The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn discusses some of the misperceptions people have about Anglicanism in the Global South and the vital faith it represents in an article on Episcopal Life Online. He also points out that changes are coming to the leadership of the Global South that will have implications for relations between the Episcopal Church and other parts of the Communion.
“‘Global South’ implies a monolithic body when in reality the group’s membership appears to be porous, driven by a small number of special interest advocates primarily in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and their American franchise holders. Membership and financial data about the group is as difficult to come by as that of a Cayman Islands registered corporation. The organization projects a billboard slogan North-South divide. Northern churches are cold, dwindling in numbers, and ignore the Bible. In contrast, the growing South is energetic, biblically correct, and the home of ready judges waiting to declare what is acceptable practice throughout the Anglican Communion.
This slick North-South divide is no more accurate than numerous other discredited religious clash-of-civilization comparisons that have appeared and disappeared during recent centuries. Amartya Sen, the Pakistani-born Nobel-Prize-winning author, has warned about the dangers of such distorted religious reductionism: ‘The hope of harmony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clearer understanding of the pluralities of human identity, and in the appreciation that they cut across each other and work against a sharp separation along one single hardened line of impenetrable division.’ (Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence, The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), xiv.)
Population growth numbers widely favor the South, but within most ‘southern’ countries there is an amazing diversity of religious expressions. In the Anglican case, the range of religious issues present in any province is far more complex than represented by a few well-worn slogans about sex and structure.
The Anglican Global South faction and their American supporters so far have missed an opportunity to draw on the rich contributions of the African American religious ethos, Pentecostal, liberation and other post-colonial theologies. Asian, Latin American and African Christians have been in the forefront of developing such forms of religious expression linking eternal truths with local settings and cultures.”
Read the rest of the essay here.