African Anglicans are paying a steep price for adhering to principle:
Anglican bishops in Africa who are refusing millions of dollars from liberal AmericanEpiscopal sources to protest homosexual clergy say the price of their protest has been higher than they thought.
"To be honest, there is not enough money for the needs we have in Rwanda after the [1994] genocide," said Rwandan Bishop John Rucyahana of the Diocese of Shyira, "but if money is being used to disgrace the Gospel, then we don't need it."
The Rev. Alison Barfoot, assistant to the Anglican archbishop of Uganda, said the Anglican province has no working phones in its Kampala headquarters because it lacks the funds. Conservative American churches haven't pitched in enough -- "definitely not to the extent of what we've given up," she said.
Bill Atwood, general secretary of Ekklesia Society, an international Anglican network, just returned from a tour of Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda and called the lack of money for Africans "scandalous." "I just met with some archbishops a week ago," he said, "They were saying how painful it was, with people starving to death to make these choices."
What choices are these? The Bishops of Africa have decided that they will not accept money, as desperate as is the need, from those Episcopal bodies which support the ordination of gay priests and the marriage of gay couples. The amount of money declined totals in the millions of dollars.
Kenyan Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said in an interview he was willing "to do without the money" if it's necessary to remind the Episcopal Church of its mission. "It was to preach the Great Commission," he added, "but what kind of Gospel are they preaching now, saying there should be union of people of the same sex?'"
In March, Bishop Jackson Nzerebende of Uganda's South Rwenzori Diocese cut ties with the Episcopal Diocese of Central Pennsylvania, which had donated more than $65,000 for school fees, transportation, college tuition and an AIDS program. Then, last month, the Ugandan province rejected a $27,000 donation from the New Hampshire Diocese to improve local schools.
Central Pennsylvania Bishop Michael F. Creighton called Bishop Nzerebende's decision "a Good Friday nail in the compassion of Christ." "Our consent to the election of a bishop in New Hampshire (Bishop V. Gene Robinson, who is divorced and living in a homosexual relationship) appears to be more important than the compassionate ministry we have shown with his own people," he said, "who are struggling with and dying of AIDS."
Leave it to an American Bishop to be clueless about what fidelity to a principle means to those who truly believe in it.
