“The missionaries brought the word of God here and showed us the way of life. We have seen the way of life and we rejoice in it. Now you are telling me this way of life is not right. I have to do something else. Keep it for yourself. I do not want it.”
No Nigerian bishop needs to go to Canterbury to learn how to be a bishop, he says. “No Nigerian Anglican needs to go to Lambeth Palace to learn how to become a Christian. It is all available here. We rejoice in our fellowship, we rejoice in our heritage as Anglicans. We celebrate it. But our unity will never be at the expense of truth, of the historic faith.”
In spite of what Western church leaders fear, he has no ambitions to lead a breakaway church. “That has never been on my mind. This is the media thing. You see we have scripture. We have our traditions. We have not broken the law. It is your churches that are breaking the law. You are the ones breaking the rules. You are the ones doing what should not be done with impunity. We are saying you cannot sweep it under the carpet. Maybe in the past you could get away with it, but not any more. We have aged. So we are not breaking away from anybody. We remain Anglicans. We are Anglican Church. We will die Anglicans. We are going nowhere.”
Rasputin's not been a very good shepherd. The ageing, barren American and English sheep in one part of his pasture are given over to practices offensive to the healthier, more vigorous Nigerian flock. One side of the field bleateath not to the other. All very sad.
(An aside - perhaps the first violent jihadist attack in the UK was the 1995 murder of Nigerian Christian Ayotunde Obanubi, stabbed to death at Newham College in east London by mates of Ed Husein and totally off the radar of liberal England. One of those charged (the charges were dropped) with the murder was banged up for nine years not long back.
A Briton who allegedly tried to buy missiles to shoot down airliners has been jailed, it has emerged following the Old Bailey fertiliser bomb trial. Reporting restrictions covering the conviction of Kazi Nurur Rahman have been lifted. Rahman, 29, was arrested in November 2005 after trying to buy three Uzi sub-machine guns in a police sting. He pleaded guilty and was jailed for nine years but details were kept secret because of his links to the defendants.
4 comments:
I only heard about Ayotunde Obanubi's murder yesterday when I was looking something else up, and I follow the news pretty thoroughly. It seems extraordinary how little coverage it appears to have received.
That interview with Akinola was very informative especially about his having been a carpenter.....he is not one of those who has treated Christianity as an abstraction like so many Western Bishops who treat it as a module in an English Lit degree.....for him it has immediacy and relevance because of the spread of Islam in Nigeria backed by Saudi money
The biggest absurdity in ECUSA in the USA - New Hampshire has 30.000 registered congregants for the Anglican Church and Nevada where Schori the Presiding Bishop originates just 6.000.....there are fewer Anglicans attending Church in the USA than in England.
So I can see why Akinola feels fury at the way the US church uses its wealth to lay down policy on religion rather as the Sadduccees tried to use the Temple to sanctify their collaboration with the Roman Empire ....and how it looks when Western Churches go on their deviations from Scripture as Nigerian Christians are murdered by Muslims
Islam has been in Nigeria long before Saudi money became available. It was the religion of the slave traders. Prior to the "Scramble for Africa" Christianity was unknown, the main native religion being animism. It then took off in a big way and now both Catholicism and Anglicanism are both growing. The division with Islam is basically North-South and the southerners, who in general are better educated, retain much resentment against the British for leaving power in the hands of, people described to me as, "ignorant northerners".
Interesting how the review of Hussain's book which you link to turns into (at the end) yet another Guardianista warning about the evil racists waiting in the wings to take over. And this because Hussain had the temerity to mention "Asian racism" (gasp!), criticize multiculturalism (Nooooo!), and express skepticism about "Islamaphobia".
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