If Church of Uganda Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba Mugalu is qualified for his job, he certainly knows the African proverb about Wakasanke (a small bird personified), who prays for a fight between two cocks to become fiercer and protracted. The kasanke is eyeing the plumage torn from the warring cocks to feather its nest. The canons who elected Dame Sarah Elisabeth Mullally to be the 106th Primate of All England and Metropolitan Bishop of the Province of Canterbury are a system mostly of men.
Being the first woman in that position in the Anglican Church’s 14 centuries of history is a far bigger deal than Mullally’s liberal views on human sexuality, although the latter, of course, has more sensational value, and a greater capacity to divide people. Naturally, Wakasanke’s kinsmen are watching. Some are even cheerleaders, overtly urging the critics of Bishop Mullally’s appointment to fight Canterbury.
It is not often that senior religious leaders in one Christian denomination advise the leaders in another Christian denomination how to resolve their theological and administrative differences. So, ordinarily, it would be considered indiscreet or audacious for leaders of a questionably defined Pentecostal group to vociferously advise Uganda’s Anglican Archbishop how he should proceed after the developments at Canterbury. But that is exactly what Pastors Joseph Serwadda and Andrew Lugoloobi did at their morning talk show on Impact FM last Sunday, a few days after Mullally’s appointment.
Archbishop Kaziimba and the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Gafcon), an outfit most identified with African bishops, were themselves perhaps hasty in responding to Mullally’s elevation, declaring that the Church of England had ‘relinquished its authority to lead’. The bishops correctly recognise that many Africans in and outside the Church are disgusted by same-sex relations. The question is whether to respond to Canterbury with the emotional intensity Kaziimba and Gafcon deploy to satisfy the home base, or to internalise the different cultural settings in which the Anglican Church has been established and over which Canterbury ceremonially presides but does not rule. It is a choice between populism and pragmatism.
Mullally’s elevation from outside the Oxbridge stock and her ideas on morality and spirituality reflect something of the zeitgeist, the tendency of thought in our times. African bishops can show off how holier than Canterbury’s their souls are, or they can commit themselves to finding points of contact and themes encouraging dialogue. When Pentecostals like Serwadda and Lugoloobi urge the Church of Uganda to change its constitution and extend Kaziimba’s reign, or to break all ties with Canterbury and set up something they called ‘reformed’ or ‘charismatic’ as they did on Sunday, they are not talking as allies, but as Wakasanke’s kinsmen.
The so-called reform or charismatic agenda returns Africans to neo-pagan spiritualism, with its emphasis on the power of ancestral spirits, fictitious demons, unintelligible jabbering (tongues), the concoctions of witchcraft and the magical acquisition of wealth. These things add nothing to the depth of Christianity in African minds. The Impact-FM talk show pastors secretly want Uganda’s Anglicanism to descend into the kind of anti-institutional anarchy and cutthroat personal rivalry plaguing Uganda’s Pentecostalism.
If you want, you can wake up tomorrow and build a Pentecostal church and call yourself a bishop even before you are qualified to be ordained a priest. The half-acre of land around your church building is your diocese. Your wife, of course, is the senior pastor serving immediately below you. End of hierarchy. Both of you will hold your positions for life. I greatly doubt whether Kaziimba deserves condemnation to that league.