A Hit Piece

How do you know you are doing what God wants? One of the ways is that you are opposed by the world. A man of God who takes godly stands will be accused of being "narrow-minded" or "bigoted" by the enemies of God. Below is excerpts from an article from the New York Times.

I mentioned Peter Akinola, the Arch Bishop of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, in an earlier post. He is leading a revolt against the Episcopal (Anglican) church in America for it's embracing of homosexuality as a normal way of life. He has gotten the attention of the NYTimes and they are going to do their best to make a villain of him. Here are some highlights:

At Axis of Episcopal Split, an Anti-Gay Nigerian

By LYDIA POLGREEN and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

ABUJA, Nigeria, Dec. 20 — The way he tells the story, the first and only time Archbishop Peter J. Akinola knowingly shook a gay person's hand, he sprang backward the moment he realized what he had done.

Archbishop Akinola, the conservative leader of Nigeria's Anglican Church who has emerged at the center of a schism over homosexuality in the global Anglican Communion, re-enacted the scene from behind his desk Tuesday, shaking his head in wonder and horror.

"This man came up to me after a service, in New York I think, and said, 'Oh, good to see you bishop, this is my partner of many years,' " he recalled. "I said, 'Oh!' I jumped back."

Archbishop Akinola, a man whose international reputation has largely been built on his tough stance against homosexuality, has become the spiritual head of 21 conservative churches in the United States. They opted to leave the Episcopal Church over its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop and allow churches to bless same-sex unions. Among the eight Virginia churches to announce they had joined the archbishop's fold last week are The Falls Church and Truro Church, two large, historic and wealthy parishes.

. . . . .

"He sees himself as the spokesperson for a new Anglicanism, and thus is a direct challenge to the historic authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury," said the Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.

.. . . He has also become the most visible advocate for a literal interpretation of Scripture, challenging the traditional Anglican approach of embracing diverse theological viewpoints.

"Why didn't God make a lion to be a man's companion?" Archbishop Akinola said at his office here in Abuja. "Why didn't he make a tree to be a man's companion? Or better still, why didn't he make another man to be man's companion? So even from the creation story, you can see that the mind of God, God's intention, is for man and woman to be together."

Archbishop Akinola's views on homosexuality — that it is an abomination akin to bestiality and pedophilia — are fairly mainstream here. Nigeria is a deeply religious country, . . .

... Bishop Martyn Minns, the rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, Va., who was consecrated by Archbishop Akinola this year to serve as his missionary bishop in North America, said Archbishop Akinola was motivated by a conviction that the Anglican Communion must change its colonial-era leadership structure and mentality.

"He doesn't want to be the man; he just no longer wants to be the boy," Bishop Minns said. "He wants to be treated as an equal leader, with equal respect."

Even among Anglican conservatives, Archbishop Akinola is not universally beloved. . . . Some bishops in southern Africa have also challenged his fixation with homosexuality, when AIDS and poverty are a crisis for the continent.

He has been chastised more recently for creating a missionary branch of the Nigerian church in the United States, called the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, despite Anglican rules and traditions prohibiting bishops from taking control of churches or priests not in their territory.

"There are primates who are very, very concerned about it," said Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the primate of the West Indies, because "it introduces more fragmentation."

. . . One of Archbishop Akinola's principal arguments, often heard from other conservatives as well, is that Christianity in Nigeria, a country where religious violence has killed tens of thousands in the past decade, must guard its flank lest Islam overtake it. "The church is in the midst of Islam," he said. "Should the church in this country begin to teach that it is appropriate, that it is right to have same sex unions and all that, the church will simply die."

He supports a bill in Nigeria's legislature that would make homosexual sex and any public expression of homosexual identity a crime punishable by five years in prison.

. . . "It could target just about anyone, based on any form of perception from anybody."

. . . Though he insisted that he was not seeking power or influence, he is clearly relishing the curious role reversal of African archbishops sending missionaries to a Western society he sees as increasingly godless. . . .

. . . Asked whether his installing a bishop in the United States violated the church's longstanding rules, he responded heatedly that he was simply doing what Western churches had done for centuries, sending a bishop to serve Anglicans where there is no church to provide one.

. . . Anyone who criticizes him as power-seeking is simply trying to undermine his message, he said. "The more they demonize, the stronger the works of God," he said.