Faith McDonnell takes great exception to Sister Mary Diocletian's recent feature, 'Bishops Behaving Badly'. Which bishops were behaving badly at the recent Lambeth Conference, she asks: the persecuted bishops of the Third World, or the snarling bishops of the liberal West?

But my response to the article was not to laugh. I re-read 'Bishops Behaving Badly' late last night and paid for it with a sleepless, grief-filled night.

The Five Talents Project's steering committee, which includes a Tanzanian bishop, believes there are more ways than one to empower the poor and counter the crushing problem of international debt. I was not at Lambeth. My job was to remain in the States and do all I could do to make sure that the bishops who are a part of the persecuted church were heard.

As is usually the case, sex trumps persecution. I mean real persecution – people being imprisoned, beaten, enslaved, raped, starved, hacked to pieces, or burned to death because of their Christian faith – yes, members of the Anglican Communion. The asinine debates that take place over sex issues drown out the voices of the valiant Christians who deny all – not just their 'right' to sexual fulfillment – for the sake of their Lord Jesus Christ.

Because of my admiration and respect for these courageous Christians and the bishops who represented them at Lambeth, I must protest. Because I personally know many of the bishops with 'theological propeller blades,' who according to the article held the conviction that 'Jesus wanted them to go to Lambeth to kill some infidels and queers', I cannot remain silent. And, less important, but also true, because I know the truth about how 'humble and self-effacing' were the white-straight-liberals at Lambeth, I can't let that one slide, any more than I could the 'polite and earnest' apple sauce.

It is because of their love for these brothers and sisters that they bother to speak the truth, when they know that they will be ridiculed and misrepresented by those who wish to revision the church to fit their own desires.

The same could be said for Nigeria's Bishop Emmanuel Chukwama, who was responding to sin in his culture's accustomed way, by the laying on of hands, urging repentance and praying for deliverance. It's funny that the liberals who are always urging greater sensitivity to cultural differences totally lost it when the cultural differences involved ways of looking at homosexuality.

The 'conservative' Western bishops did not need to 'coach' Third World bishops. Apart from how demeaning and insulting that comment is to our brothers and sisters from the Third World (but more about that later), it is ridiculous. The Third World bishops were better versed in the nuances of the revisionists than one might have expected; they can now unpack the language of the liberals.

These bishops (orthodox Western and Third World) are truly 'brothers in Christ'. They worked together at Lambeth because they have done the work of ministry and evangelism and have prayed together for years. Their Western brothers have acknowledged the persecution many of them undergo in their own countries (unlike the Lambeth position paper author who could find nothing worse to say about Sudan than to mention the deforestation caused by civil war). They brought the Five Talents micro-enterprise development project to Lambeth because they are sincerely interested in helping the poor, not in spouting off political pronouncements about the bad, bad West that doesn't do a thing to help the poor.

After the sexuality resolution vote, the bishop most smoky of voice and flamboyant of speech, Barbara Harris, declared that the African bishops had been bought for the price of a chicken dinner. A Nigerian bishop responded to this attack with dignity by saying that he and his fellow bishops could not be bought by anything, except the cross of Christ. And it is obvious that these dear ones have been bought by the cross, just as some of these snarlers have sold out the cross for a mess of pottage.

Another bishop 'kindly' suggested that the Third World bishops should get a course of theological training for the post-modern world before the next Lambeth. This of sophisticated African theologians who have been educated at Oxford, Cambridge and the like; and of Sudanese bishops who have learned well in the school of suffering – receiving the lash in an Islamic court; seeing their people killed, enslaved or starved, rather than deny their faith and convert to Islam.

Still another liberal bishop remarked that living in an Islamic society for so long had made these bishops 'fundamentalist'. What it has done is strip them down to the essentials of the faith, to adherence to the word of God. The revisionist bishops would have nothing to worry about in the Islamic world, because no one would recognize them as Christians.

The only hope of the Anglican Communion is bravehearts like these Third World bishops, whose dioceses are growing in ways that the West could never match, in spite of the sword of Islam hanging over the heads of those who convert. These are bishops who have nothing materially, who remained on the University of Kent campus, while the Western bishops went frolicking off to play golf, go to the Continent, and take tea at Buckingham Palace. These are the bishops, battle-scarred and weary, who radiate the joy of Jesus, alive and fully Easter-ing, in their countenances, their character, and their humble walk with the God for whom they are willing to die.

Faith McDonnell is International Religious Liberty Associate at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, DC.

Bishops I | Bishops III | Archive | Ship of Fools Central

© Ship of Fools 1998