, for example, did not endorse it and was of the view that there was a deliberate intention to undermine the due processes of the Anglican Communion and the integrity of the instruments of Unity. He called for patience in resolving the present crisis and appealed to his brother Primates to step back from the brink at which the Kigali Communiqué had placed the Anglican Communion calling for a spirit of tolerance and grace in the face of pains of divisions among the Primates.
Secondly, the Primates seemed to have gone ahead of everybody as there was no apparent consultative process that fully engaged the laity, clergy and bishops in the debate within the Global South.This is essential in the current crisis before a final decision is taken on these weighty matters. Surely Primates do not have sole monopoly on wisdom and knowledge. Although some would like to think so!
In a presidential address delivered by the former Archbishop of Sydney and Primate The Most Revd Sir Marcus Loane, he said, “The trouble is that the Bishops are not the Church. The Church is made up of people: it is governed by an elected General Synod; when the synod is not in session, its Standing Committee acts on its behalf. That is as democratic a system of church government as can easily be devised, but it makes it impossible for the Church to speak with a single authoritative voice.
Therefore what the Primate should choose to say, or what the Bishops decide to say may be no more than a personal utterance and may command no more support than those whose views it happens to reflect.”
From this position the Global South’s pronouncement are no more than “Primates utterances” provoking deep thought. For the fundamental and indispensable element of our Anglican identity is that we are both episcopally led and synodically governed.
The other factor influencing the voices from Africa is numbers and the almighty dollar!
These factors can be seen to influence – and at times bring pressure to bear, or even manipulate the situation. Where does ‘power’ lie in the present debate? The provinces in Nigeria have collectively the largest number of Anglican members in the world – more than the Church of England and ECUSA combined! America has long been generous in its hospitality and support for African church projects and its leaders, however, in the current situation, the almighty dollar has been used to strengthen the voice and position of some African bishops who have been invited to the States and given generous incentives. Very tempting indeed for a bishop from a poor African diocese to be feted and offered funds by his American hosts, if he endorses the party line!
One of the things that amazes me in this whole debate is the manner in which lobbying, very perculiar to America, has been used to influence opinion, decisions, and relationships, which results in the creation of a culture of ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘in’ and ‘out’, and never shall the twain meet. The success of this lobyying has been assisted mainly by the dissemination of information on the internet.
THE African Future
Well then, from this overview it is apparent that the, “view from Africa” varies depending where you stand. The answer to the question, “Is there a unanimous view from Africa”? is no. And the answer to the question, “are there different voices”? is yes. We now know what the voices are and what they are saying and now we address one of the most important questions “How does the future of the communion seem from Africa?
Here I shall share with you my “personal utterances” or reflections. A realistic picture of the future of the Communion from Africa is that it will continue renewed in faith and mission by reassing the present structures and instruments of unity.
The African Provinces are not a monochrome body and the scenario of the African Provinces spliting off as a whole from the Communion to form an alternative Communion is in my view impossible. The only likely possibility in the unlikely event of this happenning is one or two African provinces spliting to align themselves with similar minded provinces.
However the Communion will continue and these are my reasons.
The first point we must understand is that the majority of African Anglicans about 37 million of them are frankly not bothered about the whole debate on sexuality and gay bishops, impaired communion and so forth. A fact not lost on the Windsor Commission who recognized the existence within the Anglican Communion of a large constituency of faithful members who are bemused and bewildered by the intensity of the opposing views on issues of sexuality. This group embraces worshippers who yearn for expressions of communion which will provide stability and encouragement for their pilgrimage. Their voices have been eclipsed by the intensity of sounds on opposing sides of the debate.
The majority of African Anglicans are not bothered because their minds are concentrated on life and death issues of HIV and AIDS, poverty and drought, malaria, dying from starvation and not what the church thinks about sexuality or what colour your pyjamas are! The debate on sexuality is a non – issue for most of our people. And I suspect that for the millions of poor Anglicans Africans in the villages they are not even aware that this controversy is raging on! That’s the first point I want to make.
The second point I want to make is that the minority of Africans who have the luxury to think on this issue don’t what to see the Communion disintegrate, because they value the communion and its bonds of affection, and would prefer to follow the process recommended by the Windsor Report. They are also indifferent to the pronouncements purportedly made on their behalf as they are rarely consulted.
The long history of Anglicanism has only been possible because of its capacity to embrace different views on matters of faith, practice and spirituality.
The labels bandied about of conservatives, liberals, moderates are a simplification of a much more complex situation. We wear all these labels depending on the situation.
But whatever label we may wear its okay. It speaks of diversity and the unity in diversity as Anglicans is that we must all learn to live together.
The late Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, wrote in a foreword to a book, Grow or Die in 1981, that “…no single form of Christian experience, conviction or organisation is going to prevail over others. Conservative and radical, contemplative and activist, pietist and social reformer, all must learn to live together. They may and should see much to criticize in their own and others’ position. The critical faculty must not be lost. Reverence for truth must still be paramount. But all must learn to live together, for in religion, as in all else, the same things do not appeal to everybody”.
It was a wise observation that is still valid now. The learning to live together means discovering mutual respect and understanding for one another in the way we believe and see things. The crisis in the Anglican Communion gives us all an opportunity to rediscover our relationship with God, ourselves, and each other. And this is only possible by cultivating the gift of humility.
A story is told of famous old priest was being introduced to a congregation by the parish priest who waxed more eloquent by the second:
“We are about to hear from a man of such wisdom that even the most learned sit at his feet; of such kindness that even children flock to him for advice; with such a keen understanding of human problems that men and women bare to him their innermost secrets; a man of such…such…at this point, the old priest tugged at the sleeve of the parish priest, whispering, “ And don’t forget my humility”!
“Don’t forget my humility”. We need to organise an , “Anglican Communion on Humility Conference”! Think of humility as an attitude or spirit of how we see people and the world in general. Humility is seeing, knowing and understanding people with reverence, a sense of wonder, respect and appreciation. It is honouring the person and life by not imposing our ways on them. It is this humility that is a missing ingredient in the war of views on sexuality. We seem to have forgotten that in God’s grace there is no space for arrogance, the holier than thou attitude and judgemental spirit. There is however a lot of space for the spirit of humility which inspires us to be open to learning, growth and being enriched by other encounters.
In humility we must maintain the unity of the Church which is non-negotiable. It is a calling for the leadership of the Church to work hard for the maintenance of the unity of the Anglican Communion through the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council and Meeting of the Primates.
The pursuance of this unity should be done graciously. As you are aware the 75th General Convention of ECUSA in Resolution A165 affirmed their commitment to the Windsor process. I agree with the former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold’s remark in his communiqué of 28th September 2006 that such a process calls for patience and rules out actions which would pre-empty their orderly unfolding.
One is reminded of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the King sitting as a judge orders the jury to consider their verdict even before the trial has began. And the Rabbit hastily interrupts, “Not yet, not yet! There is a great deal to come before that!”
Yes, there is a great deal to come from the listening process and so we all need patience the solution will not come today or tomorrow but most likely within the next 20 years or God’s time because God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, is also here today working for reconciliation in the Anglican Communion as we embrace different views of our faith. Reconciliation is the answer.
Up to now, some strident voices in Africa have threatened the Anglican Communion with schism, insisting that some provinces be expelled from our world-wide fellowship. Yet such voices because of the very diversity and strength of the Anglican churches in Africa, should be playing a reconciling role, in which Africa’s voice is bringing about reconciliation rather than splitting the Communion.
The Anglican provinces in Africa reflect most of the Anglican traditions – Catholic, Evangelical, Liberal and Charismatic. Southern Africa is progressive, Uganda and Kenya more conservative Evangelical, Central Africa, following its UMCA and USPG heritage, traditional Catholic.
Arguing for a middle way from the extremes, which is our situation in Africa, is being true to the Anglican tradition of seeking the via media. For example, in Southern Africa, the Anglican Church has held together despite huge diversities, not just of race, but of ecclesiology and theology, culture, language – and all under the most intensely divisive political system. Whether the issue was economic sanctions, army chaplains in Namibia, or the ordination of women, they stuck together, not unwillingly but joyfully sharing in the family of the Church, the kingdom of God, to which they knew they all belonged.
They have much to teach us. Our energy should go in strenghthening the many things we have in common rather than focusing on matters on which we differ.
The African perspective also recognises that the individual finds his/her identity within the community; and the community is more important than the individual. This insight is helpful at a time of exaggerated emphasis on individualism in the west. Globalisation means that no region or province can act unilaterally – either the US or regions of Africa. The whole Body of Christ is affected by the actions of one part. In a symphony, the various instruments and sections of the orchestra are designed to play together, such that the full melody is heard. This is unity in diversity.
The wonder of God.
In humility we need to see the Mystery and wonder of God’s kingdom. The core mission of the Church is the enlargement of God’s kingdom on earth. A kingdom where everybody has a place at the table of God. Everybody is welcomed and accepted. Everybody is affirmed. So the mission of the Church is to draw our attention to the dimensions of the Kingdom of God which are immense.
In breadth and length it embraces every tribe, every nation, every colour, every language on the face of the earth.
Why do we keep thinking separation? Could it be it’s because we have lost sight of the height and depth of the kingdom which is just as great – the kingdom within, the infinity of God in us, the wonders of union with God in prayer and sacrament and the realm of silence. We think too small in our inner world just as we think too small in the world around us. We are baptised into something larger, all of us. God help us to live into that. God help the leaders of the church to see the full dimensions of the kingdom, the large picture, and deliberately set out to include, to heal, to reconcile a broken church in a broken world.
I strongly believe through initiatives of collaboration encouraging linkages amongst dioceses in the USA, UK, Asia and Africa which are different from each other; and clergy working in a different cultural context from their own; exchange of visits to create the opportunity for a deeper understanding and appreciation of one another; the issues threatening to divide us can be resolved. Understanding breaks down walls and builds love and friendship.
So, as an African I believe that the future of the Communion is good. We have heard some powerfuls voices speaking on our behalf but there is a voice of grace embraced by the majority of Anglican Africans. It is a still small voice that believes in the beauty of diversity without trying to force people to be square or round. You may not have heard it loudly because many of people go about faithfully living out their christian lives prayerfully, patiently, in a spirit of forgiveness, in a spirit of repentance and reconciliation. This is grace. The only way that can help us overcome the problems that bedevil our Communion today. It is this still small voice that in the Communion will prevail. The voice of grace.
What is vital for all of us, is in all humility, to allow the God’s grace to work in us so that we can be able to work out with patience, prayer, faith, repentance and forgiveness our own salvation and that of the Communion. This will require a tremendous amount of hope against hope and I am sure we shall succeed to hold the Communion together.
For as St. Paul says we are not people without hope. For we walk by faith, not by sight. The Anglican Communion is a great treasure to us and we carry this treasure in our earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God. It is true that we shall be afflicted in every way in this crisis, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair, excluded by others in the Communion but not forsaken by God, struck down but not destroyed for we shall always carry in our bodies the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies to the world in the imperfection of our human nature.
There is much to be thankful for to God. May our prayer be to paraphrase the late Lord Runcie that “O’ God we lose not the critical faculty. Supremely reverence the truth and all learn to live together in the knowledge that in religion, as in all else, the same things do not appeal to everybody”.