The Episcopal Church General Convention adoption of resolutions D025 and C056 is a deliberate defiance of the wider Body of the Anglican Communion. We believe this is the choice they make to be politically correct with circular popular opion which seeks continually to destroy the moral fibre of people in general as we see the decay all around us. The blessings of the same-sex unions and the ordination of practicing gay clergy is inconsistence with the Word of God written; it is theologically uninformed, incoherent with the wider church, endorsing schism in the Anglican Communion and threatens ecumenical fellowship and relations.

Read it all.

The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town says a decision by prosecutors to drop charges against South African presidential candidate Jacob Zuma will become a “running sore” unless there is an independent inquiry into the arms deal that triggered a legal process that has gripped the country for more than two years.

“How can this country forgive unless we know who we are forgiving and for what?” Archbishop Thabo Makgoba said in a 20 April speech to the Cape Town Press Club, The Cape Times newspaper reported.

Read it all.

(ACNS) ‘Continuing exaggerated weather patterns across Southern Africa are a further illustration of the urgent need to tackle global warming’ Archbishop Thabo Makgoba said on Tuesday, calling for swift and decisive global action on climate change.

Speaking in the week before the G20 summit, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town said ‘We have had enough of talking. The international community cannot continue to prevaricate while countries like ours are increasingly suffering inestimable human cost, in deaths, displacement, and the destruction of livelihoods. Northern Namibia is experiencing the worst flooding in decades, as is Southern Angola. This year has already seen serious storms, flooding and loss of life in Gauteng and Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa, as well as in Mozambique, where we are told we should expect further flooding, while other parts of the country suffer extensive drought.’

Read it all.

(ACNS) The Synod of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, meeting at Modderpoort in the Free State from 16 to 20 February 2009, have been shocked at the news that the Provincial Department of Health in the Free State has withdrawn anti-retroviral medication from HIV positive patients because of shortage of funds.

It is well known and often publicised by the National Department of Health, that patients must be counselled and prepared with great care before embarking on anti-retroviral medication. The Department is clear that it is vital for the medication to be taken consistently, with adequate food, and under diligent medical supervision; if this fails, it is said, the consequences in terms of illness and side effects may be severe.

Read it all.

(ACNS) Archbishop Thabo Makgoba has sent messages of support to areas of KwaZulu Natal and Mozambique where storms and flooding have caused death and destruction. The Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, whose area of responsibility includes several of South Africa’s neighbouring countries, assures the Bishops and people of the Church’s prayerful support, while calling for greater political commitment and practical action in overcoming global warming.

Writing to the Bishop of Natal, Rubin Philip, and the Bishop of Lebombo, Dinis Sengulane, Archbishop Makgoba says: ‘Our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones, who have been injured, and who have lost homes and livelihoods through these storms and flooding. We hold them all in our prayers and in our love, and especially remember before God those who have died. May all in need hear the still small voice of God within the anguish and chaos they face, bringing comfort and strength in the days ahead.

Read it all.

(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.

Faith leaders “should shout from the rooftops that AIDS is not a punishment from God but a medical condition which is preventable,” Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, former primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, has told the World Aids Campaign.

Ndungane was speaking in an interview for the Amsterdam- and Cape Town-based World Aids Campaign, founded by UNAIDS, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the marking of December 1 as World AIDS Day. The campaign says World AIDS Day is a time of “global solidarity for a pandemic that has led to over 25 million deaths, with an estimated 33 million people currently living with HIV worldwide.”

Ndungane, who now heads African Monitor, a continental development agency, said that AIDS was “manageable and treatable although not curable,” as well as not being a punishment from God.

Read it all.

I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief and wonder. It can’t be true that Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, is the next president of the United States.

But it is true, exhilaratingly true. An unbelievable turnaround. I want to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa on April 27, 1994.

We owe our glorious victory over the awfulness of apartheid in South Africa in large part to the support we received from the international community, including the United States, and we will always be deeply grateful. But for those of us who have looked to America for inspiration as we struggled for democracy and human rights, these past seven years have been lean ones.

Read it all.

A bio with a picture at the bottom is here.

Division over homosexuality and women bishops does exist “across the spectrum” within the Anglican Church, Archbishop Thabo Makgoba has said – but that is an indication of a church that is facing its challenges.

The archbishop, who returned from the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, this month, said final decisions had not yet been made on contentious issues such as women clergy and the ordination of gay bishops, but they had been thoroughly discussed.

He acknowledged that there were divisions on these matters within all their dioceses across the world. However, it could not be seen as a split between liberals and conservatives as this was an “artificial divide”.

“The reality across the spectrum, not just in South Africa, is that some parts of the communion are wrestling with issues such as ordaining women bishops, which we have done for 12 years already.

“I don’t see this as a problem, but an indication of a church that is alive, and prepared to face the contextual realities and their challenges,” he said.

Read it all.

There were 1,148 lay and clergy participants – including 291 bishops – from among many faithful Anglican Christians who still look at the Bible as the Word of God, not just a ‘primary source’, as some are led to believe by liberal revisionist theology. Gafcon believes that Anglicanism has a bright future for as long as we are obedient to the Lord’s Great Commission “to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching and training them to observe what the Lord commands.”(Matt 28:16-20; Eph.2:20). Gafcon is a movement in the Spirit and a fellowship of confessing Anglicans. Please read the statement on the Global Anglican Future. There is nothing divisive about it. The Global South and the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa are affiliated to it. Pray that the unity of the church be preserved. “Can the two walk together, unless they are agreed?” (Amos 3:3). Continue to pray for Lambeth so that we may have common mind in obedience to God’s written Holy Word in all our deliberations. Lambeth is not only about the issue of homosexuality, it is also about how the poor are held ransom as the rich dictate terms and power, in order to continue to subdue the colonized with shackles of hunger, want and misery. It is my wish to remind you that what the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies. May God’s kingdom come, and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Read it all.

NJONGO NDUNGANE: I think Rowan Williams has done all he can in terms of seeking to keep all the people together. He has bent backwards and forwards to try to accommodate everyone.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Archbishop Rowan Williams fills a position that has symbolic influence, but no hard power. It’s a difficult balancing act, complicated by his own public statements.

He has in the past broadcast liberal attitudes about homosexuality, but he has also forced a suffragan bishop to resign because he was gay.

But archbishop Ndungane says the coalition of conservative rebel bishops, does not respect the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

NJONGO NDUNGANE: They are instruments of unity. Instruments of communion and one such instrument of communion is the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then if you don’t respect the office or the integrity of the office, then there are problems in terms of understanding what being an Anglican is.

Read it all.

In the few years since Mandela has retired from official engagements, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Laureate and outspoken flayer of duplicitous politicians, has taken his place as South Africa’s moral conscience. Everyone wants to catch his eye or exchange a few words with him or prompt his famous giggle, and Tutu himself is the first to admit likes the attention.

The waitress takes our order and we both opt for grilled Cape salmon, the great cleric having changed his mind on the oxtail. At first Tutu seems pretty much unchanged since I last interviewed him a decade ago. Then, as head of the commission, he had the emotionally and physically taxing responsibility of wading through, in a series of public hearings between 1996 and 1998, the barbarities of apartheid.

He also had to make hugely sensitive decisions on granting amnesty for crimes, and on assessing the respective weight of human rights violations committed for or against such an inhumane system, a balancing act that infuriated both the African National Congress and white rightwingers. Then, towards the end of the assignment in 1997, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and yet the dynamic force of his personality helped to carry the country and himself through those difficult days, just as it had in the worst days of apartheid.

Read the whole article.

Last month, the House of Representatives showed leadership in the fight against global poverty by passing the Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Expanded Debt Cancellation, which would extend lifesaving debt cancellation to more poor nations around the globe.

Too many of the world’s poor children needlessly starve or go without education because too many impoverished nations – even after the laudable debt relief provided to date – are still funneling scarce resources to multilateral banks instead of paying for needs at home.

The world community has found crushing debt to be akin to a modern-day apartheid, and has responded with debt cancellation. Unjust debt leaves developing nations at the behest of the powerful. Shall we let the children of Africa and Asia die of curable disease, prevent them from going to school and limit their opportunities for meaningful work – all to pay off unjust and illegitimate loans made to their forefathers?

Read it all.

There is growing regional and international pressure for an arms embargo to be placed on Zimbabwe, until a legitimate government is in place. This is mainly because of the Chinese arms ship that was turned away from South Africa last week.

A High Court order sought by pressure groups in Durban barred its transit overland to Zimbabwe, while trade unions in the region urged their members to refuse to unload it. Campaigners are arguing that presidential election results have still not been announced 25 days after the elections and as such any arms shipments are likely to be used for internal repression.

On Wednesday the new Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, called on the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe.

Read it all.

There is so much more I could say about the vision I believe God is setting before us. It is a vision we must seek through rootedness in Christ Jesus, and ever-deepening engagement with Scripture and Sacraments; through the discipline of daily prayer and Bible-reading.

It is a vision that will touch every area of our lives. Let me share where it is already touching mine:

It is a vision of the restoration of dignity of each person, created by God and precious in God’s sight.

It is a vision of growing parish youth ministries, strengthened ecumenical ministry in tertiary education and Anglican schools helping address the skills shortages of our communities.

It is flourishing theological education, including through our residential college in Grahamstown and the Anglican House of Studies in Pietermaritzburg.

It is confident, competent, well-remunerated clergy, energising all God’s people in mission.

It is parishes as centres of peace and safety, offering shelter and nurture the vulnerable, especially children and youth: whether parishes in Cape Town, across South Africa, in Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Swaziland, or in St Helena and Tristan da Cunha.

It is churches working in partnership with governments and civil society to breathe hope and transformation into every aspect of our communities and common life.

It is an Africa without conflict, and without the unjust structures that fuel injustice….

Read it all.

Newly elected Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba was on Sunday officially installed as the Church’s leader at a colourful ceremony attended by hundreds of well-wishers.

Makgoba, 47, is the youngest person to be elected as Archbishop of Cape Town, was greeted with ululation, Kudu horn sounds and endless clappings as he was anointed during a church service held at the ST Georges Cathedral in Cape Town.

Over a thousand people, including President Thabo Mbeki, former Archbishops and leading business attended the service.

Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Science and Technology Minister Mosibudi Mangena and top businessmen Saki Macozoma, were amongst the more than 1000 people who had attended.

Read it all.

The garden is a place of God’s abundant providence and blessing. Everything is gift and cause for wonder and celebration. Everything is permitted and a source of ongoing delight and pleasure. But there are always boundaries, and the garden is bounded by one prohibition. he story does not explain the prohibition for the prohibition in and of itself is unimportant. What is important is the authority of the one who speaks and the expectation of an absolute obedience that is born of trust. This is God’s world and we live in it on God’s terms.

The conversation that comes later between the woman and the serpent is fascinating. The prohibition is interrogated and challenged, and what is a given is reduced to an option. In the process, what was boundary becomes threat, promise is obscured, and what was trust becomes defiance.In his commentary on Genesis, Walter Brueggemann rather scathingly says, ‘Theological-ethical talk here is not to serve God, but to avoid the claims of God. ”¦ The serpent is the first in the Bible to seem knowing and critical about God and to practice theology in the place of obedience’.

I wonder how often we ‘practice theology in the place of obedience,’ how often we use it to avoid the claims of God on our life? In the garden when the prohibition is violated, the promises are perverted and vocation is undermined. The energy once spent in ’tilling and tending’ God’s creation is now focussed entirely on the self and its new-found freedom that is not freedom but bondage.

Vocation, promise, prohibition are three strands of human life lived in God’s world on God’s terms, interdependent facets of divine purpose. Prayerfully they must woven into a threefold cord that is not easily broken and that can sustain us in our ministry. All life is vocation.

May the three-fold chord of your life be renewed this Advent and Christmas

Read it all. (Hat tip jdk)

Listen to it all as he gives his perspective on the Communion and some matters with which it is involved.

The apartheid era in South Africa produced Anglican Church leaders who stood out against injustice. Bishop Graham Chadwick, as Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman, following the example of one of his predecessors, Bishop Crowder, was expelled from the country for his actions. The Welsh-born bishop was finally escorted by the security police to Kimberley airport where 50,000 protesters joined in voicing their contempt at his deportation.

Graham Charles Chadwick was born in 1923 in Mid-Wales. The early death of his father led the family to relocate to Swansea, where Chadwick attended Swansea Grammar School. In 1942 he joined the RNVR. With his great gift for languages, he was selected to learn Japanese, before serving as an intelligence officer on flagships in the Pacific. He lost a close friend when he survived a kamikaze attack on HMS Formidable, and in 1946 he acted as an interrogator of war criminals.

Read it all.

He also threw down a theological challenge on a doctrine that the worldwide Anglican Communion is threatening to split over.

In his sermon, he poked fun at the belief that only those who accept Jesus as their savior can enter heaven.

“Can you imagine that there are those who think God is a Christian?” he said to laughter from a mostly appreciative audience. “Can you tell us what God was before he was a Christian?”

More than 1,300 people crammed into lofty Calvary Episcopal Church, East Liberty, yesterday for the interfaith prayer service, part of the archbishop’s first visit here.

Jared Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University, noted the unusual setting for the secular universities to award their degree, but said the archbishop’s role in ending brutal segregation and working for reconciliation in South Africa made extraordinary gestures easy. He awarded the degree with Mark Nordenberg, chancellor at Pitt.

They were surrounded by religious leaders, from evangelical Presbyterians to Muslims to rabbis to Catholic Bishop David Zubik of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Bishop Robert Duncan of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, a leader among theologically conservative Anglicans, also attended.

Read it all.

But this does not mean “anything goes.” By no means!

We are all permanently under the three-fold testing and purifying scrutiny of the refining fire of God’s holiness (Zech 13:9), of the two-edged sword of Scripture (Heb 4:12), of minds transformed by the renewing Spirit (Rom 12:2).

It is on this basis we dare to engage with the complexities of contemporary life around us.

God is God of everything, and we need to have the spiritual maturity, and the depth and breadth of faith, to know how to listen to what he has to say about everything from global security and biotechnology to poverty and development.

We need to be able to engage profoundly, and often critically, with every aspect of human behaviour.

Sometimes we speak of the need to “baptize culture.”

This is no cursory wipe with a damp cloth to produce a superficial religious veneer.

Baptism is the radical transformation that comes through burial with Christ and being raised with him to new life. Every culture must die to the priorities, the loyalties, the idols, of this world; and find new, authentic, life-giving, contemporary expression — transfigured under the Lordship of Jesus, Saviour and Redeemer, who calls us to walk in holiness of life.

This is God’s call to all of us, and to every area of our lives ”“ it is not just about sexuality and the morality of our sexual behaviour.

It is the life of obedience and self-discipline, and often costly self-denial, for, as Paul reminds the Corinthian church, even where “all things are lawful,” it may well be that “not all things are beneficial” (1 Cor 10:23).

All of us would do well to remember this, as we grapple with our diversity — believing it to be a gift of God’s creative abundance.

Read it all.

From ACNS:

16-October-2007 – Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndunganes’ statement on The Episcopal Church – South Africa

”˜Now is the time of God’s favour’ writes St Paul, reminding us that in every present moment we must grasp the opportunities offered by God’s reconciling grace (2 Cor 5:16-6:2).

The Episcopal Church has grasped that opportunity, and committed itself to the path of reconciliation. Now the rest of the Anglican Communion must make sure the moment is not lost.

As the careful and comprehensive report of the Joint Standing Committee makes clear, the House of Bishops have now provided the necessary clarifications and assurances on the responses General Convention had given to issues raised in the Windsor Report. We now have a basis for going forward together, working alongside one another to restore the broken relationships both within the Episcopal Church and within the wider Communion.

The Episcopal Church has borne unprecedented scrutiny into its affairs, often with scant regard either for its legitimate internal polity or for the principle, observed since the ancient councils of the Church, of local jurisdiction and non-interference, and in the face of all this has had the courage to take hard decisions. The Presiding Bishop, in particular, is to be commended for her self-denial in the generosity of the provisions proposed for the ministry of Episcopal Visitors. Others should now respond by also abiding by the recommendations of the Windsor Report, as the Joint Standing Committee Report underlines.

This has not been an easy road to travel. Much remains to be done and we must continue to strive earnestly together to find the path ahead. The experiences of my own Province, both through the terrible divisions of the apartheid years, and in the differences of our earliest history (which contributed to the holding of the first Lambeth Conference), have repeatedly demonstrated that holding fast to one another yields lasting fruit, while separation solves very little. Our God is the God of reconciliation, not of division, and we can take courage that he will continue to guide our way forward. I am sure that as we continue to abide in Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord, in whom lies the gift of unity, that we will find ourselves, our churches, our world-wide Communion, refined and strengthened, for the life of worship, witness and service to which we are called.

With the reputation of a quietly spoken priest dedicated to the upliftment of the marginalised, Thabo Makgoba, the newly elected Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, is expected to be as effective, but much less high-profile, than his predecessors.

He will assume the position when Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane retires at the end of this year — a position previously filled by the likes of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner in 1984.

His legacy is set to be no less profound: in meeting the challenges of poverty, HIV/Aids and giving moral leadership within Southern Africa; or in debates in the global Anglican Communion over scripture interpretations relating to human sexuality and over a long-brewing power struggle between its traditional centre in the global North and the South, where the number of believers is much larger.

“He has been a wonderful gift to this diocese. He is a compassionate, thoughtful and very humble man — in the best sense of the word — who has always led by example, like encouraging all of us to go for public HIV tests. His mission is not to create a bunch of Christians but to empower people with their rights and responsibilities,” says Suzanne Peterson, vicar general of the Grahamstown diocese, which Makgoba will be leaving on January 1 to assume his new position.

Read it all.

The Rt. Rev. Thabo Cecil Makgoba, Bishop of Grahamstown, was elected Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan and Primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa on Sept. 25.

Bishop Makgoba, 47, will succeed the Most Rev. Njongonkulu Ndungane as archbishop, and will assume office on Jan 1. Viewed as a conservative on issues of human sexuality, he is expected to try to move the South African church closer to the other African Anglican provinces. The spiritual reconstruction of the church and of South African society will guide his tenure as archbishop, he told the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Read it all.

THE ANGLICAN Church in South Africa will not permit blessings of same-sex unions or gay marriage, the Bishop of Mthatha told his diocesan synod on Aug 25, as it is contrary to Scripture and God’s plan for humanity.

The Rt Rev Sitembele Mzamane told the 48th meeting of the diocesan synod that he forbade clergy in the Diocese of Mthatha (formerly the Diocese of St John the Evangelist) from solemnising gay marriages under South Africa’s new civil marriage code.

“We still embrace the Biblical truth that homosexual behaviour is a sin, not an orientation as others would like us to believe,” he said.

“Same-sex union is something that has been accepted by the government. But that does not mean that everything the government accepts or condones as right, the church will simply say ”˜Yes’ and toe the line as well. No, it’s not like that, we base everything on the Bible,” Bishop Mzamane said according to accounts printed in an Eastern Cape newspaper, the Daily Dispatch.

Read it all.