Ousting the "Pope of Africa"

Flamboyant Burgess Carr is stripped of his ecumenical post

In nearly seven years as general secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches, the flamboyant Canon Burgess Carr often seemed more interested in politics than religion. The 42-year-old Anglican spoke often of liberation and less often of salvation, and declared: "We have had a British Jesus on our backs too long." Now the conference, which claims a constituency of 68 million non-Catholics, has reluctantly concluded that it has had the burly Carr on its back too long.

The Carr era ended at a tense emergency meeting in Lome, the sweltering capital of Togo. Though the All Africa Conference's board issued statements defending Carr, key churchmen finally concluded that he had brought the young ecumenical organization to the brink of disaster. The board put Carr on leave until May 1979, when his term officially expires. This week Carr becomes a research fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, and in the next academic year a visiting lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. His interim replacement: Egyptian Coptic Layman Sarwat G. Shehata, 39, a quiet management expert, who is already at work mending the many fences that Carr shattered.

Most African Christians defended Carr's style of political Christianity, including his support of black guerrillas in Rhodesia and South Africa. But many were afraid that he had made the organization too secular. The conference could "speak with eloquence on political issues, but had no spiritual message," says one church analyst. Nor was Carr above using the most sacred themes for political ends. Defending the guerrillas, he told the last All Africa Assembly, in 1974: "In accepting the violence of the cross, God, in Jesus Christ, sanctified violence into a redemptive instrument." Such comments helped dry up vital funding from church agencies in Western Europe.

To his credit, Carr did not attack just the West. He also denounced Africa's own murderous dictators, self-seeking businessmen and corrupt politicians. This caused trouble in Kenya, where the All Africa Conference is based. Attorney General Charles Njonjo turned against Carr, branding him a meddler. Even though a palatial $2 million headquarters on government-donated land is due to open in Nairobi next October, Carr tried to pull the organization out of the country.

Carr's conduct got him into as much trouble as his outspokenness. His high-handed handling of his staff produced a ceaseless round of firings and resignations. He acted like the ecumenical Pope of Africa, and grass-roots Christians complained that he paid scant attention to their opinions. Many took offense at the 1974 assembly's proclamation of a missionary-go-home policy (since downplayed) and its declaration of war against "theological conservatism."

There was an uglier factor. In 1976 complaints of sexual indiscretions by an unnamed "Christian leader" reached the floor of Kenya's Parliament. When Carr and the All Africa Conference board complained at the Lome meeting that he had been the victim of a smear campaign, the official Voice of Kenya radio accused Carr by name.

A Liberian, Carr first came onto the ecumenical scene in 1967, when he cut short his doctoral studies at Harvard to join the Africa desk of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was assigned to handle relief for Nigeria and to try to mediate its bloody civil war. In 1972. the year after Carr took charge of the All Africa Conference, he ably moderated the negotiations that ended the Sudan's 17-year civil war.

That was his single greatest accomplishment, but Carr had a more general impact. "He put the All Africa Conference on the world map," says Presbyterian Leader John Gatu, a Kenyan who is chairman of its General Committee. In Geneva, Philip Potter, head of the World Council of Churches, praised Carr's "deep Christian commitment, his boundless energy and his remarkable political sensitivity." To workaday Africans, he was above all an eloquent freedom fighter. Said an admiring Kikuyu carpenter in Nairobi: "He roared like a jumbo jet, and his words were like bullets."

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