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New Partnership Models Give Hope to a Divided Communion

By John Bryson Chane

 

In January 2004, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington signed a partnership agreement with the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (CPSA), an Anglican province consisting of Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland.

This new partnership grew out of initial talks with the Archbishop of Capetown, the Most Rev. Njongonkulu Ndungane, which began in May 2002, and were initiated by the Rev. Canon Ted Karpf. At that time Ted was serving as the HIV/AIDS coordinator for the CPSA. The initial talks grew into a pilgrimage to Cape Town in December of 2002 involving 11 members of the Diocese of Washington. That pilgrimage changed my life, as it did the lives of all who traveled with me.

Prior to the signing of the partnership at our diocesan convention in January, the archbishop and I led a delegation of officials from his province and our diocese in a weeklong series of meetings with senior officials in the U. S. government and world financial institutions. Those in our delegation included: Nema Aluku, HIV/AIDS coordinator for the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa (CAPA); the Rev. Canon Colin Jones, current HIV/AIDS coordinator for CPSA; and the Rt. Rev. David Beetge, CPSA provincial dean and Bishop of Highveld.

We met with U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy Thompson; Ambassador Randall Tobias, coordinator for President Bush's Global Aids Initiative; Gaddi H. Vasquez, director of the Peace Corps; Charles R. Snyder, Secretary of State for African Affairs for the U.S. State Department; Robert J. Polito, HHS's coordinator of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and Michael A. Magan, who fills the same role for USAID; Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane, director of the African Department of the International Monetary Fund; James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank; and Dr. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Advisor.

The purpose of these meetings was to familiarize government officials with CPSA's and CAPA's response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, a response that includes programs in treatment, education and the non-institutionalization of orphans.

Estimates are that three out of every four persons living with HIV/AIDS reside in sub-Saharan Africa, a staggering total of 29.4 million people. Approximately 3.5 million new infections occurred last year and nearly 3 million Africans succumb to the HIV/AIDS virus annually. Many of those deaths and new infections were among young people. 10 million young people between the ages of 15-24 have been infected and almost 2.5 million children under the age of 15 are living with HIV/AIDS. Currently there are an estimated 11 million AIDS orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Related to HIV/AIDS is the curse of famine. Half of the population of Zimbabwe is in need of emergency food aid. In Lesotho the figure is 30 percent, in Malawi 29 percent, in Zambia 26 percent, and in Swaziland 24 percent.

Between 40 and 50 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans live on less than $1.00 per day and one-third of the population suffers from malnutrition.

The infant mortality rate in Africa is the highest in the world at 93 deaths for every 1000. Surely Jesus would weep over the plight of the people of Africa, just as we might be moved to tears – or, better yet, to action – by the knowledge that two billion people on our planet live on less than $2.00 per day, including one billion who live on less than $1.00 per day.

Conversations with African bishops. . . in September 2003 made it clear to me that the partnership between CPSA and the Diocese of Washington is a much needed sign of the healing that must now begin between our Anglican province, the Episcopal Church in the United States, and the Anglican provinces in Africa.

Conversations with African bishops that I met while participating in the CAPA conference in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2003 made it clear to me that the partnership between CPSA and the Diocese of Washington is a much needed sign of the healing that must now begin between our Anglican province, the Episcopal Church in the United States, and the Anglican provinces in Africa.

It is essential that following the decisions of General Convention in Minneapolis last summer, we work with renewed vigor to end our internal struggles and devote our energies and resources to alleviating the destruction of God's people through HIV/AIDS and related diseases. We must be aggressive in bringing to an end the economic inequality and injustices that scar the face of the global community. Not to do so is to ignore the teachings of Jesus Christ and to demean his sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary. It is to ignore the reality of the resurrection and to dismiss the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church.

The partnership between Washington and the CPSA will involve mutual pilgrimages and work on a number of issues on which the church in southern Africa has requested our help. These include: justice and empowerment issues; educational issues, and the prevention of domestic violence and child abuse. We will continue to work within the U.S. government and world financial institutions to plead the case for the Province of Southern Africa and the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa. The partnership exists as a reminder that although we may be in disagreement over issues of human sexuality we can in fact work with one another because even in our differences we are still all members of the same Body of Christ.

The partnership will bring to our diocese one of the many great gifts of the African Church; its unshakeable faith in God's saving grace and healing. One day, about an hours drive east of Cape Town, I came upon a small village of about 100 people who were living in squalor, filth, poverty and conditions that were unacceptable by any decent human standard.   Most of the villagers were either HIV/AIDS positive or dying from TB. Most were suffering from the debilitating effects water-born diseases. As an elderly Anglican priest led us from the village after our visit, I said to him; “Father, how can you work under these conditions and how is your faith so unshakeable when you deal with such misery and death every day?” He said; “Bishop Chane, don't feel sorry for us. God has been very good to us. We have faith that God will hear our cries and eventually heal us. After all we survived apartheid, and we know that we can survive AIDS and this horrible poverty as well. We have great faith that God will not leave us alone.”

Later that day, I painfully reflected on the present struggles in the Episcopal Church that consume so much of our energy as we argue and fight with one another, too often in disrespectful and destructive ways. We fight over who has been given the divine wisdom of how to read and interpret correctly God's Holy Word. We fight over the current place of gay, lesbian and transgender persons in our life as if they were sick with some illness that must be avoided at any cost. We are still fighting over the role and place of women in Holy Orders as if General Convention had not resolved that issue some years ago.

If we have been guilty of anything as a church these last few years, it has been our willingness to sacrifice our sense of who we are as the indispensable and equally valued parts of Christ's Body. We are guilty of listening to the shrillness of our own voices rather than the voice of a loving God who must weep at our inability to live with our differences.

We are willing to “drop our gloves” at a moments notice if we feel that our theology is threatened by someone else's theological opinion and we do so in the name of Christ and the Holy Catholic Church. We have become so absorbed with our own self-righteousness, that we have lost our connection to anything larger than our own self-interest. If we have been guilty of anything as a church these last few years, it has been our willingness to sacrifice our sense of who we are as the indispensable and equally valued parts of Christ's Body. We are guilty of listening to the shrillness of our own voices rather than the voice of a loving God who must weep at our inability to live with our differences. Our warring ways have made it difficult to mobilize our resources to heal the sick, care for the dying, work for justice, respect the dignity of every human being, and call others to join us in a new missionary effort to minister to all who have been created in the image of God.

The new partnership between the Diocese of Washington and the Anglican Province of Southern Africa will strive to show the larger Anglican Communion that it is possible to work through our significant cultural, biblical and theological differences as equal members of Christ's Body for the common good at a time when such alliances must be forged for the sake of the future of the human race and the global community.


The Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane is the Episcopal Bishop of Washington (DC), and also serves as dean of the Washington National Cathedral . He is a member of the board of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company ( The Witness ) and his office may be reached by email at lburpee@edow.org.

 

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