All Tanzania All The Time: Prelude

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It may be "All Anna Nicole All the Time" on the national news but it's "All Tanzania All the Time" in blogland it seems. Here are some samples for today. I'm thinking a daily "All Tanzania All the Time" post during the week the Primates are meeting will be the way to go on keeping up with the info from Dar Es Salaam!

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Thanks to Fr. Jake for pointing us to Andrew Plus's Tanzanian Take: The Travelling Anglican Circus and Medicine Show:

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Over in the You-Can't-Win-By-Placating-Bullies-Department, the ABC himself is in a very uncomfortable spot. He has managed to make nearly everyone angry. While a certain, ahem, American said "enough!" to Archbishop Rowans' snubbing of the North American Churches while simultaneously giving bits of apparent approval to schismatics, the very people who foment that schism call Rowan too authoritarian. They said this with, I presume, a straight face.

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Meanwhile, Mark Harris has the latest from the Our-Way-Or-The-Highway Nigerians looking past Tanzania to Lambeth declaring:

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There is no point, in our view, in meeting and meeting and not resolving the fundamental crisis of Anglican identity. We will definitely not attend any Lambeth Conference to which the violators of the Lambeth Resolution are also invited as participants or observers.

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Happily, there are voices of reason, faithfulness and sanity also speaking out and high on THAT list is Njongonkulu Ndungane, Primate of Southern Africa who has some great thoughts to share in today's NYTimes article "Inviting Africa's Anglicans to Gather Under a Bigger Tent."

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The prospect of such a boycott [against +Jefferts Schori] dismays Archbishop Ndungane, a short, blunt-spoken man with a scholarly bent. “It is absolute nonsense,” he said in his high-ceilinged study. “To be quite frank, they are behaving like schoolboys. She has been constitutionally elected. We should be embracing her. She is a super person.”

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He said he could not understand why a debate over homosexuality had sidetracked what he saw as the church’s true mission in Africa: confronting AIDS, poverty, war and famine.

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“I wonder if somebody could calculate how much money is being spent on these meetings, which deal with one issue and one issue only, when we have 48 million orphans?” he asked. “Whose agenda is this? Definitely in my view, this is not God’s agenda.” Nor is it the average Anglican’s agenda, he said. “I interact with people on the ground. They don’t care about the lifestyles of the people in America.”

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And then there's Kendall Harmon over at titusonenine who is unhappy to have been "misrepresented" by a Stand Firm Anglican Report

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If you take a scale and put “expect nothing” on the left and then put on the right “expect significant discipline and a complete backing for the new structure of a new province”, what I was trying to say, and all I was trying to say, is that the expectation on the right extreme is wrong in my view. All I said was what in my view would NOT happen which is what some reasserters seemed to think would happen, and that would be the second expectation listed above.

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OK. That was ... ummm ... clear.

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And so the Anglican World Turns ... stay tuned for the next episode of "All Tanzania All the Time" ... I'm signing off to head off to church to talk to the thirty-some three-to-five year olds who attend our Saturday evening "Family Eucharist" about The Beatitudes.

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Odds are Tanzania won't even come up -- and that will be a GOOD thing!

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PS -- As predicted ... lots of wiggly kids and we had some fun with "blessed are those who don't get so distracted by their Play Station 3 that they forget to listen for God." And not a word about Tanzania, Primates, Schism, etc.

But thanks to Ann who pointed us to one more entry in the "All Tanzania All the Time" derby ... Tobias Haller's les jeus sonts faits ... with a "revisionist" Compass Rose ... don't miss it!