Posted on 08/13/2005 8:09:56 AM PDT by sionnsar
[All, CT's requirement for excerpting, and FR's excerpting rules, don't allow me to provide enough to give you any sense of this excellent article. --sionnsar]
Philip Jenkins, in his groundbreaking The Next Christendom, wrote that a "global perspective should make us think carefully before asserting 'what Christians believe' or 'how the church is changing.' All too often [such statements] refer only to what that ever-shrinking remnant of Western Christians and Catholics believe. Such assertions are outrageous today. … The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning."
In the Anglican Communion, the third-largest Christian body in the world with more than 70 million adherents, there is no better representative of that shift than Nigerian Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola.
...
The archbishop of Canterbury still lives and works at Lambeth Palace in London, but the balance of moral authority has moved in the Anglican Communion. This year's meeting marked the first time, apart from the once-per-decade Lambeth Commission, that Global South primates began leading accordingly. If Jenkins is right, what's happening in the Anglican Communion foreshadows what may happen in other Christian bodies over the next few decades.
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(Excerpt) Read more at christianitytoday.com ...
Related Elsewhere:
Our full coverage of the battle in the Anglican Communion includes articles about Akinola:
'African Church Has Come of Age,' Say African Anglican Bishops | It now faces the dual threat of Western heresy and militant Islam. (Oct. 27, 2004)
Christian History Corner
The African Lion Roars in the Western Church | Anglican liberals are fretting, conservatives rejoicing, and all are scrambling to their history books: whence this new evangelical force on the world scene? (June 27, 2003)
The website of the Anglican Church of Nigeria has more information about Akinola.
Philip Jenkins wrote a profile of Akinola for The Atlantic.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams.
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