COMMENTARY: It’s time to listen to Third World Christians

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Erich Bridges writes for the international bureau of Baptist Press, the official news agency of the Southern Baptist Convention.) UNDATED _ Hurray for the bishops! The Anglican bishops from Africa, Asia and Latin America, that is. Tired of getting pushed around by modernist theological bullies from North America and Europe, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Erich Bridges writes for the international bureau of Baptist Press, the official news agency of the Southern Baptist Convention.)

UNDATED _ Hurray for the bishops!


The Anglican bishops from Africa, Asia and Latin America, that is.

Tired of getting pushed around by modernist theological bullies from North America and Europe, they stood up for biblical morality at the recent Lambeth Conference of the world’s Anglican prelates.

Specifically, the bishops responded to the modernists’ effort to put the church’s stamp of approval on homosexual practice by supporting and winning passage of a resolution rejecting church approval for such.

While hastening to condemn”irrational fear”of homosexuals and calling for loving ministry to them, the resolution declared homosexual practice”incompatible with Scripture”and refused to give church approval to same-sex unions or the ordination of people involved in them.

The resolution, passed overwhelmingly, was mild. But it constituted a stinging rebuke to liberal clerics and their hopes of winning over pagan Western culture by surrendering to it. Certain North American and European bishops may be eager to please a flock increasingly contemptuous of what the Bible actually teaches. Many Third World churchmen, however, have a very different perspective, and it’s quite refreshing.

Listen to them:”In the Sudan we know nothing of homosexuality,”said Bishop Michael Lugor, where Christian believers live under constant pressure from Islam.”We only know the Gospel and we proclaim it.” Bishop Alexander Malik of Pakistan, another land where Christianity struggles for a voice among an overwhelming Muslim majority, said his stand against homosexual activity is not”gay bashing but a matter of doctrine, faith and dogma.” Bishop Eustace Kamanyire of Uganda told his colleagues that both the Old and New Testaments condemn homosexual activity as immoral, adding the ordination of active homosexuals is”false teaching,”which,”when exported to Africa and other parts of the world, is causing serious damage and scandal to Christ and his church.” These statements drew scorn from the usual suspects, including Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., who never met a Christian doctrine he couldn’t reject or fad he couldn’t embrace. Spong, popular with the progressive crowd, writes books with such titles as”Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Christianity certainly isn’t dying in our day. The gospel is spreading like wildfire in Africa, Latin America and other areas when it is preached with spiritual power and biblical integrity. Indeed, the spiritual center of the church is steadily moving South and East and Third World Christians will soon outnumber us _ if they don’t already.

A strident advocate of full acceptance for active gays in the church, Spong initially dismissed the African leaders’ biblical views as”superstitious.”When that insult offended many prelates, he backtracked and apologized, explaining that the First and Third Worlds use different”symbols”to communicate the gospel. But then a few days later he was arguing the Africans inherited their backward,”Victorian”theology from 19th-century evangelical missionaries.

Spong’s view, however formulated, is, if not racist, patronizing in the extreme.

More to the point, it reveals the hypocrisy of many First World church leaders. They drone on about respecting multicultural”diversity”but remain theological colonialists at heart. They’re eager for their Third World counterparts to show up for meetings like the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference and smile for the group photo as long as they stay quiet when the big issues get debated.”We are like Cinderella _ we’re still in the kitchen,”said Bishop Julio Holguin-Khoury of the Dominican Republic.

Well, it’s time for the preachers of diversity to experience a little of it. After breaking out of the kitchen at Lambeth, the Third World bishops resoundingly declared that condoning homosexual practice in the church would be”evangelical suicide.” That is the heart of the matter. When under fire, when tested in the crucible of persecution, true Christian faith of whatever denomination returns to its source: a holy God revealed in Jesus Christ and Scripture. A faith based on anything less isn’t worth having in the first place, and won’t survive real opposition in the second.


The”crucial question,”wrote nine mostly Asian and African archbishops,”is how we relate to the modern globalizing culture … (and) whether we are in danger of allowing this culture with its philosophical assumptions, economic system, sexual alternatives, and hidden idols to determine what we become.” American Christians are in such danger, whether our idols are sexual, materialistic or spiritual in nature.

DEA END RNS

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