ACNA warned on Islam threat: CEN 7.03.09 p 5.

The Rev Canon Julian Dobbs

Delegates to the 2009 ACNA convocation in Bedford, Texas last week were warned not to be lulled into complacency by the siren song dialogue with “moderate Islam.”

Canon Julian Dobbs, the canon missioner for the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) told the June 22-25 meeting that “so-called moderate Islam” was a myth.

The American variety of “moderate Islam” was “no more moderate than the militant Islam of Saudi Arabia or Indonesia,” Canon Dobbs said. Quoting the founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), he explained that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant.”

“Don’t be misled or misguided, the peace Islam offers is not the peace of sitting around the camp fire singing [songs]. Islam’s peace is the implementation of Sharia Law and the global submission to Islamic ideology,” he argued.

Canon Dobbs stated that in the West, a “resurgent Islam” sought to “infiltrate the Church and win the loyalty and trust of large numbers of church-goers.” Some had responded by conversion, he said, “attracted by the apparent order and simplicity of the Islamic faith.”

However, “Under Islamic sharia law, women are oppressed, sometimes beaten and abused. Converts to Christianity and other faith are severely persecuted.” Canon Dobbs urged the delegates to support the work of the Barnabas Fund, asking them to pressure the government to speak out against Islamic apostasy laws.

He added that “a lonely and yet courageous voice” calling the Church to arms to the threat of “resurgent Islam” had been the Primate of Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola. Canon Dobbs urged the ACNA to head Archbishop Akinola’s words: “The Christian Church must wake up to its prophetic role and remind all that it has a message that will change the world.”

Claiming the full backing of Archbishop Duncan of the ACNA, Canon Dobbs urged the delegates not to let “polite multi-faith conversations” become a substitute for the “proclamation of the historic Christian message.”

Muslims were in “many ways just like us,” searching for the divine. The opportunities for the evangelization of Muslims had never been greater he said, and it was imperative for the church to reach out to them, as “God’s love was not meant to exclude a fifth of the world’s population who are Muslim.”

At this “juncture in history” more Muslims were “coming to faith in Jesus Christ than at any other time in history of the Christian Church,” Canon Dobbs said. He urged the ACNA to “engage, educate and faithfully proclaim the gospel to all the world, including the world of Islam.”