Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS) officials have withdrawn an invitation for a visit by the head of the U.S.-based Episcopal Church (TEC) because of TEC’s liberal stances on sexual issues. It is a stinging rebuke of the official American branch of the global Anglican Communion. Equally striking, the Sudanese have recognized the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the Episcopal Church’s conservative American rival.
With about 4.5 million members, the growing church in Sudan outnumbers the declining U.S. based denomination, which has fewer than 2 million. Overwhelmingly poor and besieged for years by war and persecution, mostly from the Islamist regime in Khartoum, ECS is strongly theologically conservative, like most African churches. Many Anglican churches in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South have distanced themselves from TEC even as they remain in the global Anglican Communion of about 80 million believers.
This is a more significant move than it might appear at first sight. TEC has been assiduously wooing Sudanese Anglican leaders, trying to bribe them with various gifts in order to keep them from doing what the Sudanese bishops just did. ++Daniel Deng Bul took a very courageous and costly stand at Lambeth in 2008, and now the whole HoB has taken an equally courageous and costly stand. The explicit, formal recognition of the ACNA as the real Anglican church in North America is a most welcome development.
The Sudanese HoB may be economically impoverished, but they are rich in faith and courage. TEC’s HoB, OTOH, is spiritually destitute on the whole, and strikingly lacking in courage as well, with the significant exception of such bold leaders as +Lawrence. TEC’s HoB has fecklessly capitulated to an increasingly relativist and antinomian culture, while patting itself on the back for being “prophetic.” Meanwhile, the Sudanese HoB has acted like real successors of the apostles. BRAVO.
By officially recognizing the ACNA, the fourth largest Anglican province (in terms of ASA) has joined the three even larger ones (giants Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya) in doing so, and thereby made it all the plainer that the vast majority of the world’s practicing Anglicans supports the ACNA, even if Lambeth Palace and the ACO is loathe to do the same.
David Handy+
P.S. Good catch, Jeff Walton. IRD is doing a great job.
I guess that, among other things, the Sudanese bishops wanted to avoid the sort of acute ambarrassment that the PB’s recent visit to Harare caused Anglican Church leaders in Zimbabwe. Any association with TEC just puts deadly ammunition in the hands of Muslim critics of Christianity in Sudan.
David Handy+
You are so RIGHT, David Handy+, and that recognition is bound to grow. God is truly at work here, and He will not be mocked.