CofE appoints first black UK archbishop

[tjwmason]

CofE appoints first black UK archbishop
(Filed: 17/06/2005)

The Church of England has appointed its first black UK archbishop, as Archbishop of York.

Bishop John Sentamu, Bishop of Birmingham, arrived in England as a refugee after fleeing Uganda in 1974 having become an outspoken critic of Idi Amin's regime.

The new archbishop has called for a stronger voice for the church
The 56-year-old also advised the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

He succeeds the Most Reverend David Hope, who resigned in February to take up a post as a parish priest in Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/17/uarchbishop.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/06/17/ixportaltop.html

F.Y.I. The Church of England (Anglican/Episcopalian) has two Archbishops Canterbury (Rowan Williams) and York. Canterbury is the senior, but York ranks as the second most important cleric in England.

[T_i_B]

1. Good news

It is noticable that Black people tend to be a lot more religious then White people in Britain if you don't mind me saying.

[tjwmason]

2. Definitely - including those in the Church

The Church of England is packed full of people for whom it is a middle-class Sunday morning social club. The black population do appear to take the whole thing more seriously once in church, as well as being more likely to go there.

Personally speaking, he sounds like a good man, the whole incident about refusing to clear a chum of Idi Amin suggests great strength of character. From what I've heard, though, he is quite conservative in his views (unsurprising given that he's from the Church of Uganda). This is exactly what one would expect - the Church likes to have a balance. The Archbishop of Canterbury is liberal, intellectual, and high-church/anglo-catholic; thus the Archbishop of York is likely to be conservative, down-to-earth, and low-church/evangelical.

**Edit, for greater clarity (I hope).

[T_i_B]

3. Well Africa is where it's at...

...when it comes to Christianity, as the article below demonstrates.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1390868,00.html

Many people use Timbuktu to express distance and suggest something beyond a person's experience. I was a teenager before I discovered Timbuktu was in west Africa. Timbuktu, in Mali, was once an economic and cultural centre equal in historical importance to Rome, Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca. In the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, salt from mines in the Sahara desert was traded for gold and slaves, and great mosques, universities, schools and libraries were built.

In 2000, the city was once more a place of world importance. This time, it was because it had become the statistical centre of Christianity.

In AD 33, a possible date of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the statistical centre of Christianity was, not surprisingly, Jerusalem. As the Christian religion spread so its centre shifted. For the first 500 years, it moved around the Mediterranean region. Then, from AD 600 it began a journey north-westwards in a consistent trajectory. By 1000, the centre was near to Constantinople (today's Istanbul), thus coinciding with one of Christianity's great ecclesiastical and spiritual centres. By 1500, the statistical centre reached its northernmost point ever, in Budapest, at which it began a movement south that has continued to this day. In 1600, Zagreb in Croatia hosted the centre; by 1900 it arrived in Madrid, Spain, on its way to Africa. By 1970, the centre was in Morocco; 30 years later it had turned up in Timbuktu.

Compared to the early centuries of Christianity, the centre is now moving very fast, at something like 19 km per year (in 400, for example, the speed was a snail-like 0.4 km per year). By 2100, it is predicted that the vast majority - almost 80% of Christians - will live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania, and that the statistical centre will be even further south, in the northern Nigerian city of Sokoto.