The resolution on sexuality that was passed by a majority of the bishops of the Anglican Communion at the 1998 Lambeth Conference was a surprise to many Episcopalians. Basing itself on a biblical paradigm of monogamous marital commitment as God's intention for human sexuality, the resolution rejects "homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture," and consequently rejects same-sex unions as well as ordination of non-celibate homosexual clergy.

Gay Episcopalians, and those who have supported their witness and their ministry, have tended to interpret this as an uninformed condemnation issued from the covenant of law, rather an invitation to fellowship in the covenant of grace. But there is good news in this startling message from Lambeth. The resolution is the declaration of a Communion which is outgrowing its colonialist legacy. The mind of the church is not necessarily to be determined in the centers of institutional and financial power of the English and North American churches. Church people in the wealthier nations can no longer presume that our financial support will buy the silent consent to our views of Anglican policy by those whose pastoral and evangelical concerns are formed by very different cultural conditions, pressures and conflicts than our own.

The resolution is a lesson in humility, reminding us that the Western cultural agenda is not self-evidently a universal or global one. This is a salutary lesson, if we are willing to learn from it. If we wish to carry our own commitments forward beyond our own national and cultural boundaries, we need to do so with attentive respect to the point of view and cultural circumstances of those with whom we are in communion.

When we were teaching and working as part-time chaplains in Uganda from 1992 to 1994, we were privileged to know several of the bishops of that province, especially the Rt. Rev. Elisha Kyamugambi of East Ankole and the Rt. Rev. Zebedee Masereka of South Rwenzori. These courageous and visionary pastors find their personal energies and financial resources stretched to the breaking point by the massive needs of their dioceses. Yet their efforts are always at risk, in a nation where peace is still fragile, poverty is deeply and structurally rooted, and AIDS continues its scourge. Bishop Masereka's diocese is just over the border from the war zone in the eastern Congo (formerly Zaire), just up the road from Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, where the recent massacre of European and American tourists occurred. For as long as we have known him, Bishop Masereka has had to deal on a daily basis with carnage like this, as the war erupts into his diocese, in the form of rebel assaults, displaced people, and devastated, unprotected farms and villages.

If the spiritual and political situations faced by our episcopal friends in western Uganda are typical of other African and Asian settings, it should not be surprising that the sexual politics of the Episcopal Church seem strange, and even peripheral, to their commitments. Traditional church affirmations of marital fidelity and of sexual abstinence outside marriage make good stabilizing sense in societies where modernization, war and disease have devastated tribal order, local agronomy, and the social security provided by the extended family. Supporting monogamy and sexual abstinence, as well as women's education, are the church's most pragmatic response to the crises posed by AIDS and the population explosion. They provide comparatively low-tech, low-cost forms of sexual education that allow the dignity of moral agency to people with very little else to hold onto.

To reflect productively on the controversy over homosexuality at Lambeth, we Americans need first to recognize that homosexuality is a virtually unacknowledged and socially unsupported sexual practice in the societies of East Africa. The suspicion of homosexuality among African bishops is not the result of a naive biblical literalism, as some of their critics have hastily concluded. Traditional tribal codes of conduct widely (although not universally) proscribed homosexual practice. These attitudes were reinforced by the conservative training in scripture provided by the early Church Missionary Society teachers who evangelized East Africa. Furthermore, in the popular imagination of Ugandans, homosexuality is associated with the twin evils of abusive traditional monarchy and colonialism.

"There are no homosexuals in Uganda," our students at Makerere University unanimously informed us. The students, preparing to be the intellectual elite of Uganda, were more open-minded, globally literate, and intellectually sophisticated than the general population of Uganda, and yet they shared the normative view that homosexuality is alien to African sexual practices and self-understanding. Ugandans and Kenyans will tell you that homosexuality was introduced in East Africa by Arab traders and slavers on the coasts of what are now Kenya and Tanzania. Contemporary European sex safaris, specializing in the procurement of young girls and boys, reinforce the suspicion among East Africans that homosexuality is a decadent colonial practice, and heighten the resistance to any positive representations of it. Although we speak of East Africa, we expect that Anglicans of other former colonies have had analogous experiences to inform their historical attitudes and reinforce their traditionalist sexual ethics.

A great deal of talking and patient listening needs to be carried on if we can hope to bridge this cultural divide. At this stage of the Anglican conversation about sexuality, quick self-righteous resolutions to condemn or reject the Lambeth resolution are gestures of polarization rather than reconciliation. They are likely to send the message to the rest of the Anglican Communion that we Americans can afford to do and think what we bloody well please.

To make a compelling alternative account of homosexuality to the sponsors and supporters of the Lambeth resolution, including alienated traditional members of the Episcopal Church, supporters of gay ministries and gay unions must give accounts of the exemplary lives and loves of gay Christians in witness, outreach and ministry. We must seek in such lives and loves the revelatory evidences, such as we find in marriage, of the loving fellowship of the Trinity, the mysterious origin, ground and end of all charitable human relationships. We must articulate a theology of conversion, reconciliation and inclusion, sponsored by the One in whom there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, straight or gay. Our listening, in turn, must be attuned to, and prepared to learn from, the deep, steadfast, honorable and life-sustaining convictions of those whose faith has been made strong and principled by the fires of history: the slave trade, colonialism, civil wars, state terror, poverty, disease.

The recognition that we are in communion with our Anglican sisters and brothers across the earth ought always to inform and reform the spirit of our conversations with them. Our disagreements ought to be of a different sort than the disagreements of the secular and politicized world. If we can recognize and repent of our sense of cultural superiority and privilege, and acknowledge that we have as much to learn from the Asian and African churches as we have to teach them, we can take up this opportunity presented at Lambeth. We can give our will to power over to the Holy Spirit, who alone can guide our branch of the Holy Catholic Church beyond the colonialist imperatives that first took it to the ends of the earth. o

William Shullenberger teaches literature at Sarah Lawrence College. His wife, the Rev. Bonnie Shullenberger, is a priest of the Church of Uganda. They reside in Ossining, N.Y.