Bishop Ingham's Ignorance and Idiocy

[David Virtue]

BISHOP INGHAM'S IGNORANCE AND IDIOCY

NEWS ITEM. Canadian bishop says well-orchestrated, well-financed political
lobby of American conservative bishops is buying overseas clergy.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue

The Bishop of New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada Michael C. Ingham
has, once again, raised the 'chicken dinner' issue where, he alleges, African
bishops were bought off to vote against homosexuality at Lambeth by a group
of well-orchestrated, well-heeled American Evangelical Episcopal bishops.

This is not only a lie it is racist as well.

I was there. I attended all two of these chicken dinners and not more than a
dozen African bishops showed up. (There were over 220 African bishops at
Lambeth). On one occasion the inscrutable Archbishop of Singapore, Moses Tay
appeared and said absolutely nothing. He positively refused to speak to the
media (and all of us present were conservative and sympathetic) about
anything relating to Lambeth at the buffet-styled dinner.

And Canon Bill Atwood, president of EKKLESIA, hosted this particular dinner.

Ingham's shameless chicken dinner charges are a sign of desperation. This
revisionist bishop along with his boss Michael Geoffrey Peers, the Canadian
primate and a covey of American revisionist bishops are trying once again to
spin the Lambeth resolution on human sexuality to make African bishops look
like theological nincompoops.

They are not. The truth is this.

The African bishops (excluding South Africa) are, to a man, orthodox and
evangelical and they never had any intention of voting in favor of homosexual
behavior, not then, not now, not ever. Ditto for the bishops of India,
Pakistan and South East Asia.

It is the crassest theological idiocy to believe that Africans, most of whom
have received their undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate theological
training in the West would ever succumb to a theological change of heart for
a few lousy chicken dinners and alleged payoffs by certain American
Evangelical bishops.

Here are men who have suffered for their faith. Some have lost family members
(a Ugandan Bishop I know lost his wife in a land mine disaster) and friends
in tribal wars. Many live on the edge of personal poverty, their
congregations own no buildings, their populations are being wiped out by
civil and tribal wars and an AIDS pandemic, and they are going to sell their
immortal souls for chicken?
Judas Iscariot did better with 30 pieces of silver for his betrayal, a far
larger sum by today's standards than all the chicken dinners put on at
Lambeth. And he had abandoned his faith in the living Lord and hung himself.

It is insulting, ignorant and idiotic for Bishop Ingham, who can't stand
losing, that he would say such things.

The only other group trying to spin the sexuality resolution are American
Episcopal homosexualists, who have spent the last two years whining, braying
and crying on Frank Griswold's shoulder, complaining about how theologically
narrow and unscientific Third World bishops are about sexual matters. Newark
Bishop John Spong still opines about "pre-Copernican Third World bishops".

One bishop, Washington Right Reverend Ronald Haines even threatened to
withhold funds to African bishops because they (the African bishops) did not
roll over and play ball on Western desires to affirm homosexuality. They just
don't get it, he says. And this is a bishop whose own son did a gay man
sodomize, and who later became an Episcopal priest! You've got to wonder
where the brains of some of these revisionist bishops are parked. And Bishop
Ingham wants to blame it on American conservatives, who, he says, "have
managed to export their anxiety about gays and lesbians."

Do American revisionist bishops and Ingham honestly think that men who have
nothing to gain financially being Christians (except their eternal salvation)
would, now in their 60s, having lived a lifetime on the economic edge,
suddenly come to England and say "yes, buy me off with chicken dinners!!!"

What fools do you think these men are?

No, the real fools are some American, Canadian, NZ and Australian bishops who
have long ago lost their "first love," Jesus Christ, and have sold their
souls for a mess of post-modernist, reductionist theological thinking that is
bankrupting their own dioceses just as the Church is growing by leaps and
bounds in Africa and Asia.

Is it any wonder the Anglican Communion is more Black than White that the
church is growing fast in Africa while its counterpart is dying in the West.

Is it any wonder "irregular" consecrations are occurring as a sign of the
desperation of orthodox and evangelical bishops in the U.S. to salvage
something from the moral and theological cesspool that is ECUSA.

No, Bishop Ingham you are wrong, dead wrong. African bishops were not bought
off by chicken dinners nor were American bishops out to stir anti-gay
sentiment at Lambeth. You have been bought off and seduced by a morally
bankrupt culture, and in your desire to do handstands to meet the demands of
Generations X and Y you have compromised the gospel to your emptying churches
and dying dioceses. In your efforts to accommodate the message to the present
generation you have abandoned the gospel altogether. You have no Good News,
you have nothing, and perhaps the best of it is, (with emptying pews) no one
is listening to you anymore.

END

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