See history in the making
by the Rev. Dr. Leslie P. Fairfield
The “Hope and a Future” Conference in Pittsburgh (November 10-12) promises to be one of those rare events where you can watch history unfold.
The Conference will showcase an historic alliance between the American evangelical mainstream and Anglicanism in the Global South. Speakers from each movement will include Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California and Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria.
Rick Warren was recently lauded by a feature article in The New Yorker magazine, not usually a fan of evangelical Christianity. Top American social critic Malcolm Gladwell (Blink and The Tipping Point) praised Warren for shaping a people-movement that can mobilize thousands of evangelical Christians for social ministries. Recently Saddleback Church deployed 9,200 people to gather and distribute two million pounds of food to homeless people in Orange County, California, over a forty-day period (The New Yorker, September 12, 2005, page 63).
Now Rick Warren has made a covenant with the nation of Rwanda, highlighted by the cover story in the current issue of Christianity Today magazine.
Touched by his wife Kay’s heartbroken concern for AIDS orphans, Warren has launched a historic experiment to test whether Christian compassion can heal a broken nation like Rwanda. Saddleback’s initiative aims to unite the American evangelical mainstream (of which Warren is a key leader) with Global South Christians, to extend God’s compassion to the least and lost.
Rwandan Anglicans are Warren’s principal allies on-site. The Christianity Today article features a photo of Warren embracing Bishop John Rucyahana (Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, ‘90) of Shyira, the region most devastated by the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s.
The “Hope and a Future” Conference will feature this global covenant dramatically. I believe that our identity and mission as orthodox American Anglicans lies in this historic alliance. Our institutional arrangements with the Episcopal Church will take whatever shape they may. The process will be painful. But let’s not get bogged down in that mess. It’s a choice between morass or mission. We need to make the mental shift now, and lean into our future. And our future lies in this mission-partnership with the American evangelical mainstream and the Anglican Churches of the Global South.
The “Hope and a Future” conference is our chance to get on board our future now. If you have not already registered at anglicanhope.org, I urge you to do it immediately. Clergy, bring your entire vestries — bring your whole congregations. Watch history in the making. And join it.
Dr. Fairfield is professor of church history at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa.
Posted at 11:02 am 10.3.2005 | Permalink