Ugandan church mulls new law

George Conger reports:

The Church of Uganda has come under fire from gay activists in the UK for failing to speak out against a proposed law that would toughen the East African nation’s sodomy laws.

However the furore in church circles over the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” speaks more to the rift between the African and Western Anglicans than to the politics of the proposed legislation. The campaign mounted in the West to defeat the bill will likely change few minds in Uganda, while the Church of Uganda’s response will likely been seen in Britain as moral cowardice in the face of injustice.

One senior Ugandan cleric told The Church of England Newspaper, “The Church of Uganda is not passive about current issues, but we have chosen not to be publicly confrontational. People will work behind the scenes to influence current events and discuss issues with the players rather than go to the newspapers. For example, you will never know when the Archbishop meets with the President. This is the way we Ugandans do things, which is different from the West.”

“There’s very little influence to stop the legislation of a law, an institute, in practice by the church,” Archbishop Henry Orombi explained on June 22, 2008. “The church’s practice is to preach, to proclaim, so that people who find themselves in a position where they go away from the word of God, the same word of God can bring them back to life.”

The Church of Uganda is unlikely to address publicly the merits of the Anti-Homosexuality bill before parliament senior church leaders tell CEN, but will seek to educate and instruct the country’s leaders on the moral issues raised by the debates. During the reign of Idi Amin, the Church of Uganda spoke out against the injustices and abuses of his regime, yet the manner in which it confronted the government was very different than that favored by the Church of England and its governments. Archbishop Janani Luwum’s confrontation with Idi Amin, which ultimately led to his martyrdom, was behind closed doors in a private meeting with the President.

On 14 Oct MP David Bahati of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) tabled a private-members bill before parliament entitled the ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill’ that would stiffen Uganda’s sodomy laws.

British colonial era laws prohibiting “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” remain on the statute books of Uganda as do similar laws in Tanzania and Kenya.

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Church of England set to lose a tenth of its clergy in five years

Ruth Gledhill and Tim Glanfield report:

The Church of England is facing the loss of as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years and internal documents seen by The Times admit that the traditional model of a vicar in every parish is over.

The credit crunch and a pension funding crisis have left dioceses facing massive restructuring programmes. Church statistics show that between 2000 and 2013 stipendiary or paid clergy numbers will have fallen by nearly a quarter.

According to figures on the Church of England website, there will be an 8.3 per cent decrease in paid clergy in the next four years, from 8,400 this year to 7,700 in to 2013. This represents a 22.5 per cent decrease since 2000. If this trend continues in just over 50 years there will be no full-time paid clergy left in Britain’s 13,000 parishes serving 16,000 churches.

Jobs will instead be filled by unpaid part-timers, giving rise to fears about the quality of parish ministry. Combined with a big reduction in churchgoing, the figures will add weight to the campaign for disestablishment.

Nine meetings with bishops, diocesan and cathedral staff were held in London this summer to discuss the crisis. A Church report on the meetings released yesterday to The Times describes the traditional model of a stipendiary vicar in every parish as “broken in much of the country”.

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Vancouver’s James Packer leads battle against Satan

Douglas Todd writes:

One of the most influential evangelical theologians in North America lives in Vancouver. Unknown to many Canadians, James (J.I.) Packer, 83, has for 50 years led evangelicals on the "right theological path in 60-plus books, including the influential Knowing God (which has sold two million copies)," says a new profile in World Magazine.

Packer recently left the Anglican Church of Canada because of what he considers its increasing liberal values, particularly the willingness some dioceses have been showing to bless same-sex relationships. He continues to attend St. John's Shaughnessy Anglican Church in Vancouver, which has also split away from the Anglican Church of Canada.

{St. John's Shaughnessy parish was one of those launching a lawsuit over property against the diocese. The case was decided, by coincidence, six hours after I posted this item. Go here for story about the B.C. Supreme Court ruling.}

Unlike many clergy and theologians today, Packer is not abundantly cautious in sharing his views with the wider, secular world, which he judges, along with liberal Christianity, infected by Satan, the arch-foe of God who appears in many New Testament passages. Packer does not pull his punches. Like it or not, and many don't (including most mainline Christians and even many evangelicals), with Packer you know exactly where you stand.

"What has happened to the Anglican Church of Canada makes me sick. Our diocese had enmeshed itself in heresy. Homosexual partnerships were not just tolerated but celebrated. And that was just one of several important issues," Packer said in the recent issue of World Magazine, a large North American publication with head offices in North Carolina that promotes conservative Protestantism and the inerrancy of the Bible.

But Packer is upbeat about the future of conservative evangelicalism in North America. He believes conservative evangelical Christianity is the force for goodness, leading the charge against the evil unleashed by Satan.

"Evangelical seminaries are full. Liberal seminaries are half-empty. That steady flow of evangelical clergy is getting stronger. Of course, the secular culture is getting stronger as well, and everything that evangelicals do to further the gospel is opposed by Satan. Sometimes that gets the attention of the media. So even with Satan and secular culture aligned against us, when I see what God is doing in the lives of many of the young people I teach, I have much reason to hope."

Though officially retired from Regent College, on the UBC campus, Packer still teaches classes there and keeps a teaching assistant busy with his projects, says the World profile, headlined "Patriarch." Two of his favorite pastimes are listening to jazz music—especially pre-World War II masters such as Jelly Roll Morton—and reading mystery novels. A mild stroke, or TIA, in late October temporarily limited his travels, but he has continued to preach.

As the World article says, Packer remains an active churchman. Packer now works closely with the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA), a group of theologically conservative Anglicans that has separated from the Anglican church. Recently, AMiA joined with other biblically conservative Anglican groups to form the Anglican Church of North America. One of the leaders of that movement, Bishop Chuck Murphy, studied under Packer in England in the early 1970s.

Source: Anglican Mainstream

Archbishop of Burundi seeks support for developing countries

Ed Beavan writes:

THE Archbishop of Burundi, the Most Revd Bernard Ntahoturi, visiting the UK last week, spoke of the effects of climate change on his African nation.

Archbishop Ntahoturi was in London as a guest of the aid agency Christian Aid, which has projects in Burundi. He spoke of the devastating im­pact of climate change on a country in which 90 per cent of the population is reliant on agriculture.

“It used to always rain in September, but this year the rains just came one week ago in Novem­ber, and we have had a time of drought. We used to have eight months of rain, but we now only have five-and-a-half months, and that affects the whole population of Burundi. Even when it rains, there’s a lot of flooding; housing has been de­stroyed, and people killed,” he said.

He called on world leaders gather­ing at the climate conference in Copenhagen next month to draw up a fair and binding deal that would include capacity-building measures for devel­op­ing countries.

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Uganda's anti-gay bill causes Commonwealth uproar

Geoffrey York reports:

The Commonwealth convenes for a summit this week amid growing furor over a proposed law that would impose life imprisonment on homosexuals in Uganda, whose President is chairing the gathering.

The law, proceeding through Uganda's Parliament and supported by some of its top leaders, would imprison anyone who knows of the existence of a gay or lesbian and fails to inform the police within 24 hours. It requires the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” – defined as any sexual act between gays or lesbians in which one person has the HIV virus.

The controversy is growing because Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is the chairman of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, which opens on Friday with Stephen Harper joining the leaders of 52 other countries.

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