The Zimbabwe Independent – The Leading Business Weekly Newspaper
I THINK recent developments at the Anglican Cathedral and Greendale parish clearly show the difference between Bishop Nolbert Kunonga and Bishop Sebastian Bakare: one is a thug and the other a true spiritual leader.The public needs to know that the hype about homosexuality is real hypocrisy and opportunism on the part of Kunonga. Before he clutched onto this he had suggested as an agenda item to the provincial secretary that the Province of Central Africa should be dissolved as a sign of respect to Archbishop Bernard Malango who was retiring at the end of September 2007.
All other provincial bishops laughed at his reasoning. It was after this that he came up with homosexuality as the basis of breaking away.
I’ve been collecting links to stories about Bishop Kunonga for about a year now… but this opinion piece from the Zimbabwe Independent deserved a bit more notice. I saw it at Episcope along with another article from the same source about Kunonga’s rather scandalously cozy relationship with Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party.
Right, I blog about gay clergy and gay marriage and gay laity issues a lot as they relate to the Episcopal Church. Why? I’m not gay, though I’m proud to say that in college I was named an honorary dyke (those words exactly) by a large circle of friends I had in Eugene who were lesbians. Since then, I’ve found that on my spiritual journey, which led me to the Episcopal Church, there were gay people at key waypoints.
So I keep an eye on the issues, and this led me to start keeping an eye on the “Bad Bishop of Harare.”
In some ways, Kunonga strikes me as a less adroit version of Bishop Akinola of Nigeria… one who hasn’t been briefed with the game plan and the strategery, although he gets the gist: attack the gays, label critics as Satanists, kick out clergy and congregations who don’t toe the line, and grab the goodies.
And in some ways, Kunonga and Akinola and some of the other “province poaching” bishops in Africa remind me of some of our own dissatisfied and unhappy conservative bishops, and most especially of Bishop Schofield, self-declared Bishop of San Joaquin of the Southern Cone (and ex-bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin), who seemed to be confused about whether he could wear both pointy hats recently.
It’s refreshing to see some news from an African source laying out the facts as they are seen there; the literalists who condemn homosexuality on Biblical grounds claim that great numbers of disapproving African Anglicans demand that the US church snap out of it and get back into exclusionary lockstep with the rest of the Communion.
Well, there’ve been several stories lately that have pointed out that in Zimbabwe (and also Nigeria) great numbers of Africans (not just Anglicans) simply want to go to church without armed thugs preventing them from entering, or people in purple shirts taking the keys to the parish car, or disrupting their Sunday worship. They’re worried about rampant hyper-inflation, not “Adam and Steve.” That whole argument is revealed as hypocritical and opportunistic by this telling little detail; the other bishops laughed at him when he suggested a self-aggrandizing reorg, so he attacked “the gays” instead.
Bishop Kunonga is an example of “how not to Bishop.” And too many of the conservative clergy and bishops seem to be using the same strategery to improve their status in the Anglican world – by getting more pointy hats and provinces of their own. I wish they’d realize how bald-faced obvious a ploy it is. It’s embarassing.
