Clergy from a conservative grouping of the Anglican Church are meeting this week in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to choose a rival to the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. The UK’s Sarah Mullally will officially be installed as the leader of the world’s Anglican communion at a lavish ceremony later this month but her appointment has divided opinion in Nigeria, and elsewhere. Many conservative Christians believe that only men should be consecrated as bishops.
The Vining Memorial Church Cathedral in Nigeria’s main city Lagos was full of women in gold, green and purple “geles” or headwraps and men resplendent in white-flowing “agbada” robes for its weekly highlight, the Sunday service. Some of the hymns and liturgy were the same as those sung by Anglicans around the world, but there were also differences, like the upbeat worship music that had the congregation dancing in the pews. Some congregants, like Bunmi Odukoya, were supportive of the appointment.
“The work of God is an individual thing. If you’re called – you can be a man, you can be a woman – you need to fulfil the calling of the Lord,” he told the BBC. Others, like Uche Nweke, strongly disagreed: “I don’t think it’s Christian.
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When you look at the Bible and the apostles, there was no woman in there, so a woman being the head of the Anglican church in England, I don’t think it’s going to go well.” In addition to being the most senior cleric in the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also “primus inter pares” – or first among equals – of the primates of the worldwide Anglican Communion, meaning she is the spiritual leader of almost 95 million Anglicans. At its four-day meeting that has just started in Abuja, Gafcon, which describes itself as a global movement of “authentic Anglicans, guarding God’s gospel”, plans to elect its own “first among equals”, just weeks ahead of Archbishop Mullaly’s installation at Canterbury Cathedral.
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