Akinola attacks inclusiveness: CEN 5.30.08 p 8.

Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.

The Archbishop of Nigeria has denounced “multiculturalism” and “inclusiveness” as tenets of a false gospel that have sapped the missionary imperative of the Church.

In his commencement address to the Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry outside of Pittsburgh on May 17, Archbishop Akinola warned the new graduates from the Episcopal Church’s sole remaining Evangelical theological college that the world outside their seminary’s walls would not be welcoming.

“Here, you live in a community of faith. But out there, secularisation of society has led to the consignment of the Christian faith and practice to the background. What is left of the Church is infested by such new phenomena as ‘inclusiveness’ here in the USA, and in the UK we hear of multiculturalism,” the Nigerian primate said.

These worldviews were a form of “political correctness” that sought to “accommodate all shades of opinion and practice in the church.”

However, the “consequences” of multiculturalism were “grave. We end up with what looks like Church but in reality is not.”

“The authority of Scripture is put to doubt and denied. The uniqueness and Lordship of Jesus the Christ is jettisoned and our Lord is categorised as no more than one of the great men of his time. The fatherhood of God is questioned and a new vocabulary of father/mother introduced to please those of feminist persuasion. We learn that some even deny the bodily resurrection of Christ. When you take away these cardinal teachings and beliefs of the church, what is left is certainly not the church of Jesus Christ called out of the world but stationed in the world to bring the erring world to God,” he said.

The situation for Anglicanism in the West was grim. The church was full of “heretics and apostates” and was “declining so fast” that its “cathedrals are becoming mere tourist attractions. Of the Episcopal Church’s “two hundred bishops, I doubt if you can count on forty bible believing orthodox leaders,” he said.

The situation in Europe was as the continent had “gone apostate,” leaving a “huge religious vacuum which is now being aggressively filled by Islam.”

Archbishop Akinola called upon the new clergy to rise up and “overthrow all the ungodliness and apostasy we see in our Church and society” and challenge the “extreme revisionist liberalism of the Episcopal Church.”

He denied the disputes dividing the Anglican Communion were manifestations of power politics, but were salvation issues. For “to deny the authority of the Bible in matters of faith and conduct is to remove the ground from the feet of theology,” he said, and would lead to damnation.