The average Anglican ( 45 million in the Global South, 5 million attenders in the Anglo-world) is under thirty, female, lives on two dollars a day, has three children, walks three kilometres for water a day, is related to someone with HIV/Aids and is evangelical. It is not the case that those who are promoting the gay agenda are the poor or underprivileged of western society. Surveys show that they are overrepresented in the upper middle class and upper income brackets and in powerful institutions such as government, the media and the universities.

There is a noble tradition of justice and care for the poor in the Anglican tradition and history. However, one area seems to be currently excluded from that care and respect for the poor. That is when their understanding of the Bible and Christian faith conflicts with those at the centres of ecclesiastical metropolitical power. So the tradition of justice and "bias to the poor" can continue, as long as the poor know their intellectual place, which is not in challenging the hegemony of the liberal establishment of money and power in the Anglican Communion which assumes that its way of framing the current debate is self-validating and above question.

Thus it is that the Archbishop of Nigeria is regularly demonised in the western press, including the Christian press, for daring to articulate his understanding of the biblical teaching on homosexuality. The leadership of the African primates is criticised as not being representative of their provinces, when as elected leaders they are probably more representative than any English Bishop or Archbishop. The orthodox position of the Anglican Churches in Africa on the matter is explained away as emanating from a different cultural background which has no universal implications, or from a less tutored theological position, or from the legacy of a conservative missionary past.

One of the principles of the Reformation was that the scriptures by the Holy Spirit's illumination are perspicuous for all Christian believers to study and interpret. In the current crisis we are seeing emerge a new tyranny of the scholars and an erosion of the priesthood of all believers.

The current crisis has been triggered by disagreements among the intellectual elites in the western Church. The Church in the two-thirds world is not party to them but is clear about its loyalty to the orthodox teaching of the Bible, not only as a result of Christian commitment, but also practical experience. They know that faithful monogamous heterosexual marriage is a central Christian teaching for society and a bedrock for addressing poverty. Anything that undermines that, undermines the health and welfare of both people and society. For this principled stance poor Anglicans are having to pay. They are refusing funds, especially from the US Church, which are tied to not opposing the onward march of the gay agenda. Thus for example help to orphans in Tanzania and theological education in the West Indies is under great financial pressure.

As the Global South makes clear its position, based on the Kigali Statement, at the Primates Meeting in Tanzania in February and in subsequent developments, watch to see whether those who urge the Christian commitment to justice actually listen and give respect to the way the poor of the earth receive Jesus' good news to the poor.

Published in Evangelicals Now, February 2007.
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