Anglican Mainstream South Africa

Scene from January Violence in Jos

Please bear in mind that this harrowing letter comes from Bishop Ben Kwashi, who is “on the ground” in Jos, Nigeria. If you need to catch up on recent events from Jos, then click; here, and here.

Anglican Mainstream:-

People were in deep sleep and woken up by about three this morning to meet with death. Men women children and pregnancies were all littered on the road as they were  killed as they were probably fleeing to God knows where. This is a premeditated killing in the worst way. Please continue in prayers for us. The cost of being a Christian is rising by the day.

+ben

Bloody heartrending…

Here is a report from the LA Times today:-

Nigeria massacre leaves more than 120 dead – Witnesses say Muslim herdsmen armed with guns and machetes attacked three Christian villages outside Jos. The violence may have been in revenge for an attack last month.

Reporting from Kano, Nigeria – The attacks came in the night, as the villagers slept. Hundreds of Muslim herdsmen armed with guns and machetes swooped down on three Christian villages outside Jos in central Nigeria, killing more than 120 people early Sunday, according to witnesses.

There were contradictory reports on the casualties. Some said more than 120 were killed, while others put the number at about 200.

The massacre in volatile Plateau state — long beset with ethnic-religious violence — was apparently a revenge attack. Nomadic Fulani herdsmen had accused a group of local indigenous Christians — Berom people — of attacking their camp late last month, killing four people and stealing about 200 cattle.

In the latest violence, which appeared unrelated to national sectarian political frictions, hundreds of herdsmen launched coordinated attacks about 3 a.m. on three villages, Dogo Nahawa, Ratsat and Zot, about six miles south of Jos.

The herdsmen charged the villages, firing in the air, then cut down villagers as they fled their huts, witnesses said.

“Some people, whom we believed to be pastoralists, attacked three villages including our own with machetes, killing and burning people,” said Fidelis Tawkek of Dogo Nahawa in a phone interview. “They burned down most of the houses. They killed many women and children.

“They escaped after the attack. Up to this moment, houses are still burning and barns are smoldering.”

Jos and the surrounding areas had seen a series of violent attacks in January, which left more than 320 dead, police figures show.

Plateau state is on the dividing line between Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north and the mainly Christian south, but the recurrent violent outbreaks have as much to do with bitter rivalry between the indigenous Christian Beroms and Muslim Hausas who came later, settling in Jos about a century ago.

The city lives on a knife’s edge, with friction between the Christians and Muslims who compete for jobs, business, land and resources. Similar tensions radiate throughout the state: Thousands have died in ethnic-religious violence in Plateau state in the last decade.

Sunday’s violence — allegedly involving the nomadic Fulani herdsmen — was slightly different. Because it was said to involve nomads, who reportedly fled after the attack, it was probably not related to the usual flare-ups resulting from the bitterness between the Christians and Hausa Muslims in the Jos area.

But the violence underscores the Muslim-Christian rivalry that permeates Nigerian political and economic life. The most recent example has been the bitter power struggle in the ruling People’s Democratic Party between southern Christians and northern Muslims over the presidency, following the illness of President Umaru Yar’Adua, a Muslim.

The country’s political stability hinges on a ruling party deal that the Muslim north and Christian south should rotate power: eight years to the north and eight to the south. The jostling over the presidency was resolved when the PDP affirmed that a Muslim northerner would rule until 2015.

On Sunday, acting President Goodluck Jonathan placed security forces in Plateau state on alert and ordered them to track and arrest the killers.

UPDATE: The BBC report has upped the number of murdered to 500.

BBC

Some 500 people were killed in Sunday’s revenge attack after religious clashes near the Nigerian city of Jos, local officials say.

The figure had previously been put at about 100 – it is always difficult to get accurate figures for such clashes in Nigeria.

Officials say two mainly Christian villages near Jos were attacked from nearby hills by people with machetes.

There is a long history of local tension between Muslims and Christians.

The attacks are said to have been in revenge for the killing of several hundred people in January.

Acting President Goodluck Jonathan has put security forces on alert to stop the flow of weapons to the area.

Many of the dead in the villages of Zot and Dogo-Nahawa are reported to be women and children.

Jos lies between the mainly Muslim north of Nigeria and its largely Christian south.

Some further Internet links on this:-

Muslims slaughter hundreds of Christians in Nigeria (Catholic Culture)

Violence Erupts in Nigeria’s State of Jos (Vatican Radio)

Nigeria: Radical Islam and the challenge of dialogue (ACN News)

400 Killed in Fresh Jos Crisis (Lagos Daily Champion)

If you have stumbled onto this blog and are not a Christian, get yourself a hot drink, pull up a comfy chair and then tuck into the following article written by one of the best in the business:- All Of Grace by Charles Spurgeon

In his speech to Liverpool Diocesan Synod today, Bishop James Jones has argued that the Church should view the debate over human sexuality in the same way that in the past we have agreed to disagree over Just War. He says,

A cursory glance at the history of the just war theory and the ethics of pacifism show that for the last two thousand years the church has been exercised about whether or not it is ever right for a Christian to take up arms and to take the life of another human being.  Although it has been agreed that the early church (from the period of persecution within the Roman Empire until the conversion of Constantine) was the age of pacifism, since then the church has not only allowed but embraced a breadth of ethical opinion on the taking of life.

Augustine made the point that Jesus ruled out Malatia (hatred) not Militia (military service) and the church, without compromising the principle of the sanctity of human life, has made space within the Body of Christ for a variety of ethical positions.

I suspect that within our Synod there is a similar spectrum of moral conviction about whether or not it is ever justified to take the life of another.  No doubt should our nation ever find itself in another period of compulsory conscription to military service we would have lively debates on the floor of this Synod to argue the case and to discern the truth.  Meanwhile, on this the most fundamental of all ethical issues in spite of any divergent views, we sit comfortably with each other, recognise each other’s integrity, respect one another’s faith and moral judgement and enjoy communion in Christ with one another.

I have to say that I am not fazed by this for with you I recognise that in a complex world of absolute moral principles the application of them is rarely a straightforward process.  That is why our courts are presided over by people and not computers.

Even though we live in a society tempted to reduce every decision to a box-ticking exercise that can be processed through a computer, when it comes to making moral judgements about a person’s behaviour we have to hear the human story and form a moral judgement with regard not only to the nature of the action but also to the intent and the consequences.  And although I am not a lawyer I know enough to see that context frames a deed and can either mitigate or aggravate the seriousness of an action.

The histories of the First and Second World Wars when conscription was in force show how many wrestled with their conscience as they sought to apply moral principles to their own particular context.  As we look back, our society and the church both approve and salute the courage shown by both pacifists and conscripts even though at the time there were passionate debates, fierce division of opinion and great hostility shown to conscientious objectors.

Read here

The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Revd James Jones, has today shown just what a liability the Church of England is becoming to

Bishop Jones at Greenpeace

the rest of the Anglican Communion. Liverpool stands to the north of the estuary of the great Mersey River, now cleansed and restored to life after the pollution of the industrial age, but its spiritual waters are being sadly muddied.

In his Presidential Address to the Liverpool Diocesan Synod, Bishop Jones argues that the Church of England and the Anglican Communion should embrace diversity and accept that those who believe homosexual relationships are morally wrong and those who believe that, within a ‘stable and faithful relationship’, they are right can enjoy a peaceful co-existence.

He is of course by no means the first bishop of the Church of England to put this argument forward, but this is a significant moment because he is a prominent evangelical. In 2003 he was one of those who successfully protested the attempt to appoint Canon Jeffrey John, a high profile advocate of the gay lesbian movement in the Church of England, as Bishop of Reading. Yet in February 2008, he apologised, saying ‘I deeply regret this episode in our common life’ and expressed his sorrow ‘for adding to the pain and distress of Dr John and his partner.’ Today’s address confirms his ‘conversion’.

We are given a clue as to the cause when, referring to his diocese, he comments that ‘Like the rest of England, ours is a culture of diversity.  One of the positive aspects of a rich ecumenical landscape is that we have a variety of doors through which different people might enter into the Christian faith.’ No doubt, but the deification of diversity by the English political establishment has enfeebled moral discourse by the suppression of both logic and evidence, and the Bishop’s argument suffers from the same malaise.

In fairness, he is as much a symptom as a cause of the Church of England’s confusion. He offers a kind of ‘Rowan-lite’ proposal which proceeds along similar lines to Rowan Williams’ Plenary Address ‘On Making Moral Decisions’ to the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Essentially he tried to persuade the orthodox that gay sex should not be seen as a cause of separation since the Church had not disowned those from the past who had practiced slavery and it had not split in the present on nuclear weapons, despite the deeply held convictions against them of those like himself. Similarly, Bishop Jones argues that if we can maintain mutual respect and fellowship while disagreeing about the taking of human life in war, then

‘Just as Christian pacifists and Christian soldiers profoundly disagree with one another yet in their disagreement continue to drink from the same cup because they share in the one body so too I believe the day is coming when Christians who equally profoundly disagree about the consonancy of same gender love with the discipleship of Christ will in spite of their disagreement drink openly from the same cup of salvation’.

As with Rowan Williams’ original presentation, the problem lies in the assumption that all these issues relate to Scripture in the same way, whereas in fact the biblical material on homosexuality is direct and unequivocal, that on slavery less so and on nuclear weapons completely indirect. Likewise the biblical witness on war is less direct, as reflected in the development of the Church’s theology of ‘just war’ over the centuries, whereas questions about homosexuality have arisen only after some 2,000 years within churches influenced by strongly secularised cultures.

The extent of the influence of this popular thinking on James Jones’ is revealed by the way that he repeats, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that ‘our sexuality like ethnicity is not a matter of choice’. This is also a serious misunderstanding of gay /lesbian thinkers for whom, following Foucault, the point is not so much to establish a gay ‘identity’ as sexual freedom. So the veteran gay activist Peter Tatchell looks forward to a ‘state of greater sexual freedom, where homosexuality becomes commonplace and ceases to be disparaged or victimised’ and in which ‘gayness would no longer have to be defended and affirmed. Gay identity (and its straight counterpart) would thus, at last, become redundant.’

James Jones reflects a way of thinking which is gaining ground amongst English evangelicals and fails to recognise that the deep logic of the gay/lesbian movement is the abolition of the Judaeo-Christian understanding of human identity ( gay ‘marriage’ is a key step). Faced with the very uncomfortable prospect of having to finally challenge the reality of quietly established ‘facts on the ground’ which gay activists by their own admission have been following for years, the temptation to reduce the whole problem to one of ‘go along to get along’ becomes almost overwhelming. It is recast not as an issue of false teaching, as the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement truthfully described it, but as an essentially pastoral problem.

So the ideal becomes ‘diversity without enmity’, and to be ‘a Diocese refusing to allow anything to undermine our oneness in Christ.’ But this only becomes possible by downgrading the clear biblical teaching that homosexual relationships are ‘incompatible with Scripture’, as reaffirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10, to being merely the ‘traditional’ view, an opinion which can coexist with its opposite. So whatever unity exists is not a oneness in Christ because it refuses to be faithful to the Scriptures which authoritatively reveal Christ.

This has pastoral consequences. Rhetorically, the Bishop asks ‘If on this subject of sexuality the traditionalists are ultimately right and those who advocate the acceptance of stable and faithful gay relationships are wrong what will their sin be?  That in a world of such little love two people sought to express a love that no other relationship could offer them? ‘ Unfortunately no – actually their sin would be that they had acted in a way which Scripture specifically says will exclude a person from the Kingdom of Heaven (1 Corinthians 6:9) and, tragically, they would have had the Church’s encouragement or at least toleration.

But what is particularly arresting about the Bishop of Liverpool’s address is its scope. It presents a vision which does not stop at the boundaries of his own diocese. His plea is ‘that the Church of England and the Anglican Communion must allow a variety of ethical views on the subject as in this Diocese we do’ and he adds ‘This is I believe the next chapter to be written in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.  It is the chapter that is already being written in our Partnership in Mission with the Diocese of Virginia and with the Diocese of Akure in Nigeria.’

A partnership with this aim constitutes a serious challenge to the Church of Nigeria in particular and the GAFCON Primates as a whole who have as a matter of principle withdrawn from sharing ‘the same cup of salvation’ at Primate’s Meetings with those Primates who are sponsoring sexual immorality. It illustrates the subtle reality of the way that false teaching spreads; an evangelical bishop who has learned to accommodate himself to the secular pressures of England nonetheless retains a certain credibility with fellow evangelicals in Africa and then seeks to present partnership as collusion with his compromise.

In this light we see the wisdom of clause 13 of the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration which affirmed the need to break communion with those who deny the orthodox faith in word or deed. The commentary on this clause (Being Faithful, p64) calls for action which is precisely the opposite of James Jones’ strategy for the Communion when it states ’there is a moral obligation to reject any teaching that denies or undermines the authority of God as revealed in the Scriptures, to expose its falsity and to break fellowship with those who promote it (Ephesians 5:11, Titus 3:10).’

James Jones’ address today not only marks a further stage of the Church of England’s long drift from orthodox faith, but also serves as yet another warning sign that the Lambeth led Covenant process is a false hope, not least because the internal stresses created by the moral and doctrinal incoherence of the Church of England mean that it has a vested interest in encouraging the rest of the Communion to adopt a similar pluralism. Much more promising is the potential of the GAFCON movement which has restored the Reformers’ high doctrine of Scripture to its central place in Anglican ecclesiology. Article XIX affirms the treatment for Liverpool’s muddy waters: ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.’

Charles Raven

One thing is clear though – this is legalised gay marriage in church by the back door and those of us who are Biblically conservative need to be very aware of what is going on. The Bill in its current form is too ambiguous and would arguably permit Church of England clergy to let Civil Partnerships be registered in churches without the permission of their Bishops.

Update – Colin Coward of Changing Attitude does a good job of being brutally honest about the amendment.

Is Lord Alli’s amendment a Trojan horse as some claim? I very much hope so. There are many priests and parishes where civil partnerships are already celebrated and blessed in church and bishops who either turn a blind eye towards what is happening or positively encourage priests to contract a civil partnership. Conservatives would be surprised to know which bishops and how many there are.

Conservatives are now attempting to close the stable door well after the same-sex mare and stallion couples have bolted. Our bishops are in disarray, but not enough disarray as yet. Too many of them are still in the closet or in denial about their attitude towards gay relationships, or half in/half out of the stable.              Read here