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US Presiding Bishop Uses His Color to Lambast Primates in Canterbury

US Presiding Bishop Uses His Color to Lambast Primates in Canterbury

By David W. Virtue DD
www.virtueonline.org
January 20, 2016

"I stand before you as your brother. I stand before you as a descendant of African slaves, stolen from their native land, enslaved in a bitter bondage, and then even after emancipation, segregated and excluded in church and society. And this conjures that up again, and brings pain." --- PB Michael Curry

It was a brilliant move by the black US Presiding Bishop to use his color in Canterbury following the vote to discipline the American Episcopal Church by 38 Primates of the Anglican Communion.

He shrewdly linked his color and race with his church's adoption of pansexuality. What he said and inferred is that slavery and homosexuality are linked (in his mind) and that what whites did to blacks in the US, blacks (GAFCON primates) are now doing to homosexuals.

It is a huge lie of course, but it makes for a great emotional and personal headline and would probably get you on the Oprah Winfrey show if it was still going. Black leaders of the Global South never bought the argument--and they shouldn't. There is no connection. Slavery and slavery to sexual sin are quite different matters.

First of all, the vast majority of American blacks who call themselves Christians eschew homosexuality, and that includes a vast swathe of American Baptists of one stripe or another. Three of the largest African-American churches in the United States, the African-Methodist Episcopal Church, AME-Zion, and the Church of God in Christ combine an emphasis on social activism with a traditional view on marriage.

Many decades ago I was the associate pastor of a Black Baptist church (ABCUSA) in Montclair, NJ. I was the token white in a sea of 1000 black faces each Sunday. The preacher, one Marvin McMickle, would never, in a thousand years, have entertained the notion that homosexual behavior was good and right in the eyes of God for blacks or whites. Not then, not now.

Black Christians have a strong sense of social justice that can teach us whites many lessons, but they have never ever believed you can dilute or change the way humans behave sexually. It is not in their spiritual DNA.

Yes, there are black gays (look at the fatherhood problem amongst blacks in the US), but in all, you would be hard pressed to find a single Black pastor who would stand up and say sodomy was approved by God.

The raw truth is that there's been a hijacking of the civil rights movement by the radical gay movement. This gained momentum after California's Proposition 8 in 2008.

The National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), a faith-based coalition of 34,000 churches comprised of 15 denominations and 15.7 million African-Americans, broke fellowship with Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) following its recent vote to approve same-sex marriage.

The Rev. Anthony Evans, NBCI President roared, "NBCI and its membership base are simply standing on the Word of God within the mind of Christ. We urge our brother and sisters of the PCUSA to repent and be restored to fellowship."

"PCUSA's manipulation represents a universal sin against the entire church and its members. With this action, PCUSA can no longer base its teachings on 2,000 years of Christian scripture and tradition, and call itself a Christian entity in the body of Christ. It has forsaken its right by this single wrong act. The Apostle Paul warns us about this when he declared in Galatians 1:8 that there are those who will preach another gospel."

Black Christians have repeatedly said "don't confuse your sin with our skin." Apparently Bishop Curry thinks you can.

The Rev. Evans went on to say, "No church has the right to change the Word of God. By voting to redefine marriage PCUSA automatically forfeits Christ's saving grace. There is always redemption in the body of Christ through confession of faith and adhering to Holy Scripture." Presiding Bishop Curry clearly doesn't believe that.

The late Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, Frank Turner, was black, and in all the years I listened to him he never talked about any overt act of racism that he experienced at the hands of fellow Episcopalians. The Rev. Paul Washington, a black activist clergyman in Philadelphia who supported women's ordination 25 years ago, experienced racism, but that was outside the church, not from within it. The black clergyman who jumped off a bridge to his death in Philadelphia did so not because of racism, but because he was depressed at the way the diocese and the whole Episcopal Church was going and felt he could not change it.

The former Bishop of Southern Ohio, the Rt. Rev. Herbert Thompson, Jr., is black, and almost became Presiding Bishop but lost by only three votes. He never said that his loss to Frank Griswold was a racist act by the House of Bishops. No one would have believed him had he said it. He just lost and the Episcopal Church is the poorer for it. Nor have I read, in recent years, any official statement emanating from the eight other black bishops in the HOB, condemning particular acts of racism by any other bishop, cleric or layperson in TEC.

The former Bishop of New Jersey, Jo Mo Doss--a BIG card-carrying liberal--was accused of racism by the Black Caucus of priests in his diocese before being thrown out with a golden parachute worth over $1.5 million dollars. Hyper-revisionist Bishop John Shelby Spong, Diocese of Newark, was called an "intellectual racist" by Bishop Peter John Lee of South Africa for his comments at Lambeth about African Christians. Spong said that the African blacks had "moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity," even though more black bishops have PhDs in Nigeria than the US and Canada put together. (Spong has no PhD.) Perhaps it has a certain je ne sais quoi. No ordinary racist is he. Mr. Spong's racism comes with 15 books and a total denial of historic Christianity. Spong never quite recovered from his anti-African barbs at Lambeth, even though the African bishops forgave him.

What if an Asian had stood up in Canterbury and said that Asian culture supported homosexuality? Would we say he is an uninformed bigot? What we saw in Canterbury was nothing more than cultural imperialism.

A second truth is that while Global South Anglicans usually focus on economic development, within Western (Episcopal) companion dioceses in the third world economic assistance is provided with the not so subtle message that the Global South gets Western aid if their theological underpinnings come from the West. With the trip switch, you can have aid if you buy into Western pansexual views.

All that has reversed. It is the Global South that is rebuking the sexually decadent Western Church for its abandonment of Scripture on sexuality. Although TEC has handed out money and goodies to needy Africans, these gifts have come with an iron fist in a velvet glove approach. No more.

Western Anglicans have long thought they could walk all over the Global South, but now all that has changed. The Africans won't be walked over or talked down to any more. Those days have gone.

As one writer observed, "African Anglicans who oppose changing the Communion's teaching on sexuality may not know that their views violate a central tenet of progressive thought. Their opposition challenges what appears to be the canonical interpretation of the black experience in the Episcopal Church in the United States. This definition unites the experiences of the descendants of the slaves, women, those stigmatized for their sexual orientation, and now Muslims into a single narrative of oppression and freedom. The primary work of the Church in our day is to locate and free those who are oppressed in the name of love and acceptance."

In Canterbury, godly Global South Anglicans did not buy the slavery/sexuality argument and instead made it abundantly clear that sodomy is a salvation issue and that the eternal state of those who practice it could result in everlasting damnation. They read their Bibles, but most Episcopalians are biblically illiterate. This is why Episcopalians can be so easily manipulated regarding sex. They hear nothing from their rectors about godly marriage between a man and a woman. When the culture says gay marriage is okay they can't wait to fall all over themselves because Louie and Ernest, Robinson and Russell, say so.

Blaming the Africans is little more than cultural imperialism and the meeting of the Primates confirmed that. The vast majority of the primates listened to what the Spirit had to say and what the Bible teaches, but it was Michael Curry who came up short. The Global South read the Bible faithfully and obey its teachings. They will no longer allow aid to be used coercively.

When he returned home, GAFCON chairman and Kenyan Primate Eliud Wabukala said this: "For too long the integrity of our family of Churches has been undermined by those provinces that have permitted the blessing of same-sex unions and ordained those in such relationships. Last year, the problem was made even worse by the decision of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States (TEC) to change its Marriage Canon to allow same sex 'marriage'."

An overwhelming majority of the Primates present voted that TEC should be excluded from all meetings that represent the Anglican Communion and that it should be suspended from internal decision-making bodies, initially for three years, Wabukala said.

He then took a swipe at the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, a white man, and ripped him one saying, "Flagrant violation of biblical teaching has been punished and this meeting has shown that the rebuilding of the Communion is not just a matter for the Archbishop of Canterbury, but a concern for every member Church.

"Through GAFCON, the Anglican Church of Kenya is a powerful force for renewal and restoring the Bible to the center of the Communion's life. May God strengthen us to continue this good work and may Jesus be exalted in his Church as our only Lord and Savior."

And that's telling black Curry and white Welby that they don't own the store any more. A new day has dawned. The future of the Anglican Communion, if there is one, lies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, not in a declining West.

What Martin Luther King actually thought about homosexuality. Read it here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/mlk-homosexuality-a-problem-with-a-solution

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