Khama and the Cat Claw

Botswana.

This rather well written news snippet caught my attention earlier. Botswana is one of our northern neighbours:

Peaceful, prosperous and lightly populated Botswana rarely makes the international news—unless its president gets clawed in the face by a cheetah. Officials in the African nation say Ian Khama needed two stitches to his nose after the “overexcited” animal kept at an army barracks jumped up and clawed him when he was just outside the animal’s enclosure. It was “a freak accident, not an attack,” a spokesman for the president tells the AP, adding that it all happened very fast.

This is Africa.

I see some overseas news agencies are calling the incident a ‘mauling’. Hardly. More like the Lieutenant General getting the cat claw!

Still ouch I’m sure!

And just for the record here, cheetahs are generally the most tolerant of humans out of all the large cats species… and of course, the fastest… very fast…

 

SANDF Soldiers to be Remembered

SABC news:

The memorial service for the 13 SA National Defence Force soldiers, who died in a gun battle with Seleka rebels in the Central African Republic nine days ago, will be held at the Swartkop Air Force Base in Pretoria on Tuesday.

Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula handed over the bodies of the deceased soldiers to their respective families last week Thursday. SANDF spokesperson Xolani Mabanga says funeral arrangements will also be announced on Tuesday.

“I would like to emphasise that there is a senior official that has been appointed in SANDF that will be in charge of each and every family, for the preparation of the funeral and all the administration,” says Mabanga.

It is ill-advised or ill-informed of the DA to call a joint sitting

Meanwhile, the African National Congress’ chief whip’s office says calling for a joint sitting of Parliament to force the withdrawal of troops from the Central African Republic, will not yield any results, this after the Democratic Alliance urged President Jacob Zuma to convene an urgent joint sitting of both Houses of Parliament to discuss the matter.

However, the ANC’s chief whip’s spokesperson Moloto Motapo says only Parliament’s joint committee on Defence can make such a recommendation to either the National Assembly or the National Council of Provinces.

 

Ad Clerum 3.13

For the Season of the Passion by our Bishop, Michael Gill:

View this document on Scribd

 

South African Soldiers Killed in the Central African Republic

News 24:

Bangui – South African soldiers in the Central African Republic are seeking safe passage to the airport after taking heavy losses during fighting with Seleka rebels, Reuters reports.

The agency said at least nine SA soldiers were killed.

“I saw the bodies of six South African soldiers. They had all been shot,” a Reuters witness said. Later, he saw three more bodies in burned-out South African military vehicles.

Amy Martin of the UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, told the BBC World Service that the SA troops had retreated to their barracks and were seeking safe passage to the airport.

Seleka spokesperson Eric Massi said the rebels had broken through a line of South African soldiers during their push into the city.

Around 400 South African troops were deployed in the country as military trainers.

Regional peacekeeping sources said the South Africans had fought alongside the Central African Republic’s army on Saturday to prevent rebels entering the capital.

They took substantial losses and have asked for French support to load their troops and take off,” said the source.

Meanwhile, AFP reported on Sunday night that widespread looting had broken out in the CAR capital.

Homes, shops, restaurants and cars were all fair game for looters in scenes repeated across the city.

“There’s a lot of looting by armed men. They break down the doors to go looting and then, afterwards, the people come and help themselves too,” said Nicaise Kabissou, who lives in the city centre.

Massi had promised on Saturday that the rebel coalition “will have zero tolerance for any looting, exaction or settling of scores”.

But that warning went unheeded on the ground.

 

Robert Mugabe on Pope Francis

Harare, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe says he wants Pope Francis to visit Africa because he is “a man of God who will be praying for all of us, praying for the sinful world to repent.”

Mugabe attended the Pope’s inaugural mass on Tuesday despite a ban on him travelling to most European countries to protest his human rights record and alleged vote rigging in violent elections. Vatican City is not affected by the ban. Vatican officials said representatives of all world governments were welcome to come.

On his return from Rome, Mugabe urged reporters to go to church, lead a morally-guided life, avoid heavy drinking and write well without putting in “a twist like all journalists do for propaganda,” the Zimbabwe Herald newspaper , a government mouthpiece, reported Wednesday.

Source

 

The First Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa

Here in South Africa:

Archbishop Damaskinos of Johannesburg and Pretoria and Bishop Petronius of Zalău in the Sălaj County of Romania laid the foundation stone of St Andrew’s Romanian Orthodox Church in Midrand, Gauteng. It is the first Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa.

The foundation stone for the new church ready on a table with the Romanian flag. The daisy chains mark the outline of the new church. In the background is the Midrand Mosque, the biggest mosque in the southern hemisphere.

In 2001 Father Mihai (Mircea) Corpodean came to be a priest for the Romanian community, but since they had no church of their own, and the Churchy of St Nicholas in Brixton had just lost its priest, the bishop at that time, Metropolitan Seraphim, asked Fr Mihai to become p-0arish priest at St Nicholas. St Nicholas was started as a multiethic parish, and welcomed the Romanian community, and we still use some Romanian in services there.

It took the Romanian community quite a long time to find a suitable piece of land, and in 2008 Fr Mihai moved to New Zealand, and Fr Razvan Tatu came to replace him, and began tolding Romanian service at St George’s Hotel near Oilfantsfontein.

After the foundation stone was laid at the easternmost part of the new church, everyone young and old, came to add some cement, starting with the two bishops.

At the end Archbishop Damaskinos spoke on the importance of the community supporting not just the laying of the foundation stone, but all the activities of the church. The laying of the foundation stone took place with the blessing of His Beatotude Theodoros, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa, who is the spiritual leader of all Orthodox Christians in Africa.Bishop Petronius said that he and Archbishop Damaskinos would be concelebrating the Divine Liturgy the next day in Romanian in the Archbishop’s chapel in Houghton, and invited everyone present to join in then.

There is more with photos here.

 

 

African Anglicans Say Gay Bishops Affirmation ‘Shatters Hopes of Reconciliation’

The Christian Post:

Anglican leaders in Africa have expressed their outrage over the Church of England’s decision to approve gay bishops in its order, saying that the decision could put an end to hopes of healing broken relationships in the Communion.

Archbishop Nicholas Okoh of Nigeria, one of the world’s largest provinces of the Anglican Communion with 17 million members, said that the affirmation of gay bishops “could very well shatter whatever hopes we had for healing and reconciliation within our beloved Communion,” Reuters reported.

Okoh added that the Church of England has given into “the contemporary idols of secularism and moral expediency,” and that it is “one step removed from the moral precipice we have already witnessed in The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Canada.”

Last week, the House of Bishops of the Church of England announced that it had internally decided to allow gay clergy to serve as bishops if they promise a life of celibacy, even if they are in a same-sex civil partnership.

“All candidates for the episcopate undergo a searching examination of personal and family circumstances, given the level of public scrutiny associated with being a bishop in the Church of England. But these, along with the candidate’s suitability for any particular role for which he is being considered, are for those responsible for the selection process to consider in each case,” the Right Rev. Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, said in a statement.

The Rev. James further explained that the presiding members deemed it would be “unjust” to ban gay clergy from serving as bishops if they lived their lives full in accordance with the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics and personal discipline.

Conservative Anglicans protested the decision, however, saying that it broke from traditional stances and that it should have been voted on in the Church’s General Synod, where all bishops would have had a chance to vote on the issue.

The Anglican Communion has been divided greatly over the issue of homosexuality. The Anglican Church of Canada began blessing same-sex couples in 2002, while the U.S. Episcopal Church ordained in 2003 the Rev. Gene Robinson as the first-ever gay bishop. The Church of England had remained moderate on the issue, allowing gay clergy to serve while defending the traditional definition of marriage – but its recent turn to allow gays to move to the highest episcopate rank has been firmly opposed by African church leaders who remain conservative in their positions.

Other African Anglican leaders who have spoken out against gay bishops include the Rev. Stanley Ntagali, the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, which has about 8 million Anglicans.

Ntagli said that the Church has taken “a significant step away from that very gospel that brought life, light, and hope to us.”

“This decision violates our biblical faith and agreements within the Anglican Communion,” the Ugandan church leader said. “This decision only makes the brokenness of the communion worse and is particularly disheartening coming from the mother Church.”

Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, the Primate of Kenya and the leader of the influential Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, added that the Church of England had compromised “with the secular preoccupations of the West,”the Independent noted.

All this means that the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rev. Justin Welby, has a lot of work in order to bridge the growing divide in the Anglican Communion. Welby has stood behind the Church in its opposition to the U.K. government’s plans to legalize same-sex marriage, but he has also promised to “listen very attentively to the LGBT communities.”

“I am always averse to the language of exclusion, when what we are called to is to love in the same way as Jesus Christ loves us. Above all in the church we need to create safe spaces for these issues to be discussed honestly and in love,” Welby has said.

 

Gafcon II Set

For Nairobi in October. And they’ll huff, and they’ll puff, and they’ll do little else…

The second Global Anglican Futures Conference – Gafcon II – will be held in Nairobi this October, the chairman of the primates’ council of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, reports.

In his New Year’s Day message to the Anglican Church of Kenya, Dr. Wabukala stated that he was “very happy” to report that “in October this year, we are expecting the second Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON 2) to be held here in Nairobi and we look forward to welcoming Anglican leaders from around the globe. I believe this will be a strategic moment in the reshaping of the Anglican Communion to fulfil our vision for global mission and a time when we will experience a foretaste of that glorious gathering of the people of God which Isaiah prophesied.”

Rest here.

Wikipedia has more on Gafcon here.

 

Western Anglicanism Seriously Compromised

So says a Kenyan Archbishop:

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Kenya says the tables have turned in the Anglican Communion thus it is time for the Global South to assert itself and take the gospel back to the West.

In his New Year sermon delivered at All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi, The Most Rev. Eliud Wabukala commented that, “…in our modern context we need now to be thinking of mission beyond our borders. In the past we have been the recipients of missionary endeavour and we thank God for those who brought the gospel to this land, but now the sending nations of the West are in deep spiritual and moral crisis and it is time for us to take a lead in global mission.

“The majority of Anglicans are now in the Global South and that means we need to take greater responsibility in global leadership. We cannot simply stand by as we see many of the Anglican Churches in the West, including the Church of England itself, being severely compromised by the deepening spiritual and moral darkness of the societies in which they are set.”

The evangelical archbishop noted, “The GAFCON movement is one way in which global Anglicans are responding to this need and I am very happy that in October this year, we are expecting the second Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON 2) to be held here in Nairobi and we look forward to welcoming Anglican leaders from around the globe.

“I believe this will be a strategic moment in the reshaping of the Anglican Communion to fulfil our vision for global mission and a time when we will experience a foretaste of that glorious gathering of the people of God which Isaiah prophesied.”

Wabukala said that the emphasis on a ‘holistic gospel’, one which expresses both deed and word, must be truly holistic in the need to seek after the presence of the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures at the heart and centre of our life as a church.

The Kenyan Archbishop said Christians should be neither optimists nor pessimists, but people with a strong hope in the promises of Scripture and the power of prayer.

 

Ad Clerum 1.13

Well, the year is not even a day old and we have our first Ad Clerum!

View this document on Scribd

A link to pdf. here.