In Jerusalem, conservatives stage an ecclesiastical coup.

By Travis Kavulla

National Review Online

June 24, 2008 4:00 AM

The change in the church leadership¹s consistency is manifest at Jerusalem¹s Renaissance Hotel, where it is nearly impossible this week to turn around without seeing a Nigerian, a Kenyan, a Ugandan, or other African ensconced in the crimson robes that signify the office of bishop. This alone is something of a new development; there are more African Anglican bishops present here than there were on the planet a few decades ago.

Africans began to take control of their churches in the 1960s, and these have since grown rapidly, imbued with a vitality lacking in most Western churches. Even so, these churches frequently did not have the money to finance their attendance at the Lambeth Conference. ³The American church simply thought it could get its way,² Beckwith says, ³and very largely they did in the past for two reasons: They had money, and Africans did not.²

The vibrancy of African Anglicanism has started to be matched with the funds to support it. In 1998, Africans surprised Lambeth observers by showing up in droves, and turning the tide against the liberalism of the Episcopal, Canadian, and English churches by approving a strict resolution affirming the authority of scripture as written, and pronouncing again the immorality of sexual acts outside of the covenant of marriage.

Some Episcopalians have accused American conservatives of manipulating African bishops. Barbara Harris, an Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, has even claimed that African bishops¹ loyalty has been ³bought with chicken dinners.² But it is clear that, at GAFCON, Africans are calling the shots. The event grew out of a Nairobi meeting of African bishops, and Africans are paying their own way. Peter Akinola, the primate of the Nigerian church and the chairman of the gathering, raised $1.2 million in three weeks for the conference. Indeed, his church even subsidized the attendance of a number of Americans, and Akinola has employed a young American priest as his private chaplain for the event.

At GAFCON, the African church ‹ the largest church ‹ is signalling that, by rights of dogma and demography, it should be calling the shots. Robert Duncan, the conservative bishop of Pittsburgh, says that the conference¹s task is nothing less than to prepare for a ³post-colonial² Anglicanism that has ³come of age.² Certainly the choice to hold GAFCON in the Holy Land, and not in England, is a powerful statement about where conservatives see their origins and, too, their legitimacy.

There is, of course, a certain irony to all of this. The West once redeemed Africa for Christianity; now it is the Africans who seek to do the redeeming. African prelates see themselves as repaying a favor. Benjamin Nzimbi, archbishop of Nairobi, tells me that he sees GAFCON as a way of ³reclaiming Anglicanism the way we received it.² Certainly Africans seem to have the advantage, as their churches grow and the Episcopal Church shrinks. (A recent Harper¹s cover article on the subject, seeking to explain away this trend, lamely points to the fact that the American church¹s pension fund is flourishing.)

Conservative Episcopalians see few prospects for themselves in the church. Jack Iker, bishop of Fort Worth, says, ³We either make a place for ourselves, or we have no place.² He predicts that within a year after GAFCON, whole conservative-leaning dioceses in the United States will have sought an alternative arrangement outside of the American church.

The turn from the church¹s seeming leftward trend is, in some sense, a surprise. But in some way it is merely a repudiation of the wrong-headed assumption, based on the American experience, that each year brings ³progress² in the form of an ever more secularized, liberal church. Anglicans are beginning to show that this rule is not as firm as it might seem.

‹Travis Kavulla, a former associate editor of National Review, is a Gates Scholar in African History at Cambridge University and a 2008 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow.

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