Thursday, December 01, 2005
Signs of Hope? - The First Black Archbishop in England
Lest I spend today only being negative, here is a truly positive story. The Church of England yesterday coronated its first black archbishop to the #2 spot in the entire heirarchy.
Today’s Daily Telegraph has a great story on this:
Archbishop of York is enthroned to the sound of African drums http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=LM2IOAL3K4F41QFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2005/12/01/nbish01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/01/ixhome.html
I do not know much about Bishop Sentamu, but any man who fought against Idi Amin cannot be all bad. I can do without the quote from Che Guvera, who was really just a brutal thug (even a broken clock is right twice a day). But how about this one:
“It’s a scandal of the Church in England that in the past decades it has tried everything except to stick to Jesus’s plan for the world,” he said.
I am not one who sees that the CoE or indeed Christianity in Europe is dead and must remain dead. It is most certainly on life support, and if things continue as they are then indeed death is the only possible outcome. But there are a lot of creative things happening throughout the United Kingdom and Europe. Europe underwent a true catacylsm first in 1914-1918 and then again in 1939-1945. The Church, preaching as it often did a form of cultural accomodation and a message of salvation that was solely ethereal in nature. Add to this having nothing of meaning to say as nationalism, racism and classicism became the true idealogy of the continent, and you have a church that has been rejected because it truly is meaningless.
That does not have to remain the case. In my frequent trips to the UK I see a church that is beginning to operate both cross culturally and counter culturally. I see the Gospel exiting the cathedral and reentering society. The question is can it overcome the inocculation that the population received from the church-state connection. I have hopes that maybe this new Archbishop is one positive step in that direction.
