Sunday the 22nd of April, 2018 was a joyous day in the south Sudanese capital of Juba, as thousands of Christians gathered at All Saints Cathedral to witness the enthronement of the fifth archbishop and primate of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan.

The Rt Rev Justin Badi Arama, who was previously the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Maridi in the western part of the country, won the election after a tight victory over the Rt. Rev. Abraham Yel Bishop of Aweil, a diocese in the northern part of the country. Bishop Justin won the election on 20 Jan 2018 by only a vote over his challenger and was pronounced the fifth archbishop of the province.

The Rt Rev Tim Thornton, Bishop of Lambeth, represented the Archbishop of Canterbury at the enthronement, noting Archbishop Welby regretted he was not able to attend due to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in London. Bishop Thornton read out a letter written by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the new archbishop expressing have his greetings to the people of south Sudan. Archbishop Welby wrote that though he was not present at the occasion of the enthronement he will be coming with Pope Francis to South Sudan once they have fix a date for their joint visit. He have assured the people of South Sudan that Christians worldwide were praying for South Sudan so that they may see peace once again.

The six-hour service included a sermon on the topic of forgiveness by the Rt Rev Dr Josiah Atkins Idowu secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council. He started by encouraging South Sudanese to love themselves regardless of tribes, saying “I came from a country where there are more than 250 tribes. Tribalism cannot take you ahead “and for you to realise peace it must start from you to love each other dearly.

He further said “this constant division on basis of tribes and in the church must not take our hearts out of the love of Christ. The constant disagreement in the present church on the issue of women’s ordination or baptism (sprinkling water or immersion) should not be issues that Christians should break fellowship. Our unity is not about women’s ordination or any other doctrine but our unity remains in Jesus Christ and we must all be united in the name of Jesus whether you are from the tribe of Dinka, Nuer, Azande or Bari. We are all one in Jesus.”

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A minute’s silence will mark the first anniversary of the Manchester Arena attack, the government has announced.

Twenty-two people were killed and hundreds injured when Salman Abedi detonated a home-made bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert on 22 May.

All government buildings will observe the minute’s silence at 14:30 BST on 22 May. Other organisations may follow suit, the government said.

A service at Manchester Cathedral and a communal sing-along are also planned.

The Manchester Together – With One Voice event will take place on the same day and bring together choirs from the city and beyond.

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(BBC) #Manchesterattack: Silence to mark first anniversary https://t.co/Vp9g20VdM1 #terrorism #urbanlife #religion #history #uk

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 26, 2018

The Church of Ireland is also setting aside the founding documents of the Anglican church.

In 1999 the General Synod decided to precede the Thirty-Nine Articles with a “declaration” – used to distance the church from its historic confessional foundation. [2]

In 2004, the Book of Common Prayer was replaced with a new prayer book as the standard for Anglican doctrine and practice.

Such partings from traditional forms have also been accompanied by departures from scriptural teaching on moral issues.

In the recent referendum in the Republic of Ireland, two Church of Ireland bishops publicly supported the “Yes” campaign for same-sex marriage. [3]   A subsequent pastoral letter from the bishops gave advice to clergy seeking to enter into same-sex marriage.  Such clergy were not directed to the clear teaching of scripture but to, “think carefully about the response of others” because it is “contrary to what the Church of Ireland currently practices.” [4]

Faithful Anglicans recognise such language.  It is the language of departure from obedience the word of the Almighty God!  It is accompanied by the denial of other doctrines – the uniqueness of Christ, the atonement, human sinfulness…

In the meantime, many live in ignorance of the glorious saving gospel of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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While many countries are increasingly denying religious freedoms, especially bad acts of religious persecution are more likely to draw global protest 20 years after the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, a US federal watchdog commission has reported.

Delivering a mixed picture, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 2018 annual report on 2017 religious freedom violations in 28 countries.

‘Sadly, religious freedom conditions deteriorated in many countries in 2017, often due to increasing authoritarianism or under the guise of countering terrorism,’ USCIRF chairman Daniel Mark said.

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We know, because Philip Larkin gave us his guesstimate, that the sexual revolution began in 1963. Less clear is when it will peak. But looking around it is hard to resist the thought that the moment has already passed, that a poet will one day put the climax of the permissive society somewhere around the turn of the millennium, when parents were relaxed baby-boomers and the young were yet to espouse the strict gender politics now found on university campuses.

Statistics show a large minority of chaste young people. Britain’s pornography laws have been tightened. Less measurably, there is a tauter atmosphere around sex than I remember from the ribald 1990s, or even the noughties: more dancing around sensitivities, more pressure to get your terms right.

It is normal for society to take the edge off a revolution after riding it for so long. And anyone who wants a louche life can still have one, subject to their own attractiveness. The real story is where the pressure for moderation comes from. By logic, it should be the church and political conservatives. Instead, the rampant right in western democracies is indifferent to sex, sometimes creditably, sometimes to its shame. Donald Trump was not elected for his primness towards women.

No, the guardians of the New Prurience tend to be young and avowedly progressive — people who might own Brand’s book, people whose mid-20th century equivalents lobbied for free love. With two generations of evidence to go by, they see inequity in the fruits of the revolution.

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I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or homeschooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use).

I first caught wind of this striking divergence from Christian orthodoxy in class last year, when we encountered Stoic visions of the afterlife. Cicero, for one, describes the body as a prison from which the immortal soul is mercifully freed upon death, whereas Seneca views the body as “nothing more or less than a fetter on my freedom,” one eventually “dissolved” when the soul is set loose. These conceptions were quite attractive to the students.

Resistance to the idea of a physical resurrection struck them as perfectly logical. “It doesn’t feel right to say there’s a human body in heaven, when the body is tied so closely to sin,” said one student. In all, fewer than ten of my forty students affirmed the orthodox teaching that we will ultimately have a body in our glorified, heavenly form. None of them realizes that these beliefs are unorthodox; this is not willful doctrinal error. This is an absence of knowledge about the foundational tenets of historical, creedal Christianity.

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Only the Spirit “who is in the world to convict us of sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8) can bring us to clarity about the crisis we face.  As I have sought that conviction, here is what I have come to believe: The central crisis facing us is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been betrayed and shamed by an evangelicalism that has violated its own moral and spiritual integrity.

This is not a crisis imposed from outside the household of faith, but from within.  The core of the crisis is not specifically about Trump, or Hillary, or Obama, or the electoral college, or Comey, or Mueller, or abortion, or LGBTQIA+ debates, or Supreme Court appointees. Instead the crisis is caused by the way a toxic evangelicalism has engaged with these issues in such a way as to turn the gospel into Good News that is fake. Now on public display is an indisputable collusion between prominent evangelicalism and many forms of insidious racist, misogynistic, materialistic, and political power. The wind and the rain and the floods have come, and, as Jesus said, they will reveal our foundation.  In this moment for evangelicalism, what the storms have exposed is a foundation not of solid rock but of sand.

This is not a crisis taking place at the level of language. This is not about who owns or defines the term “evangelical,” and whether one does—or does not—choose to identify as such.  It is legitimate and important to debate if and how the term “evangelical” can currently be used in the United States to mean anything more than white, theologically and politically conservative. But that is not itself the crisis. The crisis is not at the level of our lexicon, but of our lives and a failure to embody the gospel we preach.  We may debate whether the word “evangelical” can or should be redeemed. But what we must deal with is the current bankruptcy many associate with evangelical life.

This is not a crisis unfolding at the level of group allegiance, denomination, or affiliation.  The varied reality that is American evangelicalism is evidenced in this room.  We have no formal hierarchy, leadership, or structure and form no single organization, but are sorted and divided today as we have been—for better and worse—for much of our history.  Some might wish for a clearer distinction between those who call themselves fundamentalist and those who call themselves evangelical. We might look to varying traditions or geographies to explain our division. These distinctions matter but can easily devolve into scapegoating or blaming, diverting us from our vocation as witness to God’s love for a multifaceted world.

This is not a recent crisis but a historic one.  We face a haunting specter with a shadow that reaches back further than the 2016 election—a history that helps define the depth of the sorrow, fear, anger, anxiety, and injustice around us. Today’s egregious collusion between evangelicals and worldly power is problematic enough: more painful and revealing is that such collusion has been our historic habit. Today’s collusion bears astonishing—and tragic—continuity with the past.

Right alongside the rich history of gospel faithfulness that evangelicalism has affirmed, there lies a destructive complicity with dominant cultural and racial power. Despite deep gospel confidence and rhetoric, evangelicalism has been long-wedded to a devastating social self-interest that defends the dominant culture over and against that of the gospel’s command to love the “other” as ourselves.  We are not naïve in our doctrine of sin that prefers self over all, but we have failed to recognize our own guilt in it.

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Almighty God, we bless thy Name for the life and witness of Robert Hunt, first chaplain to the Jamestown colony, who sought to unite thy people in thy love amid great hardship: Help us, like him, to work for reconciliation wherever we may be placed; through Jesus Christ thy Son, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who by thy death didst take away the sting of death; Grant unto us thy servants so to follow in faith where thou hast led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in thee, and awake up after thy likeness; through thy mercy, who livest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.

–Robert W. Rodenmayer, ed., The Pastor’s Prayerbook: Selected and arranged for various occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)

The Lord said to Moses, “Cut two tables of stone like the first; and I will write upon the tables the words that were on the first tables, which you broke. Be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. No man shall come up with you, and let no man be seen throughout all the mountain; let no flocks or herds feed before that mountain.” So Moses cut two tables of stone like the first; and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tables of stone. And the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” And Moses made haste to bow his head toward the earth, and worshiped. And he said, “If now I have found favor in thy sight, O Lord, let the Lord, I pray thee, go in the midst of us, although it is a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thy inheritance.”

–Exodus 34:1-9