An open letter to the members of the provincial synod of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa meeting in Benoni, Gauteng, from September 27 to October 1
Dear sisters and brothers; bishops, laity and fellow clergy – Anglicans of southern Africa
I write to urge you to vote in favour of Motion 15 that will come before you in the next days. The motion, as you know, calls for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa to make provision for the blessing of same-sex marriages in selected dioceses across the southern tip of Africa. It goes further to empower bishops to reach out and provide other ministries of welcome and inclusivity to those who identify as LGBTI.
Motion 15 seeks to ensure that the Anglican Church of Southern Africa addresses one of the most urgent matters of our time – that of ensuring that people of differing sexual preferences, especially those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and intersex and/or queer, know that in God’s family, all are welcome, none are excluded; that the boundaries and barriers that divide humankind don’t exist in the mind, the heart and plan of God; and that the church is called to model this loving inclusivity in every way.
Motion 15 is a tiny and very modest reflection of the great and unstoppable unfolding revelation of God’s love. God is love. We all believe this. This love is both just and inclusive. It is God’s gift to the world, and God is spreading it across the face of the universe just as the sun rises and spreads its light across the world at dawn – a process that started 14 billion years ago at what we Christians refer to as "the beginning" and that will come to fulfilment in Christ, in the end, in the great Revelation when "everything will be made new or whole".
In the beginning, God – in the end, God and in the middle, love revealing itself in daily miracles of renewal and inclusivity. God, the alpha and omega, revealing God’s desire and intention to break down every barrier that divides, to overcome every division that exists and to envelop, embrace and renew every aspect of life.
This love is patient, it is kind… It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking… It keeps no record of wrongs. It rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. This love never fails (1 Corinthians).
This love has been breaking down divisions throughout history – building a world (a universe, a cosmos) in which everything can be free and fulfil its design and purpose. This love is a liberating love, breaking down the walls of separation, building a family united in and integrated with all of creation.
This love is unstoppable, rolling through history, embracing all in its way, bringing life and hope and wholeness. It restores and rebuilds, it recreates and refreshes. It seeks us and seeks our co-operation and camaraderie in its historic work.
Over the years of our recent history, we can see its work. How, notwithstanding the years of suffering and unexplainable pain, this love overcame the agony of slavery – breaking down a system of oppression that destroyed the lives of millions.
Even today, as the vestiges of slavery still ensnare women and children, we have declared (or has love declared it through us?) that this evil system has no place within the human family. Though it took over a hundred years, the church’s voice was eventually heard as Christians spoke out against this pernicious evil. In Christ, we have declared (with St Paul) that there is no slave or free – all are one, all are born to be free.
And this love, not without years of struggle and at great cost, is overcoming the evil of racism. Slowly (and too slowly, we cry) the walls of systemic racism are being demolished. Love knows no difference between the peoples of humankind. Love sees race as the shallow construct that it is and pushes against the walls of race, ethnicity, culture and traditions that divide and diminish the smallest person in the most distant corner of the universe.
Love liberates and is unstoppable. Once again, eventually and though initially complicit in the spread of racist ideology, the church’s voice joined and gave form to love’s own voice in proclaiming that racism has no place in the family of God.
So too are we witnessing the great undoing, the emphatic but as yet incomplete ending of gender discrimination and the oppression of women. Love, in its empowering embrace, is freeing us from stereotypes, from roles and structures that hold women in positions of repressive servanthood.
While this struggle still goes on around us and our hearts ache for the day when all will be free, at least in our church, love has begun to have its way and enabled us to make it clear that gender discrimination has no place in ministry, and that in Christ, there is no male or female – but all are a new creation, equal and free.
There are other walls of division against which love is pushing in its revolutionary march. Environmental oppression, the exclusion of those with special needs, the patriarchy, class division (which is the root of poverty) are all walls that must and will come tumbling down. Each, like apartheid, will have its Kairos moment and collapse, leaving a united and free human family enabled to share a sustainable world.
And that’s why Motion 15 is so important, today, at this synod, in this year, in southern Africa. At this synod, dear sisters and brothers, you have the chance to co-operate with love in its liberating work – to free us from yet another bondage, which is the discrimination against those who, as members of the LGBTI community, seek to love each other in monogamous and covenanted unions.
Already we have heard love’s call that to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or intersex is not a sin and is not a status that should bar anyone from enjoying the full measure of love’s gifts. In the church, we celebrate this by offering baptism to all, which is the rite of full membership in the family of God.
Of course, there are those in our midst whose countries and communities continue to pronounce homosexuality to be evil, to be outlawed. Let us as Anglicans send a clear message to all the world and certainly to our sisters and brothers throughout southern Africa that to be one who identifies as LGBTI is not a sin to be repented, not an aberration to be denounced, not a mistake to be corrected, but an expression of love’s mysterious and wonderful diversity in which everything is a gift from the very Source of Love.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here! Let us celebrate and rejoice and proclaim that love always perseveres, never fails; that this is love’s world and we, love’s people, embrace love’s invitation to co-create love in all the world.
God bless you all at synod in these important deliberations.
Yours in Christ
l The Reverend Canon Ahrends is rector of The Parish of St Margaret, Parow, and the Canon Missioner: The Diocese of Saldanha Bay