The Lead

The Primate of Nigeria is featured in a new interview this week. In the interview Abp. Akinola talks about his national role in Nigeria and his sense of how Anglicanism is failing in England. The interview appears here in the magazine, Third Way.

The Church Times has coverage here.

From the article:

"ENGLAND has let Christ go, says the Archbishop of Nigeria, the Most Revd Peter Akinola. Consequently, the ‘huge religious vacuum’ created in the name of multiculturalism is being filled by Islam.
In an interview with Third Way, the Archbishop says he now leads 20 million Anglicans — ‘not on paper: in the pews on Sundays’. He describes himself to Joel Edwards, director of the Evangelical Alliance, as a nobody; some one with no claim to glamour or ‘superstar syndrome’; a ‘tool in the hand of God’, with no choice but to be humble.

[...]England is making “a constant effort to throw God out of the system”, he says, describing a re ported one million Anglicans at Sunday worship as “not even as much as one diocese in my country”. He criticises English preachers for their timidity: “When the gospel is pro claimed uncompromisingly, the Muslim respects you. When you have no regard for your religion, when you are neither here nor there, the Muslim disdains you — detests you.”"

One correction to the Church Times article: Akinola is no longer the chairman of Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA).

Interestingly, there's an article in the Telegraph today that quotes the Archbishop of York John Sentamu's remarks that England has become intolerant of Christian faith as well as pointing to a Cambridge study that the English government has focused too strongly on Islamic groups and ignored Christian ones.

ACNS (Anglican Communion News Service) has a story on Abp. Semantu's words as well.

Comments (7)

Muslims constitute 3 percent of the population of the United Kingdom. And Peter Akinola's knowledge of the religious scene in England is formed almost exclusively by what Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream tells him. One could dismiss his remarks as uninformed were they not dangerous. Akinola's anti-gay allies on the American right are also vigorously anti-Muslim. They need support for more belligerent American policy toward Iran and Arab states. Akinola is helping them gin it up. Increasingly, he and the financial supporters in the US will graft an anti-Islamic movement onto their anti-gay roots.

And Akinola has still not come clean about the involvement of the Christian Association of Nigeria in a massacre of 700 Muslims in Yelwa in 2004. Akinola was president of the CAN at that time.

Posted by Jim Naughton | September 12, 2008 9:53 AM

On this score it is interesting to compare what Lord Carey wrote in the Times on Wednesday,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4718585.ece

How will England cope if the present predicted levels of large-scale immigration take place? If this scale of immigration continues, with people of different faiths, cultures and traditions coming here, what will it mean to be British?

To what the Jonathan Sacks has said,

http://books.google.com/books?id=rMEUU_pCgHYC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=%22It+is+through+exchange+that+difference+becomes+a+blessing,+not+a+curse.%22&source=web&ots=dlvkBF1U1W&sig=gCoBlq8NdDJExawh1otCFPflXrw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=8&ct=result

It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.

Posted by John B. Chilton | September 12, 2008 10:17 AM

A quote from the interview:

He declares himself proud to be described as conservative, “because there is no other name given under heaven by which man shall be saved”.

I thought that name was "Jesus," rather than "conservative." Maybe I'm reading the wrong Bible?

Paige Baker

Posted by paigeb | September 12, 2008 10:31 AM

Also from the interview:

"I wish the church had some law-enforcement agency we could encourage to arrest the arrestable, to jail the jailable, to banish the banishable; but it doesn't. All the church can do is proclaim the word, and it is doing it. All Akinola can do is proclaim the word, regardless of whom it offends. Akinola proclaims the word in season and out of season, in low places and in high places. Akinola looks straight in the eyes of whoever and tells him what he believes God is saying he should say."

Posted by Jim Naughton | September 12, 2008 10:47 AM

Jim, you missed the part where he was lamenting not being able to cane (i.e., beat) disobedient children...

Posted by paigeb | September 12, 2008 11:12 AM

That's the thanks the ABC gets for his attempts at appeasement.

Posted by GrandmèreMimi | September 12, 2008 9:45 PM

June Butler

Posted by GrandmèreMimi | September 12, 2008 9:46 PM

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