From here and below
See also: A letter from GAFCON Primates January 22nd 2014
To the Faithful of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and friends
from Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, Primate of Kenya and Chairman of the GAFCON Primates’ Council
January 2015
”˜Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.’ Romans 12:2
My dear brothers and sisters,
As I send this first pastoral letter of 2015, receive greetings in the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever!
As we begin a new year, we thank God that through Christ he has rescued us from futile ways and taken us up into his eternal purposes. Our new life in Christ brings a fresh dimension to even the most ordinary work because it is now done for God and his glory. What marks out a disciple of Jesus Christ is that this is a person who has not just had a conversion experience, but a person whose whole way of thinking has been radically changed.
One of the great challenges for African Christianity is for the many who identify as ”˜born again’ to become mature disciples of Christ. This is especially necessary given the challenge of what Pope Francis last week described as ”˜ideological colonisation’, which is the practice of tying aid and development resources to the promotion of alien understandings of gender, the family and sexual behaviour.
Money is a very powerful tool and manipulation can happen with varying degrees of subtlety. Such practices must be challenged, but the best defence is for ordinary Christians to have renewed minds that are profoundly shaped by the Bible. When each local church is able to see itself as a colony of heaven, its members will be much more resistant to being colonised by non-Christian ideologies.
In this respect, the Churches of Africa need the GAFCON movement’s emphasis on restoring the Communion’s commitment to biblical truth just as much as the Churches of the West. We are committed to equipping the Anglican Communion as a whole to survive and thrive in the face of many twenty-first century challenges, of which ”˜ideological colonisation’ is just one, and to do this we are building global partnerships and support networks.
So I am very encouraged that connections made at GAFCON 2013 continue to bear fruit. For instance, a few weeks ago, a team from Australia participated in a youth convention in the Church of Uganda’s West Ankole Diocese with over 10,000 attending and next month a mission team from All Saints Cathedral here in Nairobi will be flying to Chicago as part of a reciprocal mission partnership with the Anglican Church in North America’s ”˜Greenhouse’ church planting initiative.
We shall also be strengthening the work of our global fellowship with the launch of the Australian Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in March and an expanded GAFCON Primates Meeting in London the following month.
[blockquote] “This is especially necessary given the challenge of what Pope Francis last week described as ‘ideological colonisation’, which is the practice of tying aid and development resources to the promotion of alien understandings of gender, the family and sexual behaviour. Money is a very powerful tool and manipulation can happen with varying degrees of subtlety.” [/blockquote]
Its great to see the Archbishop naming the tactic for what it is. This is precisely what they do. He is giving CAPA a wake-up call as much as anything else.
But it is in his identification of the solution that I think the real brilliance is to be found:
[blockquote] “Such practices must be challenged, but the best defence is for ordinary Christians to have renewed minds that are profoundly shaped by the Bible. When each local church is able to see itself as a colony of heaven, its members will be much more resistant to being colonised by non-Christian ideologies.” [/blockquote]
One of the key manifestations of this is planting and nurturing faithful congregations. Its not enough simply to take a stand on biblical truth in our own particular church, diocese, parish or organisation (although that is very important). But we must also counter-attack by nurturing new faithful Christians, and that comes from the congregation. It is important to protect congregations against infiltration, and that in turn means securing the seminaries, since faithful clergy will secure faithful congregations. But as a bottom line we need to plant and water many more faithful congregations, and trust them to do the work of raising up enthusiastic defenders of the faith.