At the Center of a Schism

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Correction Appended: February 14, 2007

The most Rev. Peter Akinola of Nigeria was in New York City late in January making one of his increasingly frequent forays into what he once would have considered enemy territory. Only journalists from religious publications were invited to cover the occasion, at Manhattan's swank Metropolitan Club--which probably suited the Archbishop, who has become wary of the mainstream press since a December New York Times story that advisers feel wrongly portrayed him as a homophobe. But a friend of the Nigerian primate's told TIME that Akinola received a standing ovation. The actual guest of honor was a Christian missionary accused under Australia's anti--religious vilification laws of making anti-Muslim statements. (He appealed, and the case was sent back to trial court.) But Akinola, wearing a gray Western suit over his usual purple shirt, clerical collar and 3-in. wooden cross, was the man most of the religiously conservative attendees had come to see. In cadences that approached preaching, he commended the missionary for what Akinola called his faith and courage at a crucial moment for the Gospel. He cited challenges to Christianity in Australia, Africa and even in England and quoted a biblical verse recounting God's need for a hero in a debauched land, to "stand in the gap."

The image could be described as unintentionally double-edged. To a significant number of critics, far from bridging a gap, Akinola, 63, is actively involved in widening one. As primate to 17 million Nigerian Anglicans and head of an African bishops' group with a total flock of 44 million, he is one of the most influential leaders in the Anglican Communion, the global 78 million-- member confederation that includes the 2.2 million congregants in the Episcopal Church (U.S.A.). Indeed, he is the highest-profile figure in the southward shift of Christianity as a whole. Yet he may exercise that influence by helping pull his communion apart, largely over the issue of the church's stance on homosexuality.

In the U.S., the most spectacular expression of Akinola's position was his transoceanic embrace in December of 15 Episcopal congregations in Virginia that, put off by the 2003 ordination of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay bishop, became parishes of his thriving African archdiocese 5,400 miles away. It effectively constitutes a competing Anglican body on U.S. turf. He may make global news when all 38 Anglican primates meet in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Feb. 14 to continue an anguished homosexuality debate that--unlike in the States, where only a minority are expected to leave the denomination--could split the world body.

Some observers argue that, like many conservatives in the church, Akinola is motivated less by a desire for schism (or even any distaste for homosexuality per se) than by a sorrowful conviction that Robinson's ordination in the U.S., along with support in other provinces for gay unions, is the last straw in a series of offenses indicating a massive Western disregard for the authority of the Bible. They say he is not so much trying to blow up the communion as force it, by negotiation and a certain degree of brinkmanship, to rein itself in.

Anglicanism's great achievement--and one of the reasons people outside the communion may care about its fate--is that since its 16th century origins as a kind of Roman Catholic and Protestant amalgam, it has often seemed like a mini-experiment in what a global Christian church might look like: one that managed to span the distance between incense-saturated Catholic-style rite and tongues-talking low-church Protestantism, that eschewed hyperdetailed doctrinal tests to maintain a looser Christian understanding, adjusted at regular meetings under the low-voltage, first- among-equals leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury. One of the reasons Akinola is both controversial and potentially important is that as the gay issue stretches this understanding past the pain threshold, he is a man unafraid to cut the cord--an uncompromising evangelizer of a sort, more familiar to Americans than to many Anglicans, who is willing to abandon communal solidarity unless it supports a "right" reading of Scripture.

His national and personal background may contribute to his fondness for bright lines staunchly defended. Nigeria is a country where boundless enthusiasm and resources coexist with harsh factionalism, not the least between Muslims in its north and Christians in its south. Akinola, born into the Yoruba tribe, itself divided by the two faiths, was shaped in a crucible of the religious strife that has by now taken thousands of lives on both sides. That experience, combined with his naturally combative and entrepreneurial nature, made him a fearless herald of Christ. Starting when he became a bishop in 1989, Akinola developed Nigeria's hewn-from-the-forest capital, Abuja, into a great Anglican center. Later, he habitually sent bishops to non-Christian areas to preach the Gospel. Muslims sometimes responded violently, but the church gained a presence in the north. Notes the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, a well-connected Episcopal rector who counts Akinola as a friend: "They give witness at great cost, and it obviously touches people," who become Anglicans. The denomination leaped to the forefront of Nigerian Christianity, and Akinola became a civic as well as a religious voice, denouncing the country's plagues of corruption and materialism and, in a brave stance that may have helped preserve Nigerian democracy, opposing current President Olusegun Obasanjo's bid for an extraconstitutional third term.

The size of Akinola's flock, which far outstrips England's in terms of Sunday attendance, has made him a natural leader to robust and conservative Anglican bodies throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia (known as the Global South). Long seen as Western Anglicanism's missionary stepchild, the South has eclipsed it in energy and size, and yearns for corresponding clout. One obstacle is money: funds from liberal Western churches support both the communion and many dioceses, perpetuating what southerners see as a kind of neocolonialism. Akinola announced in 2004 that he would reject money from churches he disagreed with, becoming the unfettered champion of the Global South majority.

The Robinson ordination galvanized Akinola to further delineate between his definitions of right and wrong. His public rhetoric has often come across as tactless compared with the nuance of other conservatives. He has called Robinson's elevation "a satanic attack on the church of God" and has repeatedly compared homosexuality to partnering with baboons, lions, dogs or cows.

Akinola is nearly as blunt in official contexts. He pulled out of a 2004 communion conference that released a report criticizing Robinson's election without condemning it outright, and he later published a statement calling it "far short of the prescription needed." The next year he helped hammer out a demand that the U.S. and other churches "voluntarily withdraw" from the communion's central governing body unless they expressed regret and declared a moratorium on further gay ordinations or blessings. Last September, ominously, he excised all references to the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury from his church's statement of mission.

Many conservatives applaud such acts, loudly or quietly. There have been moments, however, that have given pause even to his allies. After deadly Muslim-on-Christian attacks in Nigeria during the Danish cartoon debacle last year, he announced, "May we ... remind our Muslim brothers that they do not have the monopoly of violence in this nation," leading some to wonder whether an Anglican Archbishop was threatening vendetta. The Archbishop of Canterbury rode to his rescue, saying Akinola had intended a warning, not a threat. Perhaps, but it was not atypical: responding to Human Rights Watch investigators regarding a bloody 2004 Nigerian exchange in which Muslim-initiated violence took 75 Christian lives and Christian reprisals killed 700 Muslims, the group reported that Akinola snapped, "I don't have records of Christian groups going out deliberately to attack. The church says turn the other cheek, but now there is no other cheek to turn."

Similar uneasiness surfaced when Akinola backed a 2006 Nigerian legislative bill that would assign five years in jail to not just practicing homosexuals but also those who support them. He was not alone: the legislation was enthusiastically embraced by almost every religious group, Christian and Muslim, in the country. Nonetheless, the bill was condemned by human-rights agencies and the governments of other countries, including the U.S., and it contradicted explicit Anglican accords asserting gays' freedom from persecution. According to Canon Vinay Samuel, founder of the Oxford Center for Mission Studies, who has often seemed in sympathy with Akinola, "there was an effort to try to get him to change his position." Many months later, the Nigerian qualified his position, admitting "genuine concerns about human rights."

The Right Rev. Martyn Minns, bishop for the Virginia churches allied with Akinola (and who has known him for decades), thinks the outcry around such issues smacks of armchair condescension by First Worlders ignorant of Nigerian realities. "It's vital that we begin by trying to understand [his] setting," Minns says, "before we apply it to our particular concerns." There can be no doubt that congregants in his newly formed Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) are happy with Akinola. "I've never seen a guy as full of the Holy Spirit as he is," says Ward LeHardy, communications director at St. Stephen's Church in Heathsville, Va. "He's absolutely on fire in love with the Lord and the Bible." Yet when Akinola cheerfully outlines his hopes for CANA--"Hopefully, in another year, we will have two or three, maybe five or 10 more" U.S. bishops, he tells TIME--it is hard not to conclude that he sees American Episcopalians as missionary targets who need to be taught the true Word in much the same way as the Muslims at home.

Will Akinola seek Anglicanism's rupture in Dar es Salaam? The odds are that he will have to put up with one more attempt to avoid it. On the agenda is a progress report by something called the Covenant Design Group, whose philosophical makeup runs to the conservative but does not go quite as far as the impatient Nigerian. The covenant in question would be an attempt to define the core beliefs of Anglicanism a bit more closely. Closely enough, in fact, that--some years down the line--it could well exclude the more liberal U.S. Episcopal position. But its immediate goal would be to find some fate for the church short of outright schism. For Akinola--and, for that matter, those on the liberal side who feel that acceptance of gay equality is as important as he deems its rejection--that goal may be beside the point. But it may turn out to be the closest the communion can come to sustaining a tattered dream of Anglican unity.

The original version of this story contained a quote from a man identified as Warren LeHardy, the communications director at St. Stephen's Church in Heathsville, Va. His correct name is Ward LeHardy.

With reporting by Gilbert DaCosta / Abuja, Michael Brunton / London