we may soon have gay churches –anglican bishop

By Sola Shittu (Reporter Ibadan )
 
March 18, 2006: An Anglican Bishop, Ayo Ladigbolu, has declared that with the growing number of gay and lesbian communities in Nigeria, the country may soon witness homosexuals having their churches and pastors conducting marriages for them as practiced in America.

Ladigbolu, a retired Methodist Arch Bishop of Ilesha Diocese noted that already, the whole world was at a cross-road over the issue of gay and lesbianism and suggested that the way out was for the church to seek better understanding of these group of persons, who were at the moment are considered deviants.

He told Saturday Independent that at present, the gay and lesbian communities were on the increase in the country “as more and more of them are coming out of their closet”.

“And more will still come. In America, I know of a number of community churches that are gay churches. Because the church was discriminating against them, they now started their own churches and they have their own pastors and they do their own marriages and everything in their own churches. And now the law in the United States forbids you from discriminating against them because they are gay. I am sure Nigeria will soon come to that level too,” he noted.

He advised the church to seek better understanding of these groups of persons instead of being hostile to them or treating them as outcasts in the society.

“The church should seek better understanding of them. We should avail ourselves of all the available literature on this phenomenon. What makes a man likes a man? Is there something more to it? We should be that tolerant. I am not saying that we should admit them into our churches, or join them in holy matrimony when they come to the church, but what I am saying is that the church, like we are trying to understand HIV/AIDS, should also try and understand the gays and the lesbians,” he said.

The bishop stated that “may be from that understanding, we would hear God speaking to the church as to which direction we should go. Is our present attitude the best under God? Do we have all the answers to the issue of lesbianism and gay from the Bible? Are there new insights that God is bringing because God is always bringing something new. He is always bringing new knowledge and new understanding of this universe and the church should be tolerant to gain knowledge so that our actions would not be from the point of bias and prejudice but from a point of sympathy and knowledge”.

To him the issue of being gay or lesbian is a universal one which has several ramifications because a lot of people are now approaching it.

“Some of them will say that is how God made them, that I am made not to like men in spite of being a woman, that I am made to like men like myself. And if people tell you that and they say it is coming from inside because that was the way they were born or that was the way the environment created them, what do you do? You have no right to say how God has made you is wrong, of course from the religious point of view when you look at the Bible, the Bible condemns male and male mating and female and female mating and so you look at the word of God, you look at the claim people who are experiencing this kind of feeling and you are left somehow in a fix just as they are hanging somewhere”.

He admitted that the world had always being at a cross roads over the issue and called for a deeper reflection over it.

“You know until recently, until the last ten years most of the gay were not coming out of the closet.

They were merely pretending. Some of them will even marry and raise children but inside of them they were still looking for men to sleep with. Now that they are beginning to feel that there are more of them than we are beginning to imagine, they begin to set up their own network and are coming out to tell the world that that is the way God has made them and are not ashamed of it. You can not kill them, you can not throw them away, they belong to families and communities and that is why I am saying that the church should seek better and greater understanding of this phenomenon under God so that we can react properly,” he stressed.