Derek the Anglican makes a very good point about the profound cultural distance between the western Church and the ongoing experience of the African Church:

“My sole personal experience of African Anglicanism came in the person of one of my preaching students. He was already a priest in the Nigerian church, in the US to improve his theological training. Passionate, intelligent, he was an amazing preacher; my class learned a great deal from hearing and responding to his sermons. His best sermon–I forget the text–was on the connection between the call of the Gospel and the rule of law. This took most of the class by surprise. Whenever Gospel and law are connected in American preaching it tends to be about legalism or attempts of one political part or the other to make a selective reading of a text. Not in this case. He wasn’t pushing a party agenda–he was pleading for law. He explained a bit about the African context at the conclusion of the sermon. We in the US take the rule of law for granted. He couldn’t. Not where he was from. Pleading for the rule of law was essential for him because it was so often denied in the political culture he was from.”

Derek goes on to flesh this out and uses the anecdote to help understand some of what is happening in Zimbabwe and the support the Anglican Bishops there have recently given to Robert Mugabe. Derek points out specifically the danger we all have in thinking we understand how other people are using and understanding the words they choose to express themselves.

Read the rest here: Anglicans & Africa

(Via haligweorc.)