Homo debate: Let's run a good race

It is rather timely that we are ending this year at a time when there is so much heat in the Church over the unnatural celebration of human sexuality in sections of it (Malawian Anglicans just put one of their Bishops on notice over this as the rest of the Church around the world wrestles with the issue).

Some of our brothers and sisters in the West are saying Africans - and, by extension, much of the Third World Church - have lost it; more and more of the latter are saying there is no love lost between them and the former.

"You simply were never with us in the first place," they all seem to be saying at each other.

Meanwhile, those in question continue raising eyebrows with everything they can do, all this at a time when there is a rampant decline in genuine membership and leadership for the Church in the regions concerned.

An in-depth report in the October 13, 2003 edition of the New York Times detailed a malaise that is eating deep into the Church and which, in effect, should concern every believer in the world today.

The investigative report, among other issues, suggested that our Western brethren, particularly in Europe, are estranging themselves from the cross under some popular but potentially divisive assumptions.

Such assumptions, it continued, include distaste for "unfettered allegiance," "grand ideologies" and "big institutions" (e.g. organized religion).

You need not be a prophet to realize where such assumptions would lead one in his or her idea of the Most High Living God and the true worship He certainly deserves.

So much may be said and written about these raging debates, but the one point that should be emphasized through and through is that it is time for our true love of God and our fellow humans to shine.

True, the love of some may wax cold, but that will be no excuse for the rest of us not to run a good race and fight a good fight.

No amount of theological study, caucusing and reflection - however long - will hide the obvious need for each one of us to do the obvious: Keep true to the one who first called and saved you from eternal damnation.

We owe it to Him, the cloud of witnesses above us and the world around us to live in the most excellent way - by his grace - given the circumstances obtaining in the Church.