Archbishop Criticizes Anglican Church Focus

The worldwide Anglican Communion has become so obsessed with sexuality that it has ignored the more pressing issues of poverty, AIDS and spreading the gospel, the Anglican archbishop of South Africa said.

Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane said it is irresponsible for conservative church leaders -- including other African bishops -- to criticize Anglicans in Vancouver for allowing same-sex unions, or for Episcopalians in the United States to elect the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.

Ndungane said in a June 26 statement that he agreed with the leader of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, “that we dare not become preoccupied with the sexuality issue. We must focus on mission. We are faced with matters of life and death.”

Meanwhile, the primate of the Anglican church in Nigeria, which with 18 million members is the largest Anglican church in the world, denounced the Episcopal Church as spiritually bankrupt because of Robinson’s election.

Archbishop Peter Akinola, the Nigerian primate, said his church must become financially independent so that it no longer has to rely on “handouts from the rich churches of the Western world.”

“Our boldness in condemning the spiritual bankruptcy of these churches must be matched by our refusal to receive financial help from them,” Akinola said in a June 21 “encyclical.”

And in Vancouver, Bishop Michael Ingham called on Canadian Anglicans to keep donating money to third-world Anglican churches, despite their leaders’ denunciations of him for approving same-sex blessings.

The Anglican Communion is made of 38 autonomous churches. The archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual head of the global body but holds no authority over individual churches.