Uganda’s Archbishop Snubs US Meeting: CEN 7.19.07 p 7.

The Archbishop of Uganda will not attend the September meeting between the Primates Standing Committee and the US House of Bishops. In an article published in the American journal First Things, Archbishop Henry Orombi stated the American church must give a clear response to the Primates’ call for reform.

“It is my conviction that our Dar es Salaam communiqué did not envision interference in the American House of Bishops while they are considering our requests,” he wrote.

“For me to violate our hard-won agreement in Dar es Salaam would be another case of undermining our instruments of communion. My decision to uphold our Dar es Salaam communiqué is intended to strengthen our instruments of communion so we will be able to mature into an even more effective global communion,” Archbishop Orombi stated.

He reiterated the stand taken by the Ugandan bishops in December that they would “definitely not attend any Lambeth Conference to which the violators of the Lambeth Resolution [1.10] are also invited as participants or observers.” If the “present invitations” to Lambeth 2008 stand, “I do not expect the Ugandan bishops to attend,” he said.

Aides to the Archbishop stated Dr. Rowan Williams also overstepped his authority by accepting the American invitation on behalf of the primates standing committee without first having consulting with them.

The Ugandan threat to boycott Lambeth was not a withdrawal “from the instruments of communion” but a mark of their “critical importance,” he said. The Lambeth Conferences were “greatly diminished when the persistent violators of its resolutions are invited. If our resolutions as a council of bishops do not have moral authority among ourselves, how can we expect our statements on world affairs to carry weight in the world’s forums?”, he asked.

“The Church of Uganda takes its Anglican identity and the future prospects of the global Anglican Communion very seriously. Our thoughtfulness in how we participate in the instruments of communion reflects our fundamental loyalty to our Anglican heritage,” Archbishop Orombi said.

This heritage he said was to an evangelical faith. Biblically driven, it sees Scripture as the Word of God written and the ultimate authority for faith and conduct. The three “pillars” or marks of the Church had been its experience of martyrs, revival and the historic episcopate.

From its first missionary English bishop James Hannington, to the 26 Buganda youths killed for the profession of faith and refusal to become homosexual objects for the lust of their king in 1886, to the Feb 1977 murder of Archbishop Janani Luwum at the hands of Idi Amin, martyrs have been a model and on-going witness for the church.

The Church had also been transformed by a revival that begin in 1935, and continues to animate Anglicanism, contributing to a passion for evangelism and personal holiness, while bishops have served as apostolic witnesses to an unchanging faith. The three pillars had led to the growth of the Ugandan Church in recent years, making it the second largest in the Communion.

The “long season of British hegemony” in the Anglican Communion was at an end, Archbishop Orombi stated. It will be “the younger churches of Anglican Christianity” who will “shape what it means to be Anglican” in the coming years, he said.