CHANGING ATTITUDE NIGERIA NEWS

PRESS RELEASE

Open letter to Canon Akintunde Popoola, Director of Communications, Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)

Thursday, 13 April 2006

Open letter to Canon Akintunde Popoola
Director of Communications, Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)

Dear Tunde,

Perhaps it is appropriate that we are in Holy Week, the most important week of the Christian year when we remember the human frailty of a group of women and men who betrayed and deserted the Lord of Life. The story reminds me that it is not because I am gay that the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified. He was crucified because people ran away and did not stand by him or tell the truth about him. If they hadn’t run away and lied, we would not be Christians nor be remembering the crucifixion or celebrating the resurrection this week.

It is in this context that we are having an extended conversation about a gay Nigerian Anglican who is telling the truth about his life to an increasingly interested world, while you are asserting repeatedly that he is fraudulent and a liar.

If Davis were not a real person who represents something deeply troubling and challenging to the Nigerian Church, you would not be giving him so much attention. Because you have given Davis so much time, you have strengthened his reputation and given him far more energy and publicity that he could ever have sought or wanted.

Your post of 12 April is difficult to respond to because it is so confused.

Davis was the only person named in your Disclaimer published on 28 December 2005. How can you maintain that it was not targeted against him?

I am not defending Davis solely because he is homosexual. I am defending him because he is being attacked by malicious and untrue accusations by his own Church, the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)

Whether Davis was straight or gay, when I read your disclaimer, I took 2003 to be the year 2003.

Your disclaimer does not show that Davis was “fraudulently very active in the church“, nor that he had a “domineering influence over a bishop and his diocese.” It makes an unsubstantiated allegation about him.

One result of your personal attacks on Davis has been that he has described to me in detail over a period of time his relationship with bishop Ugede and the ministry they developed together in the diocese of Otukpo, substantiated by photographs. I have learnt about a church leader who was effective in ministry and widely trusted.

If Davis “is NOT a knight the diocese of Otukpo“, who is the person wearing the uniform of a knight in the company of other knights?

If Davis “did not organise a homosexual meeting of Anglicans in 2005” who are the people in the photograph sent to me by the New York Times? Was Lydia Polgreen lying in her report published in the NYT on 18 December 2005?

Davis was an active member of St Philip’s church, Angwan Shaho Karumo, Abuja and his membership card is dated 12 June 2005. How can you maintain that he was not a member in 2004 and 2005?

Everything you have written and alleged about Davis has provoked him into providing me with facts and information about himself and I have no doubt he is telling the truth.

When you warn me that “liars are in danger of hellfire” and “wonder about me” are you, an Anglican priest, issuing a warning and threat against me, a fellow Anglican priest?

The date of Davis’s return to West Africa was a mistaken contradiction. I knew he was still in Geneva on 7 April and if I was being really picky I would have corrected then what Davis wrote, but I didn’t.

Why do you raise the possibility of Davis being taken into the ordained ministry? It is not something I have thought about or ever discussed with Davis.

I have never claimed to be dealing with the Church of Nigeria. I am dealing with Davis and other lay members of the Church of Nigeria and with you, the Director of Communications.

It is my judgement against yours when I say that I believe Changing Attitude England is indeed helping lesbian and gay members of the Church of Nigeria. Not only would I be delighted alongside you if leaders of Alliance Rights and SPIN started attending Anglican churches, I am even more happy to tell you that some of them already attend and are members of the Anglican Church.

You assert that my mission is to establish homosexuality as the norm in the Anglican Church. It is not. It is to work for equality for LGBT people in the Church alongside the heterosexual majority.

Lesbian and gay people who come to worship in Anglican churches in Nigeria will not be transformed by the Church and won to Christ. They will have their anxieties and guilt reinforced and distanced even further from the costly and generous love of Christ freely poured out for all the sinful on Good Friday. As Davis and I can both testify, they will glimpse the glorious freedom of the children of God which is their inheritance thanks to the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ on Easter Day. If they listen to you, they will hear a conditional Gospel, not the Gospel of truth and love.

If this whole issue is a costly distraction to you, Tunde, then you are not acting in accordance with resolution 1.10 of the Lambeth Conference 1998 or the commitments of the Windsor Report. As I have said before, your Primate, the Most Revd Peter Akinola is a signatory of both these documents and committed to implementing them in full in the Church.

I am still waiting for you to tell the world how the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) is respond to the authoritative commitment made by your Primate to “listen to the experience of homosexual persons and assure them that they are loved by God”, to minister “pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation“ (Lambeth 1.10) to resist “the demonisation of homosexual persons, or their ill treatment (which) is totally against Christian charity and basic principles of pastoral care” and being proactive in reassessing “in the light of … study and because of our concern for human rights, …care for and attitude towards persons of a homosexual orientation” (Windsor Report para 146)

Bishop Ugede with the first six knights created in the diocese of Otukpo, and their dames, Sir Davis MacIyalla 3rd from the right

Davis MacIyalla, second from right, with Bishop Ugede, centre, to the left the Ven Dan Mozie, green stole, then Canon of the Cathedral and now Archdeacon of Otukpo and the Ven J Stue, also an Archdeacon of Otukpo, to the right Barrister Ochoga, Registrar of the Diocese of Otukpo and Sir Godwin Obiakor, Chairman of the Justice and Peace Committee, taken on the inauguration day

Davis MacIyalla in his knight's uniform addressing a church meeting in Otukpo

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