The future of Anglicanism lies with Africa, the Presiding Bishop of Jerusalem and the Middle East told graduates of Uganda Christian University last week.In a June 6 commencement address to the Anglican-affiliated university, the Most Rev. Mouneer Anis, Bishop of Egypt said Africa was once known as "the black continent. This term was used to describe not only the colour of our skin but also our difficult and painful context.”
Poverty, disease, war, tribalism, injustice and illiteracy are formidable challenges facing Africa today. Yet in the midst of these “sometimes fatal challenges” Christianity has flourished, growing from eight million Christians in 1900 to 335 million in 2000, “marking a shift in the centre of gravity of Christianity from the Global North to the Global South,” he said.
“Europeans and North Americans are cautiously realising that the future of Christianity lies far more to the South of the Equator than the North,” Dr. Anis said.
The Egyptian bishop urged Ugandans not to be satisfied with numerical growth. “It is my dream,” he said, “that the Church in Africa should shape the global Christian mind in the third Millennium as it did in the first one. Not only that, but that we should play a leading role in changing the face of Africa and in overcoming the threats and challenges that we face today”
The African church fathers, Dr. Anis said, naming Mark, Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, Augustine and Cyril, “shaped early Christian doctrine and exegesis of Scripture, and gave birth to worldwide monasticism and a tradition of Christian academic research.”
Africans must hold fast to this orthodox repository of faith, and resist the “false teachings” of the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and “liberal and revisionist teachings.”
Promises of “money and false hopes” will be used to tempt the African faithful, he warned, but it is “our responsibility to develop, spread and deepen our theological education” to combat these heresies.
“We should not allow what weakened the Church in the North to weaken ours in the South,” he said. “This is the spirit of individualism. Beware, it is infectious and it leads to divisions and disunity.”
Anglicans must therefore “make every effort to keep the unity of the Church in Africa. Its strength lies in its unity. Unity in essentials, diversity in non-essentials and charity in everything,” Dr Anis said.
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