(ACNS) The Archbishop of Burundi, the Most Revd Bernard Ntahoturi, recently led a 5-strong ecumenical delegation of church leaders from Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo that met with the presidents of the D.R. Congo and Rwanda in order to convey to them a strong message advocating for peace. “People are tired and want an end to the war,” they said, “and dialogue costs much less than armed confrontation”.

More than 250,000 people fled their homes in the eastern part of the D.R. Congo in order to escape the fighting that broke out between the army and rebels in August. The delegation that was initiated by the AACC added their support to Churches in the D.R. Congo who are working with other agencies to alleviate the suffering of people, especially the displaced; and trying to encourage the disarmament and repatriation of armed Rwandan groups living in eastern DRC.

At last the bullets had stopped, and François Kambere Siviri made a dash for the door. After hiding all night from firefights between rebels and a government-allied militia over this small but strategic town, he was desperate to get to the latrine a few feet away.

“Pow, pow, pow,” said his widowed mother, Ludia Kavira Nzuva, recounting how the rebels killed her 25-year-old son just outside her front door. As they abandoned his bloodied corpse, she said, one turned to her and declared, “Voilà, here is your gift.”

In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s paper.

(ACNS) I am deeply pained by the terrible deterioration, disease and despair we are seeing in Zimbabwe.

I welcome signs that the South African government is alive to the implications of the total collapse of governance in Zimbabwe, of which we see new evidence daily.

But the silence of SADC leaders in general is disgraceful. Why throughout this crisis have we seen no evidence of public leadership from King Mswati III, chairperson of SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Co-operation?

He should not only be taking high-profile action on Zimbabwe, but needs to show that peace and democracy are possible in his own country.

Are SADC’s leaders not moved by the terrible human suffering in Zimbabwe? Where is their ubuntu? Must people be massacred in Zimbabwe’s streets before SADC will take firm, decisive and public action? Will they even then?

No, SADC has failed and is morally bankrupt. President Mugabe has demonstrated again and again that he will not share power. He is no longer fit to rule. I appeal to the chair of the African Union, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania to step in and declare publicly that Mugabe’s rule is now illegitimate and that he must step aside, and for the AU to work speedily with the United Nations to set up a transitional government to take control.

Mugabe and his corrupt regime must go. Lord Acton said: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ How can anyone share power in a thoroughly corrupt regime?

The sterility of the power-sharing agreement can be seen through this broken land where its people die from eating anthrax-infected cattle or from starvation. Where sewers are open and there is no running water in towns hospitals any longer. A place where there is no electricity to operate the most basic services. A land where cholera is claiming more lives by the day.

The time has come for the international community to recognise that the power-sharing deal signed in September is dead. The impasse within the South African-sponsored negotiations between the MDC and Zanu PF has been sustained by a Mugabe regime which is unwilling to give up power and refuses to recognise the rule of law.

Read it all.

Christian Aid partner organisations in Zimbabwe are responding to the cholera outbreak which is now affecting the entire country.

According to the World Health organisation more than 12,000 cases have been reported and 565 people have died.

In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, the Dabane Trust, a Christian Aid partner which specialises in drought recovery programmes, is providing an emergency response in both the city and in the outlying rural areas.

Read it all.

By: George Conger.

A “silent genocide” is unfolding in Central Africa, church leaders have warned, as soldiers loyal to rebel General Laurent Nkunda march upon government troops holding the city of Goma in the Kivu province of the eastern Congo.

In a statement released through the Congo Church Association, Bishop Bahati Balibusane of Bukavu warns that “over one million people” have been displaced by the fighting. “Men, women, children are living outside, in schools, in churches and in some hospitable families. They don’t have water, food, materials, clothes, utensils and latrines. These people living in hardship are exposed to hunger, illness and death of some fathers, mothers and children,” he wrote in a call for “urgent spiritual, material and financial support.”

Church aid agencies report the fighting between Congolese troops and the rebels has led to widespread atrocities. The Barnabas Fund reports “ young men [have been] killed, women raped by retreating government troops, children kidnapped and forcibly recruited as child soldiers to fight a war that is not their own, soldiers and militias [are] pillaging and looting, and hundreds of thousands of displaced people [are] fleeing for their lives.”

Read it all.

“World focus on the current economic situation threatens to overshadow the response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in DR Congo and elsewhere at a time when the message ”˜Peace on Earth’ begins to take centre stage in our thoughts,” declares the Most Rev Dr Idris Jones, Bishop of Glasgow & Galloway and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

He continues “Over the past few months we’ve all experienced in some way the effects of the global economic crisis. For some the effects are more shattering than for others. More recently shocking reports of the conflicts in DR Congo highlight the massive humanitarian crisis there and the atrocities being carried out on thousands of people. Peace on Earth?

Read it all.

More than 425 people have died since the outbreak in August and the number is expected to rise due to poor sanitation worsted by the onset of the rainy season.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has accused the government of under-reporting the deaths, saying that he believed more than 500 people had died and half a million were affected by cholera.

Zimbabwe’s dilapidated infrastructure has made clean water a luxury, with many people relying on shallow wells and latrines in their yards.

Read it all.

One human-rights activist has described the Congo as “the most dangerous place on earth for women”: a place where rape as a weapon of war, mutilation, gang torture, blinding, and maiming are all inflicted indiscriminately on women and young girls.

Appallingly, these everyday displays of power and hatred go largely unchecked and ignored by the law. When I was in the South Kivu province, I asked the officer in charge of military justice how many courts dealt with sexual violence against women, and how many men had been convicted. The answer, as I expected, was none.

Goma itself has seen much sexual violence. Yet it has also become a place of hope. A Christian hospital called Heal Africa was set up here, decades ago, by a fearless Congolese surgeon who regularly risks his life to serve his fellows. It trains health professionals and strengthens social activists. Inevitably, the commitment to holistic care has drawn it into treating and combating sexual violence.

Read it all.

Update: For background on this I strongly recommend taking the time to watch Ben Affleck’s journey to the Congo as shown on Nightline earlier this year: part one is here and part two is there.

After two days of mob violence, an uneasy calm returned Sunday to this central Nigerian town. Women with plastic buckets ventured out in search of water and many of the dead were buried.

Troops on foot and in armored personnel carriers appeared Sunday to have quelled two days of ethnic and religious rioting that left more than 300 people dead in Jos, apparently ending the worst violence in the West African nation since 2004.

Streets stayed mostly empty, but hunger and thirst forced some residents out of their homes for the first time since the riots began Friday after a disputed election. Hundreds of women and girls, who wouldn’t be considered combatants by soldiers with orders to shoot troublemakers on sight, carried buckets and cans to public water points.

“There’s no water in the house. Our children are crying for water, and all the shops are closed. Even the last food we have, we can’t cook because we have no water,” said Hawa Ismailah, a Muslim housewife with 24 people cowering in her home.

Read it all.

A deep moral and spiritual crisis in Zimbabwe explains why the nation has become so corrupt, the Bishop of Harare, Dr Sebastian Bakare, told the Human Rights Conference in Lulea, Sweden, last week.

The social, economic, and po­litical challenges were just the tip of the iceberg, Dr Bakare said in a keynote address on the place of the Church. He lamented Zimbabwe’s reputation as “a nation that denies basic democratic principles and human rights”, and said that the majority of people were denied a meaningful life, lacking “every-thing except the air they breathe”. Those benefiting from political patronage had access to all that made life easier.

Read it all.

Dear colleagues,

As you know, the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues to fester. Much is still underreported. In addition to the crisis in the Goma region, there are two areas of rebel activity in Congo which have not hit the news: the Dungu area, in the north, where the Lord’s Resistance Army has attacked villages and abducted adults and children in recent weeks, and also the Gety/Aveba/Nyankunde region, close to Bunia, where a new militia group emerged in late September and displaced many people from their homes.

Our Anglican sisters and brothers in those areas have been deeply affected, and are in the forefront of relief efforts and peacemaking.

I am echoing Archbishop Fidèle Dirokpa’s call for a day of prayer for peace in the Congo on Sunday 23 November.

Read it all.

As for Mr Obama, he has a chance to restore America’s moral leadership. That is not something he should do by scouring the world in search of new monsters to slay. Nor, though, can a war-weary America turn its back on people threatened by ethnic cleansing or genocide. Since 2005 the UN has accepted a responsibility to protect people in such cases, so this is not a burden for America alone. But since the UN has no army, and no other countries have the military resources America boasts, there may be times when only the superpower can move soldiers swiftly where they are needed.

Should that call come, Mr Obama will need the courage to respond, notwithstanding Americans’ fatigue. In extremis, if the danger is great and veto-wielding members of the Security Council block the way, he and others might have to act without the Security Council’s blessing, as NATO did in Kosovo. Far better would be an early effort by Mr Obama to reach agreement on the rules to apply and forces to earmark so that the UN can actually exercise its collective responsibility to protect. That will be hard, but Mr Bush was actively hostile to such work. How fitting if the next president made possible a genuinely global response to the next Rwanda, Congo or Darfur.

Read it all.

Christian emergency response organizations have expressed alarm at a deteriorating situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province and about brutalities innocent civilians are facing in a potential humanitarian catastrophe.

The Geneva-based ACT International (Action by Churches Together) said in a statement on October 30 that it had accounts from aid workers of looted shops and dead bodies on the pavements in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

“It has been a night of horror, but Goma is quiet now,” ACT International quoted one of its aid workers as saying. Emergency work became paralysed after aid workers themselves were withdrawn from the field for security reasons, while thousands of people have sought refuge as rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has moved towards the city.

Read it all.

Britain and France today called for urgent international action to prevent a humanitarian disaster in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.

In a joint statement to mark the end of their two-day visit to the region, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner said there was “no excuse for turning away”.

Gordon Brown, meanwhile, expressed concern that the Congo could be lurching towards a repeat of the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda in which up to a million people were killed. “I am very concerned by the situation in the Congo,” he told reporters during his tour of the Gulf states. “Thousands have been displaced. We must not allow Congo to become another Rwanda.”

Read it all.

The Lambeth Conference is a gathering of bishops from the entire Anglican Communion which met for the first time in 1888. It meets every ten years to discuss issues of common concern in the mission of the church today. In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury: “The chief aims of our time together are, first, that we become more confident in our Anglican identity, by deepening our awareness of how we are responsible to and for each other; and second, that we grow in energy and in enthusiasm for our task of leading the work of mission in our church.”

The conference gives bishops a chance not only to get to know each other personally, but also to share stories from different parts of the world and the cultural contexts they come from. This year’s conference was attended by 670 bishops out of approximately 800 bishops in the Anglican Communion. Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda did not attend.

One of the issues that came up among others was homosexuality, especially the blessing of same sex marriages and ordination of openly gays and lesbians. Lambeth’s position was that homosexuality is a sensitive pastoral and divisive issue that has to be handled with care. Lambeth discussed this issue in a very responsible manner by emphasising the importance of the family bond in the Communion whereby members of one family do not have to agree on all issues but still remain a family. Contrary to the forecast by the media that the Anglican Communion was about to break up, the 670- bishops present expressed their allegiance to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Communion. It was also made clear and agreed upon, after long discussion in small groups where all the bishops were able to make an input, that the ordination of gays and lesbians and blessings of same sex marriages was to stop forthwith and the discussion about these matters was to continue.

Read the whole thing.

Many people who turned out to worship at the Rev. William Payne Memorial Anglican Church, Benin, were prevented from participating in the usual Sunday service by youths protesting alleged ethnicity in the church.

The church situated at 121 A, Mission Road, Benin, was shut down by ministers and worshippers were prevented from gaining access to the complex to prevent a break down of order.

The church is said to have been plagued by disaffection caused by alleged ethnic disenchantment between Igbo speaking worshippers and other ethnic groups.

Read it all.

It is Western Christianity that objectified God, recreated Him-Her as an intellectual idea, and put up a boundary between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane. Is this dichotomy evident in Jesus’ teaching? No.

Secondly, Pope Benedict XVI has recently said that Christianity is not another moral or ideological system, but a transformative encounter with a person, Jesus Christ. Well, Papa, often in Africa we experience Christianity as an encounter not with Jesus but with a bureaucracy.

Western Christianity is obsessively institutional….
Its religious officials are a powerful class of ‘spiritual middlemen’ whose job seems to be to dole out access to the Divine. They keep pushing God further upward and the ordinary Christians further downward. The result, as one African archbishop put it, is that “God has been represented to Africa as distant and inaccessible to ordinary Christians, as if indifferent to them.”

The rise and popularity of evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity in Africa, which emphasizes personal experience of the Divine in every sphere of life, is in part due to its closeness to the traditional African spirituality of God-with-us 24/7.

Read it all.

A recent uprising of rebel activity in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo has caused Bishop Henri Isingoma and 150 delegates of the Province de L’Eglise Anglicane du Congo to be stranded in Boga following their September 30-October 5 diocesan synod.

Fears of a fresh wave of violence have forced thousands of people in the eastern region of Africa’s third largest country “to run for their dear lives in various directions,” Frederick Ngadjole, liaison officer for the province, said in an October 5 email to the Africa desk of Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD). “Some have gone towards Bunia town, others towards [the] Ugandan border and others are still wandering in the bush trying to find their way out to a safe zone.”

Writing on behalf of Isingoma, Ngadjole said that “an unidentified rebel group with no clear leadership” had risen up in Gety — an area between Bunia and Boga — to oppose the central government and reportedly uproot Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony.

Read it all.

AN OPEN LETTER OF SUPPORT TO BISHOP BOB DUNCAN
24th September 2008

The Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan
Pittsburgh, PA USA

Dear Bishop Duncan,

I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, the name above all names, and the One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. I have very intentionally addressed this letter to you as Bishop Duncan, for, indeed, you are a Bishop.

I was upcountry tending to pastoral business when the TEC House of Bishops took their vote to supposedly depose you, so I am very sorry that I could not add my name at the time to the very good statement issued by my esteemed colleagues, Archbishops Venables, Gomez, and Nzimbi. I hope you know of the unqualified support you have from me and our entire House of Bishops.

In 2004, when the Church of Uganda broke communion with TEC, we stated that, although we were breaking communion with TEC, we remained in communion with you, the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and all who uphold the historic and Biblical faith of Anglicanism and did not support the unbiblical decision of confirming the election of Gene Robinson to the episcopate.

Despite the shameful action taken last week by the majority of TEC Bishops, nothing about our position has changed. We continue to recognize you as a Bishop of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. We continue to recognize you as a Bishop in good standing in the Anglican Communion, and we whole-heartedly support the action of Archbishop Greg Venables and the House of Bishops of the Province of the Southern Cone to receive you into their House of Bishops. We continue in full communion with you and we do not recognize the action of the TEC House of Bishops to depose you.

Furthermore, we are praying that on 4th October the majority of the Diocese of Pittsburgh will vote to be reunited with you as their Bishop. When the King of Buganda tried to destroy the Christian movement in 1886 by killing the converts in his court, he instead fueled the spread of the Gospel among our people. I believe that can also happen in North America. So, do not be discouraged. Our God is a God of redemption, and He will take what was intended for evil and bring good out of it.

Finally, if the world couldn’t see it before, this vote reveals how spiritually lost TEC is and why North America needs a new Province that authentically represents historic and Biblical Anglicanism. The Instruments of the Anglican Communion could have averted this crisis. Instead, institutional inertia is preferred, and meanwhile, the tear in the fabric of our communion is now deeper and wider, the mission of the church suffers, and many people miss out on hearing the good news that a Saviour has come.

I look forward to the day when you are not only the Moderator of the Common Cause Partnership, but when we can also welcome you to the table of Primates as the Archbishop of a new, Biblically faithful Province in North America. May the Lord grant you wisdom and apostolic favour as you lead that movement, and may He add daily the number who are being saved.

Yours, in Christ,

The Most Rev. Henry Luke Orombi

ARCHBISHOP OF CHURCH OF UGANDA.

Dr Sentamu commented:

“This is a step in the right direction on a path that will hopefully lead to a full restoration of justice, democracy and a final end to the brutal regime of Robert Mugabe.

There will be understandable caution amongst the international community who will be concerned that any aid that follows today’s announcement will find its way to the poor of Zimbabwe and not to those who have abused power over the past three decades.

Read it all.

On Aug 17 fighting broke out in the small town of Nguruka in the diocese of Western Tanganyika near Lake Victoria after Muslim evangelists accused an Anglican evangelist of blaspheming Islam.

According to press accounts, the fighting erupted after Muslims took offence to the preaching of an Anglican evangelist. The Citizen newspaper in Dar es Salaam denounced the violence saying it deserved the “condemnation of all people who aspire for religious harmony in Tanzania.”

“If the Muslims were offended by the preaching of the Anglican evangelist, as the reports say, the proper procedure was to report their grievances to the police, who, in our view, would have dealt with the issue in accordance with the law,” The Citizen argued, adding that freedom of religion should not be construed to mean carte blanche to attack other faiths.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church provided the largest block of bishops at the Lambeth Conference, sending 104 of the 469 diocesan bishops present during the conference of Anglican bishops in Canterbury.

Details on who and how many of the Anglican Communion’s 880 active bishops attended the Lambeth Conference have not been made public. However, the Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council, reported the conference “involved the participation of some 680 bishops and 3,000 participants.”

There were 617 Anglican bishops registered for the conference, according to Lambeth Conference documentation obtained by The Living Church. Approximately 600 Anglican bishops were present for the group photo. Of the 617, 469 were diocesan bishops and the remaining 140 were suffragan, assisting and assistant bishops, as well as eight bishops without territorial sees.

The largest number of absentees was from Africa, with 209 of the continent’s 324 diocesan bishops missing. There were 115 diocesan and 12 suffragan bishops from African dioceses.

Read it all.

Rapidly rising global food costs have contributed to the worst hunger crisis in East Africa for eight years, with at least 14 million people at risk of malnutrition, aid agencies said yesterday.

In Ethiopia, the worst-affected country in the region, the Government said that 4.6 million people faced starvation, but aid agencies claimed that the true figure was closer to 10 million.

Drought has worsened food shortages, and Oxfam said that the number of acute malnutrition cases had reached its highest level since the droughts of 2000, when mortality rates peaked at more than six people per 10,000 per day. The official definition of a famine is more than four deaths per 10,000 per day.

Ethiopian farmers said that the crisis was caused by the absence of the Belg rains, which were due in February and March. “It’s really hard. People are eating whatever they can find,” said Gemeda Worena, 38, the tribal head of Fendi Ajersai, a village in southern Ethiopia where six children died in one week this month. “We hadn’t had rain for the last eight months. We had to buy water to save our lives, but now we have nothing.”

Read it all.

The church in Africa has often said that it conceives its mission in terms of service rather than power. It preaches to political leaders and leaders in other fields to use their position in service to humankind, especially the vulnerable. That means, in fact, that the church is concerned about the question of power.

It cannot avoid engaging the critical question of the manifestations of the use or abuse of power, which often lie at the heart of ethnic war and conflict in countries like Uganda where Church growth is phenomenal. And it is not just a matter of the bishops or the church challenging society about the proper use of power and position.

They too need to engage critically with the way they exercise their power over clergy and laity alike. It is inevitable to comment about the absence of the bishops at Canterbury of the Church of Uganda.

Read it all.

I should have known better. I should have understood that a City with such a rich and extensive history as Canterbury cannot be “done” in one day. My original assumption was that I would spend perhaps twenty minutes in the Cathedral, take the thirty-minute train ride to Goodenstone Park Garden and then on to Augustine’s Abbey. I might even tuck in a castle or two along the way, I thought. Can’t be done. In the end, I spent two and a half hours “communing with saints” in the Cathedral. Then, it was almost lunch time and it seemed wiser to abandon my ambitious plan of taking the entire county of Kent in a day and stay right here in Canterbury. A visit to the Norman Castle (dating back to the 11th century) and a couple of museums wrapped up the day.

The Cathedral visit was incredibly satisfying; a truly fulfilling and spiritual experience. There was a strong awareness for every moment of the visit that I was physically present and meditating in the exact physical location that thousands and thousands of people – going back to the sixth century A.D. – have been. There was a sense of being in communion with all those saints and recognizing once again the vastness of this holy family both in space and time. A truly awesome experience that language simply cannot fully express.

Read it all.

It is true that Africa’s Christianity, even among august denominations like the Anglicans, is more passionate than it is farther north. Apart from the contest with Islam, this also reflects the need to offer as intense an experience as do the Pentecostalists. On the other hand, many African Anglicans love the idea of an episcopate that goes back to the dawn of the Christian era, something the Pentecostalists can’t provide. In Kenya, Anglicanism offers social cachet; and in Rwanda, Anglicanism attracts those who prefer the Anglophone Commonwealth to the Francophone past.

Some African Anglicans, such as Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda, reject the idea that they are clones of the Victorian missionaries, or of any other European model. Today’s Ugandan church, he says, bears the stamp of the “East African revival”, a movement that swept the region in the 1930s, with emphasis on the need for reconciliation and repentance. The Anglican Communion needs plenty of both.

Read it all.

Bishop Tilewa Johnson, from Gambia, said that his own villages used indaba, but called it bantaba, which means “under the big tree”.

“The fact that an attempt has been made to use the process is a good one. But of course it clashes with the culture here of everybody keeping an eye on the clock,” he said. “Indaba has no time limit. We keep going until a solution is found. Indaba takes place under a huge, shady tree where villagers assemble to talk about things. The aggrieved and the perpetrators must both be there to respond.”

Allison Lawrence, wife of the Bishop of South Carolina, Mark Lawrence, said: “They have taken a Zulu word and used it for an American concept. The African concept when you do an indaba is you talk, talk, talk until you agree. In these indaba groups, they talk a little and then someone changes the subject if they don’t like it. The Americans are feeling railroaded and manipulated. Even the Africans are saying, ”˜This is not indaba’.”

Bishops emerging from yesterday’s sessions described being divided into groups of about 40. As if there were not already enough divisions among Anglicans, they were divided up further into groups of four or five and given papers on subjects that the conference is addressing: mission, millennium goals, poverty ”“ the list is long. They talked and a rapporteur took notes, to be passed up to the next level. No one quite knew who or where that was.

Moreover, none of the bishops asked by The Times had yet been given a chance to discuss the one thing that they are all desperate to address: how can the Anglican Communion survive the consecration of Gene Robinson, the openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire.

Read it all.

On the last day of spring, Tom Wheeler left home in Southern California with his wife, his two kids and two audacious dreams.

As a civil engineer, he hopes to bring standard, nicely paved sidewalks to a city with almost none.

As a follower of Rick Warren, the evangelist who wrote the bestseller The Purpose Driven Life, Wheeler dreams of making Rwanda the world’s first “purpose-driven nation.” That means spreading the Gospel and helping this tiny African country, which 14 years ago endured the worst genocide since the Holocaust, continue its unlikely journey toward peace and prosperity.

“Rick challenged us all to go out,” Wheeler says. He and his wife, Lori, “wanted to serve God, and we wanted to be part of something big.”

Read it all.

We reject homosexual practice as contrary to biblical teaching and can accept no place for it within ECS. We strongly oppose developments within the Anglican Church in the USA and Canada in consecrating a practicing homosexual as bishop and in approving a rite for the blessing of same-sex relationships. This has not only caused deep divisions within the Anglican Communion but it has seriously harmed the Church’s witness in Africa and elsewhere, opening the church to ridicule and damaging its credibility in a multi-religious environment.

The unity of the Anglican Communion is of profound significance to us as an expression of our unity within the Body of Christ. It is not something we can treat lightly or allow to be fractured easily. Our unity expresses the essential truth of the Gospel that in Christ we are united across different tribes, cultures and nationalities. We have come to attend the Lambeth Conference, despite the decision of others to stay away, to appeal to the whole Anglican Communion to uphold our unity and to take the necessary steps to safeguard the precious unity of the Church.

Out of love for our brothers and sisters in Christ, we appeal to the Anglican Church in the USA and Canada, to demonstrate real commitment to the requests arising from the Windsor process. In particular:
– To refrain from ordaining practicing homosexuals as bishops or priests
– To refrain from approving rites of blessing for same-sex relationships
– To cease court actions with immediate effect;
– To comply with Resolution 1:10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference
– To respect the authority of the Bible

We believe that such steps are essential for bridging the divisions which have opened up within the Communion.

Read it all.