Archbishops nail corruption in Africa, and false trails to bring church unity
From Chris Sugden in Cairo
In his Bible Study on Wednesday evening to the Global South conference, the Primate of Uganda, Archbishop Stanley Ntagali, who is vice chairman of the Council of the Anglican Provinces of Africa spotlighted corruption in Africa as an example that any message which contradicts the apostolic teaching is false teaching. “Any theology that comes against the truth of the Bible is false teaching.”
Expounding Paul’s letter to the Romans he quoted “Although they knew God – their thinking became futile.” He continued: “Do not preach the foolish gospel that brings darkness. In Africa we have corruption. We have been removing Jesus from the centre. In our countries corruption is a result of this; false teaching on sexuality is result of this. People who came through many hardships to our country changed us through the gospel. We are ourselves to blame if we do not preach the real gospel. We should not blame others.”
Archbishop Stanley also named the issues of nominalism where Christians name who do not follow Christ the head of the church, secularism where people no longer put God in the centre, materialism, liberalism, violence, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism, youth unemployment and people getting involved in cults and commercialization of the gospel. “Preaching has often become a business.”
“Africa is the richest continent with the poorest people. We need to wake up. We need our mindset changed. God has endowed us with riches – the heritage of Christianity in the northern part of Africa in the early centuries of the Church. If we say we are okay the way we are, we will be judged by history. We must start from within – and be an agent of God’s transforming and liberating love. We need to bring people to Jesus who is able to save. We should not stop people from seeing Jesus”, he concluded.
In the morning session, Archbishop Ng Moon, Primate of South East Asia, addressed the challenge of unity in the church. Neither theocracy ( for who interprets God’s will) nor democracy ( which can become power play) seem able to foster unity. The whole mindset of the church needs to change. Expounding Ephesians chapter 2 he argued that Paul identified the root problem as the Christians refusal to accept and adopt God’s design for his people. Paul’s stress was that Christians should become citizens of Christ’s kingdom and responsible members of the household of God, to live a life worthy of God’s rule, and rather than only wait for God’s benefits and blessings, become responsible citizens of his kingdom and faithful members of God’s household.
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