The Guardian                   Face to Faith                       July 5^th 2003

We had staying with us last weekend a bishop from Uganda. Six years ago, before he was a bishop, he escorted my wife and me for eight days around Dioceses in the centre of his country. Now the people of his  Diocese, he himself and his family among them, are threatened by the constant and spreading viciousness – looting, burning, killing, abducting children – of the “Lord’s Resistance Army”.

We talked together as fellow-Christians about our lives and our families; our circumstances are so different,  but we are held together in the common ground first of our Faith, and then of our calling and responsibilities as Anglican bishops. He updated me on the political situation in Uganda – I was there last in November 2002 as I travelled in and out of the Congo where I was working with the six Anglican Dioceses and their bishops. We talked about our Churches, and about  the world-wide Anglican Communion  which means a great deal to us both. He and my wife and I prayed together and read the Bible, as fellow-Christians and  as friends; and each of us was encouraged.

We talked, too, about the Anglican Church in the USA, and the effects across the Anglican Communion if its Convention decides, later this month, to confirm the election of gay bishop; and about the furore here following the appointment of the Bishop of Reading. I valued my Ugandan colleague’s perspective; and for me what he said had the added authority of  a man whom the LRA want to kill, because he is a Christian leader whose calling it is to support the Christian living of  people who are in constant fear, and increasingly hungry because they cannot stay near their fields.

While we talked, I remembered with  shame a headline (not in this newspaper!) that sums up a good deal of the media coverage of the last few weeks: “Should Nigeria say whether our priests can be gay?”.

Very many Anglicans in the Diocese of Winchester, very many Anglicans in Nigeria or Brazil, Myanmar or Pakistan or Sarawak, value highly the fact that they are linked together in the one Christian family of the Anglican Communion. Hundreds of people in Hampshire and South-East Dorset have recently received a great deal from two priests from South-East Uganda who came for a month to help us with a Mission; and similar stories could be told from most Dioceses in England.

The vast majority of Anglicans world-wide are learning to have Jesus Christ as their Lord  in countries where life is hard, short and insecure; and often where Governments, or majority communities of another Faith, only add to those hardships. They and their leaders struggle  to be obedient to the Christian calling in the face of the violence,  tribalism and   misuse of women and children that are often part of their own traditional culture.

Because they remember that they have received the  precious gift of Christian Faith from our great-grandparents, they watch with amazement and  distress what they see as our Western (but Islam often calls it “Christian”!) decadence. They ask why many in our European and North American Churches are, as they see us, so supine in the face of elements in our modern culture that are clearly hostile to what they have learnt as the plain teachings of the Bible. They wonder at  the extent to which we allow ourselves to be  conformed  carelessly to current fashions, so often failing to encourage each other to live the new Christian life which is to be as distinctive in London or New York – as well as in Kampala or Calcutta – as it was in the multi-cultural, multi-faith Corinth of St Paul’s time.

Nor should it need saying that almost all the leaders of these Churches, and many of their church-members, are as educated, both generally and as Christians, as their North American or British counterparts – or as the journalists who write about them! But  liberal Christians, and broadsheet journalists, often speak as if Western values, Western cultures, and every aspect without exception of the contemporary Human Rights tradition, are unquestionably superior to the values of African, Asian and South American Christians. 

We owe it, too, to our fellow-Christians elsewhere to remember that what a Western bishop says about sexual behaviour may be reported in the press in Cairo, Karachi or Kaduna in ways which may place Christians there in danger of their lives.

For me, it is fundamental to being an Anglican that we respect each other, listen to each other, learn from and with each other within the Anglican Communion, and then with other Churches, about the character of obedience to Christ as the Lord of our lives and of all life. If we are to make Godly, right decisions on the questions that are currently so divisive, we  need the help of Anglicans the world over – Nigerians among them.