Dear Gentle Readers,
I am away at Christ the King Spiritual Life Center in the Diocese of Albany this week and will be taking a fast from blogging. I will pick things up over next weekend.
Shalom,
Tony Seel
Monday, March 30, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
A Message from Bishop David Anderson
Beloved in Christ Jesus,
The controversy over TEC Diocese of Northern Michigan's choice of a bishop who is a Buddhist/Episcopal Priest continues to grow. The local diocese's choice now is being sent to diocesan bishops and standing committees of TEC dioceses for their ratification.
The interesting thing is that TEC's House of Bishops illegally deposed a number of faithful bishops, charging them with "abandonment of communion with this church," but now they are poised to confirm a Buddhist. The bishop-elect, Kevin Thew Forrester, at first confirmed he was a Buddhist, but now that TEC spin doctors have talked with him he has changed his tune. Now he is saying he is an Episcopalian who simply and occasionally uses Zen forms of meditative prayer. Truth within some of the TEC bishops corps is highly elastic--it is whatever it needs to be for the moment to accomplish the desired end. Meanwhile, we're not sure what happened to Forrester's ordination as a Buddhist--a few months ago he was rather proud of it, and now he doesn't seem to want to mention it.
Leaders from the Northern Michigan diocese say, "We are confident that Kevin will guard and defend the faith of the Church while inviting us to ever fresh expressions of that faith." The question we are left with is, what exactly is the 'faith of the Church' that Forrester will be guarding and defending? Now if he were to renounce his Buddhist faith and repent, then we would be at least be on a more familiar footing. Christian syncretism with Buddhism we don't understand.
Christian journalist George Conger reports that an investigation by the Archbishops' Council and the Church Commissioners has concluded that poor planning, inexperienced management and weak financial controls contributed to a £288,000 deficit for the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Their report in polite Brit-speak describes the financial fiasco in such kind and apologetic terms that one is almost led to feel sorry for the bumblers that lost all this money. Who appointed these people? Who thought they possessed the skills needed to manage this complex Lambeth event? Wait, wait, don't tell me. It is the Archbishop of Canterbury who is the convener of the Lambeth Conference, the same person who devised the Panel of Reference, and various other schemes that seemed predestined to fail.
In reality, things have to be kept in perspective, as they have only misplaced £288,000, and when that is compared with the membership of the Church of England that has gone missing, it is a trivial number. What needs to be accounted for is the number of church members of the C of E that no one can find in church. From a claimed membership of approximately 24 million souls, they can only find some 800,000 each week in church. Being generous, if you double that number, the truthful membership of the C of E is more like 1.6 million, meaning that 22.4 million church members, people that the English bishops are charged to watch over, have gone missing. It is far more serious to lose 22.4 million Christian souls to who knows where than it is to lose £288,000.
How can the primate of all England, whose office (not personally) has sustained such a spiritual loss, continue as primate inter pares of the Anglican Communion? When will the Anglican Communion become a real Communion (again)?
Where do we turn for hope? With God, all things are possible! By His sovereign Will and Holy Spirit the church can yet be put under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and prosper. Or as Holy Scripture says in another place, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord."
Blessings and Peace for this fifth Sunday in Lent,
+David
The Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, Sr.
President and CEO, American Anglican Council
_________________________
The controversy over TEC Diocese of Northern Michigan's choice of a bishop who is a Buddhist/Episcopal Priest continues to grow. The local diocese's choice now is being sent to diocesan bishops and standing committees of TEC dioceses for their ratification.
The interesting thing is that TEC's House of Bishops illegally deposed a number of faithful bishops, charging them with "abandonment of communion with this church," but now they are poised to confirm a Buddhist. The bishop-elect, Kevin Thew Forrester, at first confirmed he was a Buddhist, but now that TEC spin doctors have talked with him he has changed his tune. Now he is saying he is an Episcopalian who simply and occasionally uses Zen forms of meditative prayer. Truth within some of the TEC bishops corps is highly elastic--it is whatever it needs to be for the moment to accomplish the desired end. Meanwhile, we're not sure what happened to Forrester's ordination as a Buddhist--a few months ago he was rather proud of it, and now he doesn't seem to want to mention it.
Leaders from the Northern Michigan diocese say, "We are confident that Kevin will guard and defend the faith of the Church while inviting us to ever fresh expressions of that faith." The question we are left with is, what exactly is the 'faith of the Church' that Forrester will be guarding and defending? Now if he were to renounce his Buddhist faith and repent, then we would be at least be on a more familiar footing. Christian syncretism with Buddhism we don't understand.
Christian journalist George Conger reports that an investigation by the Archbishops' Council and the Church Commissioners has concluded that poor planning, inexperienced management and weak financial controls contributed to a £288,000 deficit for the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Their report in polite Brit-speak describes the financial fiasco in such kind and apologetic terms that one is almost led to feel sorry for the bumblers that lost all this money. Who appointed these people? Who thought they possessed the skills needed to manage this complex Lambeth event? Wait, wait, don't tell me. It is the Archbishop of Canterbury who is the convener of the Lambeth Conference, the same person who devised the Panel of Reference, and various other schemes that seemed predestined to fail.
In reality, things have to be kept in perspective, as they have only misplaced £288,000, and when that is compared with the membership of the Church of England that has gone missing, it is a trivial number. What needs to be accounted for is the number of church members of the C of E that no one can find in church. From a claimed membership of approximately 24 million souls, they can only find some 800,000 each week in church. Being generous, if you double that number, the truthful membership of the C of E is more like 1.6 million, meaning that 22.4 million church members, people that the English bishops are charged to watch over, have gone missing. It is far more serious to lose 22.4 million Christian souls to who knows where than it is to lose £288,000.
How can the primate of all England, whose office (not personally) has sustained such a spiritual loss, continue as primate inter pares of the Anglican Communion? When will the Anglican Communion become a real Communion (again)?
Where do we turn for hope? With God, all things are possible! By His sovereign Will and Holy Spirit the church can yet be put under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and prosper. Or as Holy Scripture says in another place, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord."
Blessings and Peace for this fifth Sunday in Lent,
+David
The Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, Sr.
President and CEO, American Anglican Council
_________________________
19,000 to 1
That is the ratio of deaths to births for pecusa according to a report in the Blue Book for General Convention 2009. The same report recognizes the conflict that is still inherent in pecusa congregations five years after the consecration of the controversial bishop of New Hampshire. We heard for so long that pecusa would grow as it became more "inclusive." The opposite has been true and the long-term prospects are grim for the gay church. pecusa has tied her fortunes to the gay agenda instead of a biblical agenda and the results shouldn't be surprising.
See the rest of the story from The Living Church in the post below.
See the rest of the story from The Living Church in the post below.
pecusa: Report Warns of Long Term Decline
From The Living Church:
Posted on: March 27, 2009
More than five years later, tensions caused by the consecration of a partnered homosexual man as Bishop Coadjutor of New Hampshire continue to affect half of all Episcopal churches, according to census information compiled in the Blue Book prepared for the 76th General Convention, to be held July 8-17 in Anaheim, Calif.
The report, based on results from 783 completed surveys, is a sober snapshot of an aging denomination, struggling with unresolved conflict and in danger of long-term decline. It was written by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church and included in the Blue Book report published in advance of Convention.
“In prior years the Committee on the State of the Church often heard the criticism that our church seemed unwilling to recognize the presence of a major source of internal controversy that some argued was having an impact on our common life, as reflected in declining membership and attendance statistics,” the Blue Book Report states. “The metaphor most often used was that we ‘failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room’, referring to what many viewed as the momentous decision by the 74th General Convention (2003) to consent to the consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire.”
There are some indications that what the committee describes as “tensions” are growing in congregations. In a similar survey undertaken in 2005, 37 percent of congregations reported serious conflict that resulted in at least some members leaving. About one-third of those responding in 2005 attributed the conflict to decisions made during the 2003 General Convention. In a similar survey conducted in 2008, 64 percent of congregations reported some level of conflict over the ordination of homosexual clergy, with most reporting such conflict to be serious.
“Overall, 47 percent of Episcopal congregations had serious conflict over this issue, 40 percent indicated that some people left and 18 percent indicated that some people withheld funds,” the committee report states. “Furthermore, the rate of decline in Average Sunday Attendance from 2003-2007 among congregations with serious conflict over the ordination of gay clergy was 35 percent higher than congregations with no conflict over the issue (and accounted for more than double the aggregate loss).”
The report states that among the most enlightening insights gained from the survey is the skewed age structure of The Episcopal Church. The report noted that The Episcopal Church has an average 19,000 more deaths than births each year, which is comparable to the loss of an entire diocese annually.
“Despite these trends of decline, about 50 percent of ‘cradle Episcopalians’ are being retained. Detailed analysis of our survey data suggests that The Episcopal Church does make up for some of its losses through ‘transfers in’—although not nearly at the same rate as in the historic past,” the report notes. The ongoing tension and loss of membership has caused what the report describes as an “alarming” increase in the number of congregations reporting financial difficulty. In 2005, 44 percent of congregations reported experiencing some degree of financial difficulty. By the 2008 the figure had increased to 68 percent. Only one domestic diocese, South Carolina, reported growth in active members and communicants in good standing between 2003 and 2007.
The Committee on the State of the Church report constitues about 20 pages of the entire Blue Book report. Also included are canonically required reports by all of the other committees, commissions, agencies and task forces of the church. The Blue Book report also includes the proposed 2010-2012 budget as well as all of the resolutions that have been pre-filed. The complete report is more than 700 pages in length, twice as large as the report published before the 75th General Convention in 2006.
Posted on: March 27, 2009
More than five years later, tensions caused by the consecration of a partnered homosexual man as Bishop Coadjutor of New Hampshire continue to affect half of all Episcopal churches, according to census information compiled in the Blue Book prepared for the 76th General Convention, to be held July 8-17 in Anaheim, Calif.
The report, based on results from 783 completed surveys, is a sober snapshot of an aging denomination, struggling with unresolved conflict and in danger of long-term decline. It was written by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church and included in the Blue Book report published in advance of Convention.
“In prior years the Committee on the State of the Church often heard the criticism that our church seemed unwilling to recognize the presence of a major source of internal controversy that some argued was having an impact on our common life, as reflected in declining membership and attendance statistics,” the Blue Book Report states. “The metaphor most often used was that we ‘failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room’, referring to what many viewed as the momentous decision by the 74th General Convention (2003) to consent to the consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire.”
There are some indications that what the committee describes as “tensions” are growing in congregations. In a similar survey undertaken in 2005, 37 percent of congregations reported serious conflict that resulted in at least some members leaving. About one-third of those responding in 2005 attributed the conflict to decisions made during the 2003 General Convention. In a similar survey conducted in 2008, 64 percent of congregations reported some level of conflict over the ordination of homosexual clergy, with most reporting such conflict to be serious.
“Overall, 47 percent of Episcopal congregations had serious conflict over this issue, 40 percent indicated that some people left and 18 percent indicated that some people withheld funds,” the committee report states. “Furthermore, the rate of decline in Average Sunday Attendance from 2003-2007 among congregations with serious conflict over the ordination of gay clergy was 35 percent higher than congregations with no conflict over the issue (and accounted for more than double the aggregate loss).”
The report states that among the most enlightening insights gained from the survey is the skewed age structure of The Episcopal Church. The report noted that The Episcopal Church has an average 19,000 more deaths than births each year, which is comparable to the loss of an entire diocese annually.
“Despite these trends of decline, about 50 percent of ‘cradle Episcopalians’ are being retained. Detailed analysis of our survey data suggests that The Episcopal Church does make up for some of its losses through ‘transfers in’—although not nearly at the same rate as in the historic past,” the report notes. The ongoing tension and loss of membership has caused what the report describes as an “alarming” increase in the number of congregations reporting financial difficulty. In 2005, 44 percent of congregations reported experiencing some degree of financial difficulty. By the 2008 the figure had increased to 68 percent. Only one domestic diocese, South Carolina, reported growth in active members and communicants in good standing between 2003 and 2007.
The Committee on the State of the Church report constitues about 20 pages of the entire Blue Book report. Also included are canonically required reports by all of the other committees, commissions, agencies and task forces of the church. The Blue Book report also includes the proposed 2010-2012 budget as well as all of the resolutions that have been pre-filed. The complete report is more than 700 pages in length, twice as large as the report published before the 75th General Convention in 2006.
Bishop of Rochester to resign a decade early
From Times Online (UK) via TitusOneNine:L
March 28, 2009
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
One of the Church of England's most outspoken bishops has announced that he is to resign a decade early to devote the rest of his life to work with Christians in Islamic areas.
The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church's only Asian bishop, who is just 59 and could have stayed at Rochester until his 70th birthday, intends to use his expertise as an Islamic scholar to work in Pakistan where he was born and in the Middle East to build bridges between Christians and Muslims.
A conservative evangelical, he will step down in September after nearly 15 years in the diocese.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali was one of the favourites to succeed Dr George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. Opposition from some in Britain's Muslim community is thought to have been one factor that cost him the job.
In February last year he was placed under police protection after he and his family received death threats over his claim that parts of Britain had become “no-go areas” for non-Muslims.
The diocese said this morning: "Bishop Michael is hoping to work with a number of church leaders from areas where the church is under pressure, particularly in minority situations, who have asked him to assist them with education and training for their particular situation. Details of this arrangement are still being worked out."
Bishop Michael, who will be 60 in August, is the 106th Bishop of Rochester. He is originally from Asia and was the first non-white Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England. He was appointed to Rochester in 1994. Before that he was the General Secretary of the Church Mission Society and before that Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan and theological Assistant to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since 1999 he has also been a member of the House of Lords where he has been active in a number of areas of national and international concern.
He has been outspoken in his criticism of the pro-gay multi-cultural agenda in both secular society and within the Anglican Communion and was a speaker at last summer's meeting of leaders of the Global South in Jerusalem, the movement set up in opposition to the pro-gay provinces in the Communion. Were evangelical churches in the Church of England to seek an "alternative" bishop to lead them or provide oversight, Dr Nazir-Ali would be an obvious choice, although one insider close to the bishop said any such speculation was "hypothetical".
In February he criticised "secularist agendas which marginalise all faith but seem especially hostile to Christianity."
He said: "The long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith seems to be getting louder: nurses cannot pray, the Creed cannot be recited at Christian services for fear of offending non-believers, Christian marriage counsellors are removed because they believe in Christian marriage and Christian adoption agencies cannot be publicly funded because they believe that children are best brought up in a family with a mother and father to look after them and provide appropriate role-models for their personal development and relationships."
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said: "Bishop Michael's decision to undertake this new and very challenging ministry will leave a real gap in the ranks of English bishops. His enormous theological skill, his specialist involvement in the complex debates around bioethics, his wide international experience and his clarity of mind and expression have made him a really valuable colleague, and he has served the Church and the wider society with dedication and distinction.
"In his new work with churches in minority situations, he will need all our prayer and support. It is a courageous initiative and a timely one. I am personally very glad that I shall still be able to draw on his expertise and friendship, and wish him every strength and blessing in his work."
The Bishop of Tonbridge, Dr Brian Castle said: “Bishop Michael has had a distinguished ministry locally, nationally and internationally. He has been a true prophet in the way that he has courageously spoken out against both injustice and compromising the Word of God. His talks and statements, always prayerfully conceived, are listened to carefully, even by those who disagree with him. His Presidential Addresses at Diocesan Synod merit publication. Bishop Michael, so faithfully supported by Valerie, has exercised a leadership which inspires, challenges and takes full account of the complexities of contemporary culture, ensuring that the structures of the diocese serve its vision. He will be greatly missed by Rochester whose people he has faithfully loved and nurtured over the years.”
The Dean of Rochester, the Very Rev Adrian Newman, said: “Bishop Michael has exercised an influential and high profile ministry within and well beyond the Diocese of Rochester. His passion for making Christ known is matched only by his ability to communicate across cultural divisions, and this has opened doors of influence that he has always been courageous enough to walk through, often at personal cost. It has been a privilege to serve alongside him within the Diocese, and I am delighted that his unique gifts will continue to be offered to the wider life of church and society.”
His farewell service for the diocese will be held at Rochester Cathedral on 12 September 2009.
Dr Nazir-Ali was the first non-white Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England and was educated in Pakistan where he was born, reading economics, social history and Islamic history at the University of Karachi and then coming to England to read theology at Fitzwilliam College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge.
In Pakistan, Michael taught at Karachi Theological College, worked as a parish priest in a poor urban area, became Provost of Lahore Cathedral and was consecrated the first Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. In 1986 he was appointed to assist with the planning and preparation for the 1988 Lambeth Conference, and so joined the staff of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Britain.
Bishop Michael is married to Valerie, and they have two sons.
March 28, 2009
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
One of the Church of England's most outspoken bishops has announced that he is to resign a decade early to devote the rest of his life to work with Christians in Islamic areas.
The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church's only Asian bishop, who is just 59 and could have stayed at Rochester until his 70th birthday, intends to use his expertise as an Islamic scholar to work in Pakistan where he was born and in the Middle East to build bridges between Christians and Muslims.
A conservative evangelical, he will step down in September after nearly 15 years in the diocese.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali was one of the favourites to succeed Dr George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. Opposition from some in Britain's Muslim community is thought to have been one factor that cost him the job.
In February last year he was placed under police protection after he and his family received death threats over his claim that parts of Britain had become “no-go areas” for non-Muslims.
The diocese said this morning: "Bishop Michael is hoping to work with a number of church leaders from areas where the church is under pressure, particularly in minority situations, who have asked him to assist them with education and training for their particular situation. Details of this arrangement are still being worked out."
Bishop Michael, who will be 60 in August, is the 106th Bishop of Rochester. He is originally from Asia and was the first non-white Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England. He was appointed to Rochester in 1994. Before that he was the General Secretary of the Church Mission Society and before that Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan and theological Assistant to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since 1999 he has also been a member of the House of Lords where he has been active in a number of areas of national and international concern.
He has been outspoken in his criticism of the pro-gay multi-cultural agenda in both secular society and within the Anglican Communion and was a speaker at last summer's meeting of leaders of the Global South in Jerusalem, the movement set up in opposition to the pro-gay provinces in the Communion. Were evangelical churches in the Church of England to seek an "alternative" bishop to lead them or provide oversight, Dr Nazir-Ali would be an obvious choice, although one insider close to the bishop said any such speculation was "hypothetical".
In February he criticised "secularist agendas which marginalise all faith but seem especially hostile to Christianity."
He said: "The long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith seems to be getting louder: nurses cannot pray, the Creed cannot be recited at Christian services for fear of offending non-believers, Christian marriage counsellors are removed because they believe in Christian marriage and Christian adoption agencies cannot be publicly funded because they believe that children are best brought up in a family with a mother and father to look after them and provide appropriate role-models for their personal development and relationships."
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said: "Bishop Michael's decision to undertake this new and very challenging ministry will leave a real gap in the ranks of English bishops. His enormous theological skill, his specialist involvement in the complex debates around bioethics, his wide international experience and his clarity of mind and expression have made him a really valuable colleague, and he has served the Church and the wider society with dedication and distinction.
"In his new work with churches in minority situations, he will need all our prayer and support. It is a courageous initiative and a timely one. I am personally very glad that I shall still be able to draw on his expertise and friendship, and wish him every strength and blessing in his work."
The Bishop of Tonbridge, Dr Brian Castle said: “Bishop Michael has had a distinguished ministry locally, nationally and internationally. He has been a true prophet in the way that he has courageously spoken out against both injustice and compromising the Word of God. His talks and statements, always prayerfully conceived, are listened to carefully, even by those who disagree with him. His Presidential Addresses at Diocesan Synod merit publication. Bishop Michael, so faithfully supported by Valerie, has exercised a leadership which inspires, challenges and takes full account of the complexities of contemporary culture, ensuring that the structures of the diocese serve its vision. He will be greatly missed by Rochester whose people he has faithfully loved and nurtured over the years.”
The Dean of Rochester, the Very Rev Adrian Newman, said: “Bishop Michael has exercised an influential and high profile ministry within and well beyond the Diocese of Rochester. His passion for making Christ known is matched only by his ability to communicate across cultural divisions, and this has opened doors of influence that he has always been courageous enough to walk through, often at personal cost. It has been a privilege to serve alongside him within the Diocese, and I am delighted that his unique gifts will continue to be offered to the wider life of church and society.”
His farewell service for the diocese will be held at Rochester Cathedral on 12 September 2009.
Dr Nazir-Ali was the first non-white Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England and was educated in Pakistan where he was born, reading economics, social history and Islamic history at the University of Karachi and then coming to England to read theology at Fitzwilliam College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge.
In Pakistan, Michael taught at Karachi Theological College, worked as a parish priest in a poor urban area, became Provost of Lahore Cathedral and was consecrated the first Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. In 1986 he was appointed to assist with the planning and preparation for the 1988 Lambeth Conference, and so joined the staff of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Britain.
Bishop Michael is married to Valerie, and they have two sons.
Muslim Priest and Buddhist Bishop-Elect Are Raising Questions About Syncretism
From Christianity Today via TitusOneNine:
For years, Episcopal Church leaders have taught that God can be found in other faiths. Now some clergy are pursuing him there.
by George Conger | posted 3/27/2009 09:29AM
Jesus saves, the Episcopal Church teaches, but a growing number of its clergy and leaders believe other faiths may lead to salvation as well. Long divided and distracted by questions of sexual ethics, the Episcopal Church (along with most mainline Protestant communities) are facing a cultural and theological shift towards religious pluralism—the belief that there are diverse paths to God.
The debate is not just academic. In two current cases, Episcopal clergy are under scrutiny for practicing and promoting other religions. On February 12 a devotee of Zen Buddhism was elected bishop of the Episcopal Church's Northern Michigan diocese. Meanwhile, a Seattle-area priest has been given until March 30 to decide whether she is a Muslim or a Christian as her bishop will not permit her to profess both faiths.
The Episcopal Church's problems with syncretism—the blending of belief systems—comes as no surprise to Wade Clark Roof, professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a leading sociologist of religion. "Clearly there are people, including religious leaders, [who find] spiritual wisdom in faiths other than their own," he told Christianity Today.
This openness to other faiths is "in some respects good in an age of global religious diversity when tolerance and respect are essential to our peace if not our survival," he said. There is also something healthy about seeing "Christ in the face of the other," he said, quoting Thomas Merton. "It implies not just acceptance of the religious other, but something of the intrinsic similarities among people despite their differences."
But the spread of syncretism within mainstream Christianity is an even greater threat to the church than the 2003 election of a gay bishop, Episcopal theologian Kendall Harmon of South Carolina told Christianity Today. It imperils interfaith dialogue by detaching Christianity from its doctrinal and historical core, he argued. "To be a Christian is to worship Jesus," Harmon said. "To lose that is to lose the center of Christian truth and identity."
The shift towards pluralism has been long in coming. In his 1993 book, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation, Roof reported that surveys of American baby boomers—Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, liberal or conservative—all showed a trend towards religious consumerism. The values of the new generation were focused on choice, tolerance of different lifestyles, blending faith and psychology—a cafeteria-style religion where you believe in whatever works best for you.
Roof called this individualistic religious consumerism "transformed narcissism," and predicted it would come to dominate American religious life. The results of an August 2008 study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life appear to bear him out: a majority of American Christians (52%) believe that some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life.
Even a significant minority (47%) of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that many religions can lead to eternal life, the Pew Forum found. Of these evangelicals who say there are multiple paths to salvation, 35 percent believe that Islam and 33 percent believe that Hinduism can lead to eternal life, while 26 percent believe that atheists can achieve eternal life.
While the question of salvation outside the Christian faith is not new, the recent cultural movement toward religious pluralism has found champions among theologians. "Pluralists" such as the Presbyterian theologian John Hick and Roman Catholics Paul Knitter and Raimon Panikkar have argued that Christianity does not have the right to make an exclusive claim to the truth.
For the rest of the article, go to:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/marchweb-only/112-53.0.html
For years, Episcopal Church leaders have taught that God can be found in other faiths. Now some clergy are pursuing him there.
by George Conger | posted 3/27/2009 09:29AM
Jesus saves, the Episcopal Church teaches, but a growing number of its clergy and leaders believe other faiths may lead to salvation as well. Long divided and distracted by questions of sexual ethics, the Episcopal Church (along with most mainline Protestant communities) are facing a cultural and theological shift towards religious pluralism—the belief that there are diverse paths to God.
The debate is not just academic. In two current cases, Episcopal clergy are under scrutiny for practicing and promoting other religions. On February 12 a devotee of Zen Buddhism was elected bishop of the Episcopal Church's Northern Michigan diocese. Meanwhile, a Seattle-area priest has been given until March 30 to decide whether she is a Muslim or a Christian as her bishop will not permit her to profess both faiths.
The Episcopal Church's problems with syncretism—the blending of belief systems—comes as no surprise to Wade Clark Roof, professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a leading sociologist of religion. "Clearly there are people, including religious leaders, [who find] spiritual wisdom in faiths other than their own," he told Christianity Today.
This openness to other faiths is "in some respects good in an age of global religious diversity when tolerance and respect are essential to our peace if not our survival," he said. There is also something healthy about seeing "Christ in the face of the other," he said, quoting Thomas Merton. "It implies not just acceptance of the religious other, but something of the intrinsic similarities among people despite their differences."
But the spread of syncretism within mainstream Christianity is an even greater threat to the church than the 2003 election of a gay bishop, Episcopal theologian Kendall Harmon of South Carolina told Christianity Today. It imperils interfaith dialogue by detaching Christianity from its doctrinal and historical core, he argued. "To be a Christian is to worship Jesus," Harmon said. "To lose that is to lose the center of Christian truth and identity."
The shift towards pluralism has been long in coming. In his 1993 book, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation, Roof reported that surveys of American baby boomers—Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, liberal or conservative—all showed a trend towards religious consumerism. The values of the new generation were focused on choice, tolerance of different lifestyles, blending faith and psychology—a cafeteria-style religion where you believe in whatever works best for you.
Roof called this individualistic religious consumerism "transformed narcissism," and predicted it would come to dominate American religious life. The results of an August 2008 study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life appear to bear him out: a majority of American Christians (52%) believe that some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life.
Even a significant minority (47%) of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that many religions can lead to eternal life, the Pew Forum found. Of these evangelicals who say there are multiple paths to salvation, 35 percent believe that Islam and 33 percent believe that Hinduism can lead to eternal life, while 26 percent believe that atheists can achieve eternal life.
While the question of salvation outside the Christian faith is not new, the recent cultural movement toward religious pluralism has found champions among theologians. "Pluralists" such as the Presbyterian theologian John Hick and Roman Catholics Paul Knitter and Raimon Panikkar have argued that Christianity does not have the right to make an exclusive claim to the truth.
For the rest of the article, go to:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/marchweb-only/112-53.0.html
Friday, March 27, 2009
The Scandal of Sexual Restraint
Commentary
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/27/2009
Nothing scandalizes liberals more than the idea of sexual restraint. Anything or anyone in The Episcopal Church who dares to stand up and say homosexual behavior is wrong is automatically branded homophobic, narrow-minded, and uninclusive causing immediate pain to New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson.
So it should come as no surprise then that in his one and only conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Williams berated Robinson for bypassing the process and not doing his theological homework when making the case for homogenital sex.
Robinson reported recently that the ABC lectured him on how he should have studied, written, theologized, made canons, and rules, and so forth before The Episcopal Church ever took this action which has been so disruptive to the Communion.
Now it is interesting to note that nowhere did Robinson report Dr. Williams saying that homosexual behavior was abhorrent and wrong or that it might preclude Robinson from the Kingdom of God (I Cor. 6:9) along with adulterers and fornicators, as well as drunkards, revilers and swindlers. (There is no reason not to exclude Bernie Madoff, a secular Jew, from the company of the damned along with Gene Robinson).
Williams, however, was more interested in the failure of TEC not doing the hard theological work necessary to reach the point that he, presumably, had already reached, based on his understanding of the Bronze Age texts of Holy Scripture and his friendship of many years with Dean Jeffrey John. Williams concluded that sodomy is good and right in the eyes of God (see the Body's Grace lecture), and he expected Episcopal Church leaders to believe the same -- after they had done their homework. They hadn't and Robinson got scolded.
Ironically, Robinson got the last word with the ABC when he likened the radical response to his consecration to the irregular ordination of eleven women in 1974 in Philadelphia - women who were not following the rules, but breaking them.
Robinson told Williams that it turned out to be the right thing to do. Two years later PECUSA began regularly ordaining women to the church. Quoth Robinson, "Had they not done that, how long do you think it would have taken this church to get around to it? Would we still have an all-male priesthood?' It seems to me that, by God's grace, we sometimes do the right thing and then think our way to it."
There is no record if Williams responded to this. Robinson does not tell us. If the ABC did not answer, then Robinson won the argument. Perverse and profane sexual behavior is equal in ecclesiology to irregular ordinations. QED
The reason Robinson won the argument is because Williams was not prepared to say that homosexual behavior was unbiblical, dangerous, unhealthy, perverse, and a communion breaking act. Had he done so, he might then have had the upper hand to suggest that women's ordination was wrong and that The Episcopal Church had failed to do its homework on that issue as well.
Robinson is winning the culture wars in the church because deep down Williams actually believes that Robinson is right, but he doesn't like what it is doing to his leadership of the communion. Human sexuality for Robinson is a first tier issue trumping the gospel while for Williams it is a second tier issue to the primary issue of having an Anglican "communion" - without caring what it stands for or what it preaches.
The problem with that argument, at an empirical and theological level, is that it goes against the entire corpus of Christian teaching throughout the ages. It is soundly rejected by almost the entire Global South along with orthodox Episcopalians and numerous North American Anglicans, thousands of whom have broken from The Episcopal Church. For them, it IS a salvation issue. They are clear about that, drawn from the seven Scriptural prohibitions against homosexuality. Why then should they risk their souls and the millions who follow them by changing the received teaching of the church after 2,000 years (closer to 6,000 years) because a handful of 21st Century pansexualists like Louie Crew, Gene Robinson, Susan Russell and Otis Charles demand it? Who do they think they are that they believe they can change God's mind for Him and risk their own souls and ours into the bargain? That's playing Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber.
It should come as no surprise that Pope Benedict XVI got into hot water recently, and mainstream media lost it, when he dared to suggest that behavioral changes could have greater success in slowing down the spread of AIDS in Africa than throwing condoms at the problem. His critics said he was an intolerant bigot who is out of step with the times - and represents the last great bastion of institutionalized anti-homosexual hatred.
The primary communicator of AIDS in the West is homosexual men indulging in anal sex. In Africa and other countries, it is heterosexually transmitted through promiscuous sexual behavior. And the Pope condemned it. Is it any wonder then that TEC passed Resolution D039 to allow fornication (the first sexual foot in the door) and sodomy naturally followed? Subsequent resolutions have only confirmed that sex outside of marriage is a given for the majority of Episcopalians, certainly its movers and shakers.
But the Pope would have none of it. He went on to say homosexual acts are a sin, a violation of the natural moral order. He stressed that behavior beyond heterosexual monogamy is a "destruction of God's work."
He saw the deeper issue of promiscuity, that is any kind of sexual indulgence outside of heterosexual marriage, and got vilified for it as a denier of human rights.
Sexual behavior has nothing to do with human rights. Sex is a gift, not a right. We have no right (or Rite) to sex. There have been countless saints throughout history who have contributed mightily to missions and the church, who never married, (many of them we later learn in their biographies) wrestled with same-sex attractions.
Are they lesser in their humanity because they did not fulfill themselves sexually? Who would deny the saintly Mother Teresa her magnificent work, or the decades-long Biblical ministry of the Rev. Dr. John R.W. Stott or St. Paul, even Jesus himself.
On finding gay stories in the Bible, Robinson had the effrontery, in an interview, to say that the Exodus story "was the greatest coming out story in the history of the world." Really. "We know what it is like to be in slavery. We know what it is like to be in bondage. We know what it's like not to be free." This is exegetical nonsense. This is to turn both the nature of slavery and freedom completely on its head.
The truth is Robinson is in bondage to sexual sin and he wants us to join him for a freedom that is no freedom at all. Christ has set us free from sin. Robinson wants us to wallow in it. God's love does not embrace sexual sin. It demands that we repent of it.
If that is not the case, when St. Paul writes "that neither fornicators, adulterers and homosexuals will enter the kingdom...", then, according to Robinson, homosexuals will now be given a pass. What about the other two behaviors? Inclusion should not stop at the door of sodomy. Love all. Embrace all. If that is the case, The Episcopal Church should not have inhibited Cy Jones, the former Bishop of Montana. TEC is exercising a double standard here. Paul Moore, the late Bishop of New York, should be elevated to sainthood for his sexual promiscuity.
For this reason, we cannot keep silent. Columnist Rod Dreher rightly observes you can do as much harm by failing to effectively proclaim the truth as you can by proclaiming a lie. Emphasis on "effectively," because clearly, different arguments are necessary for our postmodern cultural environment, in which the autonomous individual is widely considered to be the source of authority.
That is precisely what is happening in The Episcopal Church. It is the triumph of one individual, of Gene Robinson declaring homogenital behavior is right, because he says so. Scriptural prohibitions be damned. The Windsor Report be damned as well. Any Covenant that is written that restricts sexual behavior to heterosexual marriage be damned as well.
The other lie constantly being trotted out is violence against gays. It is so minimal that it barely registers on police blotters, whereas gay on gay violence is huge, according to the Center for Disease Control. The passage of Lambeth 1:10 in 1998 was another example of excited outrage by homosexuals who said its passage would result in their persecution. It never happened. VOL recorded, at that time, that an orthodox Nigerian bishop was attacked by a gang of thugs in London because of the passage of Lambeth 1:10. The liberal media never touched it.
It also never happened at Robinson's consecration. I was there. Security was tighter than most airports in America. Robinson has continually exploited his flak jacket "they are going to shoot me nonsense" to gain sympathy for him and his cause. Despite the fact that Robinson and Frank Griswold both wore flak jackets, there was absolutely never any danger of either man being shot.
As The Episcopal Church slowly disintegrates, its leaders, in an effort to keep everyone at the table, say they want to honor everybody's journey, but that is a dangerous course to follow. John Bunyan discovered that in 'Pilgrim's Progress". There was a broad road (journey) that led to destruction and there was a narrow way that led to the cross and ultimately glory. We all know which road he took. Following Gene Robinson and the vast majority now in The Episcopal Church will lead to eternal destruction. That is a journey you do not want to be on.
END
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/27/2009
Nothing scandalizes liberals more than the idea of sexual restraint. Anything or anyone in The Episcopal Church who dares to stand up and say homosexual behavior is wrong is automatically branded homophobic, narrow-minded, and uninclusive causing immediate pain to New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson.
So it should come as no surprise then that in his one and only conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Williams berated Robinson for bypassing the process and not doing his theological homework when making the case for homogenital sex.
Robinson reported recently that the ABC lectured him on how he should have studied, written, theologized, made canons, and rules, and so forth before The Episcopal Church ever took this action which has been so disruptive to the Communion.
Now it is interesting to note that nowhere did Robinson report Dr. Williams saying that homosexual behavior was abhorrent and wrong or that it might preclude Robinson from the Kingdom of God (I Cor. 6:9) along with adulterers and fornicators, as well as drunkards, revilers and swindlers. (There is no reason not to exclude Bernie Madoff, a secular Jew, from the company of the damned along with Gene Robinson).
Williams, however, was more interested in the failure of TEC not doing the hard theological work necessary to reach the point that he, presumably, had already reached, based on his understanding of the Bronze Age texts of Holy Scripture and his friendship of many years with Dean Jeffrey John. Williams concluded that sodomy is good and right in the eyes of God (see the Body's Grace lecture), and he expected Episcopal Church leaders to believe the same -- after they had done their homework. They hadn't and Robinson got scolded.
Ironically, Robinson got the last word with the ABC when he likened the radical response to his consecration to the irregular ordination of eleven women in 1974 in Philadelphia - women who were not following the rules, but breaking them.
Robinson told Williams that it turned out to be the right thing to do. Two years later PECUSA began regularly ordaining women to the church. Quoth Robinson, "Had they not done that, how long do you think it would have taken this church to get around to it? Would we still have an all-male priesthood?' It seems to me that, by God's grace, we sometimes do the right thing and then think our way to it."
There is no record if Williams responded to this. Robinson does not tell us. If the ABC did not answer, then Robinson won the argument. Perverse and profane sexual behavior is equal in ecclesiology to irregular ordinations. QED
The reason Robinson won the argument is because Williams was not prepared to say that homosexual behavior was unbiblical, dangerous, unhealthy, perverse, and a communion breaking act. Had he done so, he might then have had the upper hand to suggest that women's ordination was wrong and that The Episcopal Church had failed to do its homework on that issue as well.
Robinson is winning the culture wars in the church because deep down Williams actually believes that Robinson is right, but he doesn't like what it is doing to his leadership of the communion. Human sexuality for Robinson is a first tier issue trumping the gospel while for Williams it is a second tier issue to the primary issue of having an Anglican "communion" - without caring what it stands for or what it preaches.
The problem with that argument, at an empirical and theological level, is that it goes against the entire corpus of Christian teaching throughout the ages. It is soundly rejected by almost the entire Global South along with orthodox Episcopalians and numerous North American Anglicans, thousands of whom have broken from The Episcopal Church. For them, it IS a salvation issue. They are clear about that, drawn from the seven Scriptural prohibitions against homosexuality. Why then should they risk their souls and the millions who follow them by changing the received teaching of the church after 2,000 years (closer to 6,000 years) because a handful of 21st Century pansexualists like Louie Crew, Gene Robinson, Susan Russell and Otis Charles demand it? Who do they think they are that they believe they can change God's mind for Him and risk their own souls and ours into the bargain? That's playing Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber.
It should come as no surprise that Pope Benedict XVI got into hot water recently, and mainstream media lost it, when he dared to suggest that behavioral changes could have greater success in slowing down the spread of AIDS in Africa than throwing condoms at the problem. His critics said he was an intolerant bigot who is out of step with the times - and represents the last great bastion of institutionalized anti-homosexual hatred.
The primary communicator of AIDS in the West is homosexual men indulging in anal sex. In Africa and other countries, it is heterosexually transmitted through promiscuous sexual behavior. And the Pope condemned it. Is it any wonder then that TEC passed Resolution D039 to allow fornication (the first sexual foot in the door) and sodomy naturally followed? Subsequent resolutions have only confirmed that sex outside of marriage is a given for the majority of Episcopalians, certainly its movers and shakers.
But the Pope would have none of it. He went on to say homosexual acts are a sin, a violation of the natural moral order. He stressed that behavior beyond heterosexual monogamy is a "destruction of God's work."
He saw the deeper issue of promiscuity, that is any kind of sexual indulgence outside of heterosexual marriage, and got vilified for it as a denier of human rights.
Sexual behavior has nothing to do with human rights. Sex is a gift, not a right. We have no right (or Rite) to sex. There have been countless saints throughout history who have contributed mightily to missions and the church, who never married, (many of them we later learn in their biographies) wrestled with same-sex attractions.
Are they lesser in their humanity because they did not fulfill themselves sexually? Who would deny the saintly Mother Teresa her magnificent work, or the decades-long Biblical ministry of the Rev. Dr. John R.W. Stott or St. Paul, even Jesus himself.
On finding gay stories in the Bible, Robinson had the effrontery, in an interview, to say that the Exodus story "was the greatest coming out story in the history of the world." Really. "We know what it is like to be in slavery. We know what it is like to be in bondage. We know what it's like not to be free." This is exegetical nonsense. This is to turn both the nature of slavery and freedom completely on its head.
The truth is Robinson is in bondage to sexual sin and he wants us to join him for a freedom that is no freedom at all. Christ has set us free from sin. Robinson wants us to wallow in it. God's love does not embrace sexual sin. It demands that we repent of it.
If that is not the case, when St. Paul writes "that neither fornicators, adulterers and homosexuals will enter the kingdom...", then, according to Robinson, homosexuals will now be given a pass. What about the other two behaviors? Inclusion should not stop at the door of sodomy. Love all. Embrace all. If that is the case, The Episcopal Church should not have inhibited Cy Jones, the former Bishop of Montana. TEC is exercising a double standard here. Paul Moore, the late Bishop of New York, should be elevated to sainthood for his sexual promiscuity.
For this reason, we cannot keep silent. Columnist Rod Dreher rightly observes you can do as much harm by failing to effectively proclaim the truth as you can by proclaiming a lie. Emphasis on "effectively," because clearly, different arguments are necessary for our postmodern cultural environment, in which the autonomous individual is widely considered to be the source of authority.
That is precisely what is happening in The Episcopal Church. It is the triumph of one individual, of Gene Robinson declaring homogenital behavior is right, because he says so. Scriptural prohibitions be damned. The Windsor Report be damned as well. Any Covenant that is written that restricts sexual behavior to heterosexual marriage be damned as well.
The other lie constantly being trotted out is violence against gays. It is so minimal that it barely registers on police blotters, whereas gay on gay violence is huge, according to the Center for Disease Control. The passage of Lambeth 1:10 in 1998 was another example of excited outrage by homosexuals who said its passage would result in their persecution. It never happened. VOL recorded, at that time, that an orthodox Nigerian bishop was attacked by a gang of thugs in London because of the passage of Lambeth 1:10. The liberal media never touched it.
It also never happened at Robinson's consecration. I was there. Security was tighter than most airports in America. Robinson has continually exploited his flak jacket "they are going to shoot me nonsense" to gain sympathy for him and his cause. Despite the fact that Robinson and Frank Griswold both wore flak jackets, there was absolutely never any danger of either man being shot.
As The Episcopal Church slowly disintegrates, its leaders, in an effort to keep everyone at the table, say they want to honor everybody's journey, but that is a dangerous course to follow. John Bunyan discovered that in 'Pilgrim's Progress". There was a broad road (journey) that led to destruction and there was a narrow way that led to the cross and ultimately glory. We all know which road he took. Following Gene Robinson and the vast majority now in The Episcopal Church will lead to eternal destruction. That is a journey you do not want to be on.
END
New AMIA parish in CA
From VirtueOnline:
St. Paul's, Modesto, California made it official and left TEC to come under the Anglican Missions in the Americas. Their new bishop is Sandy Greene. This parish, under the Rev. Michael McCleneghan, decided not to go with Bishop John-David Schofield. A fuller story on this will be forthcoming, shortly.
St. Paul's, Modesto, California made it official and left TEC to come under the Anglican Missions in the Americas. Their new bishop is Sandy Greene. This parish, under the Rev. Michael McCleneghan, decided not to go with Bishop John-David Schofield. A fuller story on this will be forthcoming, shortly.
David Virtue on lawsuits and church closings in the DCNY
From VirtueOnline:
If you doubt my words, consider what is happening in the DIOCESE OF CENTRAL NEW YORK where Bishop Skip Adams won the property of The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton and is now going after the will of a former member who died in 1986 leaving behind money in a trust fund for his parish. The diocese wants to get its hands on that so it can prop up a number of failing parishes. So it's back to court they go. Last year, the Diocese sued for Good Shepherd to leave the church building on Conklin Avenue. In December, a state Supreme Court judge ruled in their favor.
But the victory is pyrrhic because the bishop faces half a dozen churches or more that will shortly have to close. They include Trinity, which claims 350 members but has an ASA of 40. Emmanuel in Elmira, (ASA 16), Grace in Elmira, (ASA 98), St. John's in Elmira Heights, (ASA 18), St. Matthew's in Horseheads, (ASA 98), Christ Church in Wellsburg (ASA 13), and Grace Church in Waverly (ASA 28). Total: 311. Together they will not make up the departing congregation of Good Shepherd. These seven churches have Plate & Pledge amounts in 2007 of $70,000; 24,000; 140,000; 14,000; 130,000; 12,000; and 28,000 respectively.\
If you doubt my words, consider what is happening in the DIOCESE OF CENTRAL NEW YORK where Bishop Skip Adams won the property of The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton and is now going after the will of a former member who died in 1986 leaving behind money in a trust fund for his parish. The diocese wants to get its hands on that so it can prop up a number of failing parishes. So it's back to court they go. Last year, the Diocese sued for Good Shepherd to leave the church building on Conklin Avenue. In December, a state Supreme Court judge ruled in their favor.
But the victory is pyrrhic because the bishop faces half a dozen churches or more that will shortly have to close. They include Trinity, which claims 350 members but has an ASA of 40. Emmanuel in Elmira, (ASA 16), Grace in Elmira, (ASA 98), St. John's in Elmira Heights, (ASA 18), St. Matthew's in Horseheads, (ASA 98), Christ Church in Wellsburg (ASA 13), and Grace Church in Waverly (ASA 28). Total: 311. Together they will not make up the departing congregation of Good Shepherd. These seven churches have Plate & Pledge amounts in 2007 of $70,000; 24,000; 140,000; 14,000; 130,000; 12,000; and 28,000 respectively.\
The Ignorance of the Laity, in TEC and Elsewhere
From Positive Infinity (blog) via Stand Firm:
25 March 2009, me @ 16:34
A.S. Haley may have missed the unintentional humour of Judge Larry Schwartz in his decision favouring TEC in the case involving Grace Church and St. Stephens in Colorado. Part of his decision reads as follows:
For one thing, it appears to be rare that parish members, induding members of the governing Vestry, know anything about the details of canon law. In fact, Bishop O’Neil testified that no one expects church members to know much about the canons. That testimony is consistent with what was testified to by lay members of the parish; all of whom said they knew little or nothing about the canons. Thus, when the parish executes a document that pledges fidelity to canon law, it does so without members of the parish having actual knowledge or understanding of what it is that is being adopted.
Many years ago, I took Fluid Mechanics as part of my engineering education. Our teacher was Prof. Edwin Sereno Holdredge, a Lenoir City, TN native (and UTK graduate, for you Vols fans) whose dry East Tennessee humour escaped many of his urban, Texas raised students. One time he was talking about some consulting work for the Army about fluid flow around buildings. He said that “They said they didn’t know anything about fluid flow around buildings,” and then added, “They were right, they didn’t.” (Those of you involved with the military will have a special appreciation for that!)
Nevertheless, it’s amazing that laity, who invest their lives and time in their local church and denomination, are a) so ignorant about the workings of their church and b) so unable to have input on it because of the way their church actually works. As Judge Schwartz goes on to opine:
For another, canons are essentially created and imposed unilaterally. They appear always to have been adopted at the National Convention. Once they are adopted, they are imposed on all parishes through publication in the Episcopal Book of Canons. Even though the board that recommends changes to canons is made up of representatives from individual parishes, the canons are still ultimately imposed upon individual parishes from the hierarchy of bishops. Application of canon law is based more upon membership in the Episcopal Church than it is upon adoption through a democratic process where all individual church members participate.
And, I might add, TEC isn’t the only church which has this problem, either. The undemocratic nature of this is evident, but when it comes to property disputes, it may have legal implications if a court would decide to pursue the matter. Judge Schwartz goes on:
The perceptual legal problem with this procedure is the one argued by these Plaintiffs and those in other schism cases: that under a “neutral principles” analysis, it is difficult to understand how unilaterally imposed canons can create a legal trust relationship. While the canons form the basis for govemance within the Episcopal religion, they are usually unknown to all but the clergy and they don’t create a trust relationship in the manner one normally comes to expect. Unlike the secular “norm”, the canons purport to create a trust through a process that is the opposite of most estate situations. That is, the trust is created by the beneficiary of that trust and is imposed unilaterally on the settlor/trustee.
Fortunately for TEC (and other centrally held churches,) this Colorado court, like its counterparts in California, have held the Dennis Canon to have created the trust that owns the property, irrespective of how little input the laity (or most anyone else in the church) have had in its creation. But the possibility exists that, in the future, a court could go the other way based on the way in which this “trust” is created. That’s especially a problem for TEC because of the ex post facto nature of the Dennis Canon (the Church of God’s practice is more consistent,) but up to now such a court has not been found.
In the meanwhile, it would behoove churches to make their laity more participants than spectators in the life of the church. It’s consistent with the New Testament concept of the role of the laity and, as we saw recently in Conneticut, there’s a move out there to impose that on churches. It hasn’t succeeded. Yet.
25 March 2009, me @ 16:34
A.S. Haley may have missed the unintentional humour of Judge Larry Schwartz in his decision favouring TEC in the case involving Grace Church and St. Stephens in Colorado. Part of his decision reads as follows:
For one thing, it appears to be rare that parish members, induding members of the governing Vestry, know anything about the details of canon law. In fact, Bishop O’Neil testified that no one expects church members to know much about the canons. That testimony is consistent with what was testified to by lay members of the parish; all of whom said they knew little or nothing about the canons. Thus, when the parish executes a document that pledges fidelity to canon law, it does so without members of the parish having actual knowledge or understanding of what it is that is being adopted.
Many years ago, I took Fluid Mechanics as part of my engineering education. Our teacher was Prof. Edwin Sereno Holdredge, a Lenoir City, TN native (and UTK graduate, for you Vols fans) whose dry East Tennessee humour escaped many of his urban, Texas raised students. One time he was talking about some consulting work for the Army about fluid flow around buildings. He said that “They said they didn’t know anything about fluid flow around buildings,” and then added, “They were right, they didn’t.” (Those of you involved with the military will have a special appreciation for that!)
Nevertheless, it’s amazing that laity, who invest their lives and time in their local church and denomination, are a) so ignorant about the workings of their church and b) so unable to have input on it because of the way their church actually works. As Judge Schwartz goes on to opine:
For another, canons are essentially created and imposed unilaterally. They appear always to have been adopted at the National Convention. Once they are adopted, they are imposed on all parishes through publication in the Episcopal Book of Canons. Even though the board that recommends changes to canons is made up of representatives from individual parishes, the canons are still ultimately imposed upon individual parishes from the hierarchy of bishops. Application of canon law is based more upon membership in the Episcopal Church than it is upon adoption through a democratic process where all individual church members participate.
And, I might add, TEC isn’t the only church which has this problem, either. The undemocratic nature of this is evident, but when it comes to property disputes, it may have legal implications if a court would decide to pursue the matter. Judge Schwartz goes on:
The perceptual legal problem with this procedure is the one argued by these Plaintiffs and those in other schism cases: that under a “neutral principles” analysis, it is difficult to understand how unilaterally imposed canons can create a legal trust relationship. While the canons form the basis for govemance within the Episcopal religion, they are usually unknown to all but the clergy and they don’t create a trust relationship in the manner one normally comes to expect. Unlike the secular “norm”, the canons purport to create a trust through a process that is the opposite of most estate situations. That is, the trust is created by the beneficiary of that trust and is imposed unilaterally on the settlor/trustee.
Fortunately for TEC (and other centrally held churches,) this Colorado court, like its counterparts in California, have held the Dennis Canon to have created the trust that owns the property, irrespective of how little input the laity (or most anyone else in the church) have had in its creation. But the possibility exists that, in the future, a court could go the other way based on the way in which this “trust” is created. That’s especially a problem for TEC because of the ex post facto nature of the Dennis Canon (the Church of God’s practice is more consistent,) but up to now such a court has not been found.
In the meanwhile, it would behoove churches to make their laity more participants than spectators in the life of the church. It’s consistent with the New Testament concept of the role of the laity and, as we saw recently in Conneticut, there’s a move out there to impose that on churches. It hasn’t succeeded. Yet.
Zen Christian
From Creedal Christian (blog) via Stand Firm:
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Internet continues to feast on the story of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester, the so-called Buddhist bishop-elect of Northern Michigan. I just Googled the term “Buddhist bishop” and got 778,000 hits. From sites I’ve looked at, postings on this story range from support, to caution, to the charge of betrayal and deceit.
Perhaps I’m a bit slow on the draw, but I’ve just gotten around to reading the piece Forrester wrote for a diocesan publication back in 2004 entitled “Bridging the Gap: Finding a Place in East and West.” It includes the now infamous declaration:
"My soul-work entered a new stage on Pentecost, at Fortune Lake Lutheran Camp, when I, as a Christian, received Buddhist 'lay ordination' and a new name, to go along with my Christian name: Genpo (Japanese, for 'way of universal wisdom'). I now walk the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism."
Forrester has tried to explain the meaning of all this as follows:
“ … lay ordination has a different meaning in Buddhist practice than in the Christian tradition. The essence of my welcoming ceremony, which included no oaths, was a resolve to use the practice of meditation as a path to the truth of the reality of human suffering. Meditation deepens my dwelling in Christ-the-healer.”
Even if Forrester’s explanation of his “lay ordination” is accurate, his published theological statements raise serious questions about his understanding of the Christian faith and, indeed, whether or not he really subscribes to the tenets of Christianity.
Here, for example, is a passage from his 2008 Trinity Sunday sermon that goes rather far in the direction of collapsing any distinction between human beings and the Second Person of the Trinity:
"… we heard in the gospel today in Matthew that, for His community, Jesus says that all, what all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. That’s what we heard today, right? All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Well, we could slightly rephrase that and keep it, keep its true meaning, I think, if we would say: Jesus realized that all that He is, He had received from God. Jesus is the one that realized all He is, 'all I am, I have received from God.' And in response, we read in the gospels later on His response, to having received everything from God is that, 'into Your hands I commend my spirit and Thy will be done.' He receives everything from God and He returns everything to God. That is what it means that everything has been given to Jesus, all the power. His very center, the center of His heart, of His body, of His mind, is the living God. All things come from the divine source for Jesus—who He is, His self identity, His soul, that just means His understanding of who He is, He has come to realize and it’s key in that baptismal moment, that He is the very presence of the living God. That is who He is. He is one who is unified with God. ... Jesus realizes that God dwells in His very being, He is one with God, and He is one with you and me. And because He is one, He is the lifegiver. He can show us the path of life, which is the path to realizing that we are one with God. We are one with one another."
I hear this saying that we’re all just like Jesus: one with God. And that the problem is that we just don’t know it. We lack sufficient knowledge or awareness of our true identity. We are unenlightened to the unity of all that is. This reduces Jesus to little more than a sage or a teacher of wisdom, rather like Buddha (or, perhaps, the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas). And that’s a far cry from what the Nicene Creed means when it says of Jesus that he is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” (BCP, p. 358). As a consequence, Forrester undermines the faith of the Church by denying the uniqueness and the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Here’s another passage from the sermon:
"One of the amazing insights I have found in the interfaith dialogue is that, no matter what you name that source, from which all life comes—you can name that source God, Abba; you may name that source Yahweh; you may name that source Allah; you may name that source 'the great emptiness;' you can name that source many things, but what all the faiths in their wisdom have acknowledged in the interfaith dialogue is that, you and I, we’re not the source. We receive from the source, and what we are asked to do is give back to the source. In other words, what the interfaith dialogue has recognized is that there is a Trinitarian structure to life. That’s what I’m driving at this morning. We make the Trinity much too complex. The Trinitarian structure of life is this: is that everything that is comes from the source. And you can name the source what you want to name the source. And our response to that is with hearts of gratitude and thanksgiving, to return everything back to that source, and there’s a spirit who enables that return. Everything comes from God. We give it back to God. And the spirit gives us the heart of gratitude. That is the Trinitarian nature of life. And you can be a Buddhist, you can be a Muslim, you can be a Jew, and that makes sense."
There are several things to say about this passage.
First, it is deeply problematic to suggest that the world’s religious traditions are basically all saying the same thing. This requires making a distinction between a common essence to all religions on the one hand, and non-essentials such as creeds, liturgies, doctrines, dogmas, ritual practices, ethical norms, etc., on the other hand. For Forrester, the essence is “the source.” Things like the dogma of the Trinity (which he says we’ve made “much too complex”) are non-essential.
In his book No Other Name?: A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions (Orbis, 1985), Paul F. Knitter notes a few of the problems with the common essence approach to religion:
In the way they stress the distinction between essence and nonessentials, followers of the common essence school give the impression that the more one enters into and becomes one with the inner core or essence of religious experience, the less one needs the nonessentials of religions. It seems, in fact, that in order to hold to the essence, one is better off discarding the nonessentials (p. 51).
Another pitfall in this same area is the way many followers of the common essence approach subtly suggest that … the nonessentials of religion are incidental, or completely arbitrary. … It seems that anything goes; any creed, code, or cult can express the mystery of the Ultimate as long as it is personally appropriated, as long as it fits the needs of many. The doctrines, the rituals, the ethical practices of all the religions are valid; they are all equally true.
What is naively forgotten is that the external forms of religion do affect the way the Ultimate is experienced and the way that experience is lived out in daily life. It is possible that some nonessentials can distort the reality of God and lead to practices that are not in harmony with the truth and goodness of the Ultimate. Also, certain “accretions,” certain beliefs and ethical norms, may provide a more adequate image of deity or a more relevant morality than other beliefs and norms (p. 52; emphasis in text).
I think that the common essence approach expresses disrespect for the genuine, substantive differences in theology and practice that exist between religious traditions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. As an example of one such substantive difference, I note that a Buddhist notion of "the great emptiness" is not what the Church means by "God."
It’s also arrogant and dismissive to tell other people, “You say that you believe in such-and-such and that your religion teaches X, Y, and Z. But I know better. I know that you really believe – and that your religion really teaches – A, B, & C. You’re just not enlightened enough to see it.”
This passage from Forrester's sermon also reduces the dogma of the Trinity to a rather vague conception of “the Trinitarian nature of life” or the “Trinitarian structure of life” in which “everything that is comes from the source” which one can call by whatever name one chooses (“the great emptiness,” “God,” etc.). It’s not difficult to see that this has little if anything to do with the Church’s understanding of God as three Persons in one Essence. Add this to collapsing the distinction between Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity and all of humanity, and Forrester effectively jettisons the dogma of the Trinity.
A final question from Knitter’s No Other Name? seems appropriate to raise about the implications of the common essence approach in Forrester’s sermon:
Does the common essence approach too easily throw out the traditional Christian belief in the uniqueness, the normativity, and finality of the revelation given in Jesus the Christ? (p. 54)
I think the answer to this question is “yes.”
For another critical take on Forrester's sermon, check out "The Anglican Centrist."
There are also problems with Forrester’s 2004 article entitled “Finding a Place in East and West.” I’ll note just a few of them, starting with this:
"We also live in a world where not only religions, but denominations within religions, exclaim and proclaim that their way to God is the only path to salvation. The God of Abraham and Sara, of Jesus, of Mohammed, is even invoked to kill others. Fear, again, is the reason."
Pretty much everyone across the theological spectrum (excluding suicide bombers and other terrorists) condemns using the Holy as an excuse to kill others with whom we may disagree. I wonder what empirical evidence can support the blanket charge that the reason why some (most? all?) religious persons make claims to absolute truth is because they are afraid? And that this fear leads to murder? Besides being overly simplistic and reductionist, this also trivializes what’s at stake between different religious and philosophical traditions: namely, claims to truth.
Once again, this is a weakness of the common essence approach to religion, as Paul Knitter notes:
Does not such a staunch denial of any absolute religion run contrary to the nature of authentic religious experience? Does not any genuinely personal experience of the Ultimate contain a degree of absoluteness in leading one to assert that not only is this true for me but it can also be true for others? The experience of the Ultimate brings one to the natural contention, not that other religious experiences are false [although it certainly can and does do that], but that one’s own approach can also be true for them (No Other Name?, pp. 53-54).
Later in the article, Forrester writes:
"I see now a Jesus who does not raise the bar to salvation, but lowers it so far that it disappears."
I’m not sure where Forrester gets this Jesus, because such a Jesus is not portrayed in the New Testament gospels. And from what I know about the gnostic gospels, you can't find that Jesus there, either.
Then there’s Forrester’s take on sin:
"Sin has little, if anything, to do with being bad. It has everything to do, as far as I can tell, with being blind to our own goodness. And when we are blind we hurt ourselves and others – sometimes quite deeply."
Equating sin with blindness reduces the problem of sin to a matter of not being able to see. In other words, sin is a lack of enlightenment or a deficiency of proper insight. If we can just “wake up” and see things properly – including seeing our innate goodness – then everything will be okay. This fails to take seriously Christian conceptions of the nature, depths, and consequences of sin and evil.
And one more passage from Forrester:
"Zen offers a method, you might say, to see what Jesus saw in his own baptism: that we are indeed beloved by God. There is no need to cling to anything in the desperate hope that it is what will make us acceptable before God. All of creation is always already accepted by God as it is."
I’ve no quarrel with the whole “beloved by God” bit. John 3:16-17, it seems to me, provides ample justification for believing that we (and all of creation) are radically loved by God. The problem is with the parts I’ve put in italics. For in making these assertions, Forrester denies a core conviction of the New Testament: that something is deeply awry with God’s good creation, that there is a desperate need for healing and redemption that requires divine intervention. Instead, Forrester affirms that there is no need for transformation. There’s no need for intervention. There’s nothing to be saved from, a point which he makes in his Trinity Sunday sermon and which he seems to think is affirmed by the Syriac translation of the New Testament (wrongly, as I have noted elsewhere). Everything is as it should be ... if only we could just see it!
I’ve written previously of the incompatibility of the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding’s saying the shahada of Islam with her vows as a baptized and ordained Christian. And while I know more about Islam than I do about Buddhism, I’m not persuaded by what I’ve read that Forrester’s views are compatible with the Christian faith as articulated by the Holy Scripture and The Book of Common Prayer.
Indeed, if what Forrester says in his 2008 Trinity Sunday sermon and in his 2004 diocesan article are representative of his theology, then I think he is unfit for having any place in the apostolic succession. I would even go so far as to say that he shouldn't be a priest. What he is affirming in these two pieces simply cannot be reconciled with the doctrine, discipline, and worship of The Episcopal Church to which clergy have vowed to conform. And it doesn't help matters if the charges are true that he drops the Nicene Creed from the Sunday liturgy and writes Eucharistic prayers for use in principal services of worship on Sundays (both of which openly violate ordination vows). And then we have to add to all of this concerns about the search and election process that led to his nomination as bishop. What a mess!
The problem here is not that Buddhist meditation techniques might be helpful for one's spiritual life. The problem is denying the dogmatic core of the Christian faith and replacing it with something else.
Posted by Bryan Owen at 5:51 PM
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Internet continues to feast on the story of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester, the so-called Buddhist bishop-elect of Northern Michigan. I just Googled the term “Buddhist bishop” and got 778,000 hits. From sites I’ve looked at, postings on this story range from support, to caution, to the charge of betrayal and deceit.
Perhaps I’m a bit slow on the draw, but I’ve just gotten around to reading the piece Forrester wrote for a diocesan publication back in 2004 entitled “Bridging the Gap: Finding a Place in East and West.” It includes the now infamous declaration:
"My soul-work entered a new stage on Pentecost, at Fortune Lake Lutheran Camp, when I, as a Christian, received Buddhist 'lay ordination' and a new name, to go along with my Christian name: Genpo (Japanese, for 'way of universal wisdom'). I now walk the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism."
Forrester has tried to explain the meaning of all this as follows:
“ … lay ordination has a different meaning in Buddhist practice than in the Christian tradition. The essence of my welcoming ceremony, which included no oaths, was a resolve to use the practice of meditation as a path to the truth of the reality of human suffering. Meditation deepens my dwelling in Christ-the-healer.”
Even if Forrester’s explanation of his “lay ordination” is accurate, his published theological statements raise serious questions about his understanding of the Christian faith and, indeed, whether or not he really subscribes to the tenets of Christianity.
Here, for example, is a passage from his 2008 Trinity Sunday sermon that goes rather far in the direction of collapsing any distinction between human beings and the Second Person of the Trinity:
"… we heard in the gospel today in Matthew that, for His community, Jesus says that all, what all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. That’s what we heard today, right? All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Well, we could slightly rephrase that and keep it, keep its true meaning, I think, if we would say: Jesus realized that all that He is, He had received from God. Jesus is the one that realized all He is, 'all I am, I have received from God.' And in response, we read in the gospels later on His response, to having received everything from God is that, 'into Your hands I commend my spirit and Thy will be done.' He receives everything from God and He returns everything to God. That is what it means that everything has been given to Jesus, all the power. His very center, the center of His heart, of His body, of His mind, is the living God. All things come from the divine source for Jesus—who He is, His self identity, His soul, that just means His understanding of who He is, He has come to realize and it’s key in that baptismal moment, that He is the very presence of the living God. That is who He is. He is one who is unified with God. ... Jesus realizes that God dwells in His very being, He is one with God, and He is one with you and me. And because He is one, He is the lifegiver. He can show us the path of life, which is the path to realizing that we are one with God. We are one with one another."
I hear this saying that we’re all just like Jesus: one with God. And that the problem is that we just don’t know it. We lack sufficient knowledge or awareness of our true identity. We are unenlightened to the unity of all that is. This reduces Jesus to little more than a sage or a teacher of wisdom, rather like Buddha (or, perhaps, the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas). And that’s a far cry from what the Nicene Creed means when it says of Jesus that he is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” (BCP, p. 358). As a consequence, Forrester undermines the faith of the Church by denying the uniqueness and the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Here’s another passage from the sermon:
"One of the amazing insights I have found in the interfaith dialogue is that, no matter what you name that source, from which all life comes—you can name that source God, Abba; you may name that source Yahweh; you may name that source Allah; you may name that source 'the great emptiness;' you can name that source many things, but what all the faiths in their wisdom have acknowledged in the interfaith dialogue is that, you and I, we’re not the source. We receive from the source, and what we are asked to do is give back to the source. In other words, what the interfaith dialogue has recognized is that there is a Trinitarian structure to life. That’s what I’m driving at this morning. We make the Trinity much too complex. The Trinitarian structure of life is this: is that everything that is comes from the source. And you can name the source what you want to name the source. And our response to that is with hearts of gratitude and thanksgiving, to return everything back to that source, and there’s a spirit who enables that return. Everything comes from God. We give it back to God. And the spirit gives us the heart of gratitude. That is the Trinitarian nature of life. And you can be a Buddhist, you can be a Muslim, you can be a Jew, and that makes sense."
There are several things to say about this passage.
First, it is deeply problematic to suggest that the world’s religious traditions are basically all saying the same thing. This requires making a distinction between a common essence to all religions on the one hand, and non-essentials such as creeds, liturgies, doctrines, dogmas, ritual practices, ethical norms, etc., on the other hand. For Forrester, the essence is “the source.” Things like the dogma of the Trinity (which he says we’ve made “much too complex”) are non-essential.
In his book No Other Name?: A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions (Orbis, 1985), Paul F. Knitter notes a few of the problems with the common essence approach to religion:
In the way they stress the distinction between essence and nonessentials, followers of the common essence school give the impression that the more one enters into and becomes one with the inner core or essence of religious experience, the less one needs the nonessentials of religions. It seems, in fact, that in order to hold to the essence, one is better off discarding the nonessentials (p. 51).
Another pitfall in this same area is the way many followers of the common essence approach subtly suggest that … the nonessentials of religion are incidental, or completely arbitrary. … It seems that anything goes; any creed, code, or cult can express the mystery of the Ultimate as long as it is personally appropriated, as long as it fits the needs of many. The doctrines, the rituals, the ethical practices of all the religions are valid; they are all equally true.
What is naively forgotten is that the external forms of religion do affect the way the Ultimate is experienced and the way that experience is lived out in daily life. It is possible that some nonessentials can distort the reality of God and lead to practices that are not in harmony with the truth and goodness of the Ultimate. Also, certain “accretions,” certain beliefs and ethical norms, may provide a more adequate image of deity or a more relevant morality than other beliefs and norms (p. 52; emphasis in text).
I think that the common essence approach expresses disrespect for the genuine, substantive differences in theology and practice that exist between religious traditions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. As an example of one such substantive difference, I note that a Buddhist notion of "the great emptiness" is not what the Church means by "God."
It’s also arrogant and dismissive to tell other people, “You say that you believe in such-and-such and that your religion teaches X, Y, and Z. But I know better. I know that you really believe – and that your religion really teaches – A, B, & C. You’re just not enlightened enough to see it.”
This passage from Forrester's sermon also reduces the dogma of the Trinity to a rather vague conception of “the Trinitarian nature of life” or the “Trinitarian structure of life” in which “everything that is comes from the source” which one can call by whatever name one chooses (“the great emptiness,” “God,” etc.). It’s not difficult to see that this has little if anything to do with the Church’s understanding of God as three Persons in one Essence. Add this to collapsing the distinction between Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity and all of humanity, and Forrester effectively jettisons the dogma of the Trinity.
A final question from Knitter’s No Other Name? seems appropriate to raise about the implications of the common essence approach in Forrester’s sermon:
Does the common essence approach too easily throw out the traditional Christian belief in the uniqueness, the normativity, and finality of the revelation given in Jesus the Christ? (p. 54)
I think the answer to this question is “yes.”
For another critical take on Forrester's sermon, check out "The Anglican Centrist."
There are also problems with Forrester’s 2004 article entitled “Finding a Place in East and West.” I’ll note just a few of them, starting with this:
"We also live in a world where not only religions, but denominations within religions, exclaim and proclaim that their way to God is the only path to salvation. The God of Abraham and Sara, of Jesus, of Mohammed, is even invoked to kill others. Fear, again, is the reason."
Pretty much everyone across the theological spectrum (excluding suicide bombers and other terrorists) condemns using the Holy as an excuse to kill others with whom we may disagree. I wonder what empirical evidence can support the blanket charge that the reason why some (most? all?) religious persons make claims to absolute truth is because they are afraid? And that this fear leads to murder? Besides being overly simplistic and reductionist, this also trivializes what’s at stake between different religious and philosophical traditions: namely, claims to truth.
Once again, this is a weakness of the common essence approach to religion, as Paul Knitter notes:
Does not such a staunch denial of any absolute religion run contrary to the nature of authentic religious experience? Does not any genuinely personal experience of the Ultimate contain a degree of absoluteness in leading one to assert that not only is this true for me but it can also be true for others? The experience of the Ultimate brings one to the natural contention, not that other religious experiences are false [although it certainly can and does do that], but that one’s own approach can also be true for them (No Other Name?, pp. 53-54).
Later in the article, Forrester writes:
"I see now a Jesus who does not raise the bar to salvation, but lowers it so far that it disappears."
I’m not sure where Forrester gets this Jesus, because such a Jesus is not portrayed in the New Testament gospels. And from what I know about the gnostic gospels, you can't find that Jesus there, either.
Then there’s Forrester’s take on sin:
"Sin has little, if anything, to do with being bad. It has everything to do, as far as I can tell, with being blind to our own goodness. And when we are blind we hurt ourselves and others – sometimes quite deeply."
Equating sin with blindness reduces the problem of sin to a matter of not being able to see. In other words, sin is a lack of enlightenment or a deficiency of proper insight. If we can just “wake up” and see things properly – including seeing our innate goodness – then everything will be okay. This fails to take seriously Christian conceptions of the nature, depths, and consequences of sin and evil.
And one more passage from Forrester:
"Zen offers a method, you might say, to see what Jesus saw in his own baptism: that we are indeed beloved by God. There is no need to cling to anything in the desperate hope that it is what will make us acceptable before God. All of creation is always already accepted by God as it is."
I’ve no quarrel with the whole “beloved by God” bit. John 3:16-17, it seems to me, provides ample justification for believing that we (and all of creation) are radically loved by God. The problem is with the parts I’ve put in italics. For in making these assertions, Forrester denies a core conviction of the New Testament: that something is deeply awry with God’s good creation, that there is a desperate need for healing and redemption that requires divine intervention. Instead, Forrester affirms that there is no need for transformation. There’s no need for intervention. There’s nothing to be saved from, a point which he makes in his Trinity Sunday sermon and which he seems to think is affirmed by the Syriac translation of the New Testament (wrongly, as I have noted elsewhere). Everything is as it should be ... if only we could just see it!
I’ve written previously of the incompatibility of the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding’s saying the shahada of Islam with her vows as a baptized and ordained Christian. And while I know more about Islam than I do about Buddhism, I’m not persuaded by what I’ve read that Forrester’s views are compatible with the Christian faith as articulated by the Holy Scripture and The Book of Common Prayer.
Indeed, if what Forrester says in his 2008 Trinity Sunday sermon and in his 2004 diocesan article are representative of his theology, then I think he is unfit for having any place in the apostolic succession. I would even go so far as to say that he shouldn't be a priest. What he is affirming in these two pieces simply cannot be reconciled with the doctrine, discipline, and worship of The Episcopal Church to which clergy have vowed to conform. And it doesn't help matters if the charges are true that he drops the Nicene Creed from the Sunday liturgy and writes Eucharistic prayers for use in principal services of worship on Sundays (both of which openly violate ordination vows). And then we have to add to all of this concerns about the search and election process that led to his nomination as bishop. What a mess!
The problem here is not that Buddhist meditation techniques might be helpful for one's spiritual life. The problem is denying the dogmatic core of the Christian faith and replacing it with something else.
Posted by Bryan Owen at 5:51 PM
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Breaking News from the Bishop of Albany
In a communique sent within the Diocese of Albany, Bishop Bill Love reports that at the recent House of Bishops meeting he voted no to the request for consent for the consecration of Kevin Thew Forrester to be the next bishop of Northern Michigan. His no vote was based on theological concerns as well as the uncontested slate that was presented for the election.
NEVADA: Breakaway church forms in south Reno
Via VirtueOnline:
By Geralda Miller
http://www.rgj.com/article/20090322/NEIGHBORHOODS08/903220306/1247/neighborhoods
March 22, 2009
Dissatisfied with the direction of the Episcopal Church, a small group in Reno has formed the Sierra Anglican Church.
"Theologically, from the standpoint of faith, I believe that the Episcopal Church has departed from the traditional faith of the church," said the Rev. Ronald Longero, pastor. "So, I chose out of conscience to go to the Anglican Church."
About 15 people have been gathering at 10:30 a.m. on the first and third Sundays of the month at Mountain View Montessori School in south Reno. Beginning April 5, the congregation will begin to meet at 10:30 every Sunday morning. The church is affiliated with the recently formed Anglican Church in North America.
The Anglican Church in North America began after disagreement with the Episcopal Church on views about homosexuality and interpretation of the Bible. The apex happened in 2003 when an openly gay man was consecrated as a bishop. "The Episcopal Church, from my viewpoint, has simply strayed away from seeing the Bible as the word of God," Longero said. "They choose to interpret scripture by their cultural biases. The Episcopal Church is moving way away from Christ."
Bishop Dan Edwards, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada, disagrees. As part of the Anglican Communion, Edwards said the doctrine of the Episcopal Church is the Apostles Creed and Nicene Creed. Anglicans believe in the Trinity, the humanity and divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, salvation through Christ and everlasting heaven and hell. "No, we're still Christians," he said.
"The Episcopal Church is absolutely committed to the Christian tradition contained in the Holy Scriptures and ancient creed."
Longero said he also believes the Episcopal Church is accepting other belief systems as a means to salvation, which goes against biblical teaching. He quoted John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." "I think in that case as a tradition, that's the way it is," said Longero, who also is a long-term substitute teacher at Carson High School.
"There's really a difference. This is how you're going to get to heaven." The Episcopal Church has been engaged in interfaith dialogue and will continue that discourse, Edwards said. "We are not afraid to have an honest conversation with other faiths where we can grow and learn together," he said.
"We are committed to being an inclusive, loving church with no exception." There even is room for the more restrictive beliefs of Sierra Anglican Church, he said.
"It is a legitimate voice to be spoken in the whole church," Edwards said. "They love Jesus, and we love Jesus. And we express our love of Jesus in acts of mercy to people in need and I'm sure they feel the same way. So there should be plenty of opportunities for us to work together." Edwards said membership in the Episcopal Church has grown "significantly" in his 11/2 years in Nevada. In 2007, the diocesan membership was 5,720, according to their parochial reports.
END
By Geralda Miller
http://www.rgj.com/article/20090322/NEIGHBORHOODS08/903220306/1247/neighborhoods
March 22, 2009
Dissatisfied with the direction of the Episcopal Church, a small group in Reno has formed the Sierra Anglican Church.
"Theologically, from the standpoint of faith, I believe that the Episcopal Church has departed from the traditional faith of the church," said the Rev. Ronald Longero, pastor. "So, I chose out of conscience to go to the Anglican Church."
About 15 people have been gathering at 10:30 a.m. on the first and third Sundays of the month at Mountain View Montessori School in south Reno. Beginning April 5, the congregation will begin to meet at 10:30 every Sunday morning. The church is affiliated with the recently formed Anglican Church in North America.
The Anglican Church in North America began after disagreement with the Episcopal Church on views about homosexuality and interpretation of the Bible. The apex happened in 2003 when an openly gay man was consecrated as a bishop. "The Episcopal Church, from my viewpoint, has simply strayed away from seeing the Bible as the word of God," Longero said. "They choose to interpret scripture by their cultural biases. The Episcopal Church is moving way away from Christ."
Bishop Dan Edwards, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada, disagrees. As part of the Anglican Communion, Edwards said the doctrine of the Episcopal Church is the Apostles Creed and Nicene Creed. Anglicans believe in the Trinity, the humanity and divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, salvation through Christ and everlasting heaven and hell. "No, we're still Christians," he said.
"The Episcopal Church is absolutely committed to the Christian tradition contained in the Holy Scriptures and ancient creed."
Longero said he also believes the Episcopal Church is accepting other belief systems as a means to salvation, which goes against biblical teaching. He quoted John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." "I think in that case as a tradition, that's the way it is," said Longero, who also is a long-term substitute teacher at Carson High School.
"There's really a difference. This is how you're going to get to heaven." The Episcopal Church has been engaged in interfaith dialogue and will continue that discourse, Edwards said. "We are not afraid to have an honest conversation with other faiths where we can grow and learn together," he said.
"We are committed to being an inclusive, loving church with no exception." There even is room for the more restrictive beliefs of Sierra Anglican Church, he said.
"It is a legitimate voice to be spoken in the whole church," Edwards said. "They love Jesus, and we love Jesus. And we express our love of Jesus in acts of mercy to people in need and I'm sure they feel the same way. So there should be plenty of opportunities for us to work together." Edwards said membership in the Episcopal Church has grown "significantly" in his 11/2 years in Nevada. In 2007, the diocesan membership was 5,720, according to their parochial reports.
END
Nigerian Anglican Leaders Blast TEC and Canadian Anglican Church for Tearing Fabric of Communion
Editor's Note: There are four ACNA parishes in Central NY: St. Andrew's in Vestal, St. Andrew's and Westside Anglican Fellowship in Syracuse, and Good Shepherd in Binghamton.
African Province in full communion with Anglican Church of North America (ACNA)
News Analysis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/24/2009
"As Anglican Christians we continue to be distressed by the spiritual crisis within our own family of faith in other parts of the world. Since 2003 the unilateral revisionist actions of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church Canada have torn the fabric of our common life. While the Church of Nigeria stands resolutely and uncompromisingly on the truth of the Holy Scriptures and the Lordship of Jesus Christ endless meetings and repeated communiqués have done nothing to bring restoration of our beloved communion."
With these words, the Anglican Church of Nigeria's Standing Committee and its Archbishop, Peter Akinola blasted the American Episcopal Church and its Canadian counterpart for arrogantly going against God's Word and for putting the flimsy tide of Human Rights against the proscriptions of Holy Scripture.
Pansexuality has torn the Anglican Communion asunder. What remains now, post-Alexandria, is a shell of a communion held together, not by the bonds of affection, or the creeds but the memory of what was and because there is no mechanism for formal schism.
Recently, the Nigerian General Synod, consisting of one 155 bishops, 150 clergy and 139 laity, came together to affirm the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to repeat their denunciations of North American Anglicanism that has strayed far from that faith. Also present on this occasion was Bishop Martyn Minns, CANA representative, and Bishop Robert Duncan, Common Cause Moderator and the anticipated leader of the new North American Anglican Province. Akinola and some of his fellow bishops will be at the inaugural provincial Assembly of the Church in June in Fort Worth, Texas, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, TEC presiding bishop.
On this occasion, the Nigerian province pledged its full support, saying they were in full communion with the emerging Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) praised the unanimous decision of the Church of Nigeria Standing Committee to be in full communion with the emerging Anglican province. The Church of Nigeria is the first Anglican province to formally accept the emerging province as a branch of the Anglican Communion. CANA is a founding member of the Anglican Church in North America, which includes about 700 congregations.
Lest one thinks that Nigerians are cultural and technological Neanderthals, the theme of the meeting was "The Youth of our Church" with the Standing Committee recognizing that the youth of today are living under very different conditions from older generations. "The ease of access to the global village afforded by Information Technology has a profound impact on what they believe and how they behave. We will do all that we can to secure the commitment of our youth by involving them fully in the task of nation building through the transforming mission of the church. We will challenge them, guide them, listen to them and assure them of our support. "We acknowledge the essential role of education in enabling the youth to identify and fulfill their vocation. We congratulate those States that have returned to the original owners some of the schools founded by mission organizations and then taken over by the government. We call for a full return of all schools in this category. We believe that this will help in no small measure in the crusade for national rebirth and the restoration of moral fiber and academic excellence."
The Nigerian church is at least grappling with the problem of youth in their country. Youth in The Episcopal Church are a dying breed. "We have relatively few youth involved in our churches, which poses some issues for what happens in the next 20-30 years," noted church consultant Kirk Hadaway. Indeed. With the average age of Episcopalians being in the early to mid-Sixties, there won't be much of a church in 30 years.
It is irony upon irony that revisionist Episcopal bishops continually blast African Anglican provinces because they say they are consumed by homosexuality. In point of fact, it is the Western church that is consumed by the subject and is in fact slowly strangling on it. Here is what the Nigerian HOB concluded,: "In the present global economic crisis, when serious minded nations of the world have taken urgent steps to invest their resources in other viable sectors of their economies, Nigeria continues to sell her oil but is not investing the huge profits from these sales wisely in productive sectors of our economy. It is a matter of grave concern that our political leaders have been and remain more concerned about exorbitant remuneration packages, excessive allowances, and payment for highly inflated and hardly completed contracts; this despite the unacceptable fact that more than seventy percent of our population continues to live in poverty."
While most Episcopal bishops kept silent through the Bush years of incompetence and Wall Street greed, here is what the Nigerian Anglican leaders said, "The war against corruption has become mere rhetoric. The day of reckoning may not be far away. If Nigeria is to avoid an economic catastrophe, we call on our leaders and citizenry to wake up and cultivate a new mindset of transparency and accountability. We also must chart a new economic course by developing viable non-oil sectors for sustainable wealth creation and the development of the country."
Recently, 126 TEC bishops met at Kanuga offering up a Lenten "repentance" citing "unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, rampant consumerism amplifying domestic and global economic injustice." In sermonic tomes, the bishops bewailed their manifold sins arguing that the crisis in the world is both economic and environmental, "causing us as a people to ignore the Gospel imperative of self-sacrifice and generosity, as we scramble for self-preservation in a culture of scarcity." Too little, too late. These bishops were more concerned that the Church Pension Fund made millions of dollars for their pensions in the year of plenty and now the lean years has gotten them thinking. How disingenuous can they be, and how stupid do they think we are?
ISLAM IN NIGERIA.
The bishops also addressed the religious crisis in their country. "For more than twenty years, there has been an unrelenting religious crisis in Nigeria. The Christian Church has been the target of attack and has suffered irreparable losses in many parts of the North. At different times various reasons have been advanced: unemployment, poverty, politics and sectarian tensions. However, those who have perpetrated these destructive actions have never been brought to justice, operate with impunity and appear to be motivated by the conviction that if they persist they will be able to claim entire sections of Nigeria for their faith. We reject this claim."
And how has The Episcopal Church helped this? By throwing an incendiary bomb called Gene Robinson into the mix making it possible for radical Islamists to hunt down Christians and kill them while screaming that TEC is the gay church. Why should Nigerians convert to Christianity, if he is their foremost American representative?
SEXUALITY
Akinola has been described as an uncompromising, bold and exemplary leader, by his fellow archbishops and bishops who have been fighting homosexuality, and will continue to lead the church in the course of propagation of the gospel of Christ. Indeed.
Akinola has regularly been accused of being homophobic, inciting homophobia, hatred of and responsible for the "statutory brutalization" of homosexuals by a number of liberal Anglican and non-Anglican bloggers. Some say he should be rebuked. Nothing could be further from the truth. The one person who has gone after him is Davis Mac-Iyalla, a Nigerian homosexual activist who fled Nigeria saying he was persecuted by the church for being a homosexual. It was not true then and is not true now. He is nothing more than a sexual predator who was exposed by VOL. http://tinyurl.com/dcq8j8 and here http://tinyurl.com/dhab9q
Akinola has supported anti-gay legislation in Nigeria. He has said that "Same sex marriage apart from being ungodly is also unscriptural, unnatural, unprofitable, unhealthy, uncultured, up-African and un-Nigerian. It is a perversion, a deviation and an aberration that is capable of engendering moral and social holocaust in this country. It is also capable of extincting mankind and as such should never be allowed to take root in Nigeria. Outlawing it is to ensure the continued existence of this nation. The need for doing this is urgent, compelling and imperative. The time is now."
Akinola dares to speak the truth. In Canada, he would probably be thrown in jail for saying this. He would be protected under First Amendment rights in this country, but he would be vilified for telling the truth. What health has sodomy brought in this country? HIV/AIDS is on the rise, especially among the young. It is a death sentence only protracted a few years by a cocktail of drugs. It is emptying Episcopal churches across the country. Nearly 50% of ALL Episcopal congregations, (and there are some 7,000 of them) report serious conflict over the ordination of homosexual priests/bishops. If that is not a wake-up call to the state of the church, nothing is.
To call Akinola's statement "murderous rhetoric recalling that toxic blend of imperial/nationalistic/pietism that begins with efforts to dehumanize a class of persons and ends with their systematic elimination..." as one blogger did, is to put sodomy in the same camp as anti-Semitism. This is an outrage. To put a person's personal behavior, which many psychiatrists now believe can be redirected and changed, into the same category as people who believe Jews should be incinerated would be libelous in any civilized country.
The truth is neither Christianity nor Islam condone homosexuality, long regarded as taboo in Nigeria. Because they are Nigeria's largest religions along with the Roman Catholic Church, condemning it is in complete accord with their national consciousness. It is a small, shrill, strident and vitriolic group that want it brokered in.
Where is the outrage about female genital mutilation? An estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. Why is there little or no outcry by Mrs. Jefferts Schori or the Archbishop of Canterbury on this pressing issue? Why is sodomy being allowed to destroy the Anglican Communion while our leaders are silent about this absolute horror to women's bodies.
As one columnist noted, the mere mention of homosexuality is guaranteed to drive many Nigerian Christians and Moslems up the wall in revulsion.
These issues came to the fore recently when a bill to ban same sex marriages in Nigeria was tabled before the National Assembly. An attempt to obtain public reaction to the bill turned into an occasion of high drama. A group of young people, under the lugubrious name of Queer Alliance, stormed the House of Representatives in Abuja to protest what they say is discrimination against their fundamental human rights if a bill banning same sex marriages in Nigeria was passed. They have been joined by Amnesty International, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch and some Lesbian organizations which argue that if the bill were passed, Nigeria's obligations under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights would be undermined.
Naturally, this aroused the outrage of the Very Rev. Peter Akinola and his Anglican province, the Roman Catholic Church, and Daughters of Sarah Ministry. They warned that same sex marriages would destroy the will of God for mankind as He created us male and female. They totally reject same sex marriages as ungodly, unprofitable, unhealthy and un-African.
Akinola opined that Nigerians are all too eager to copy the latest fads from the western world. Not every product from the West is good. The well-heeled homosexual lobby is one such example.
CULTURE
Africans are looking at the issue of same sex relationships from the prism of their own culture. Why shouldn't they? The Episcopal and Canadian churches are doing exactly that - seeing sodomy through the eyes of a handful of aggrieved persons who feel ostracized and unloved and who are pushing for laws that are increasingly discriminatory of people who dare oppose their behavior.
What about Western respect for African culture? The truth is more American Episcopal bishops think that African Anglicans live in the Dark Ages and most would agree with Bishop Spong's Lambeth '98 rip at them. Former Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, on more than one occasion, has said the Africans will one day catch up to the West in their understanding of homosexuality. Really. Why the hell should they?. Bishops like Griswold scoff at St. Paul. Rowan Williams believes that Old Testament attitudes towards homosexuals are Bronze Age thinking.
For the African, the idea that a man can be married to a man or a woman to a woman is anathema. The culture of marriage is predicated on the union between a man and a woman. All traditional practices and normative values regarding marriage are based on the assumption that the other member is of the opposite sex, wrote one blogger. That is still essentially true in the West, though Human Rights have triumphed over Biblical proscription.
African parents, we are told, prepare their children from birth through adolescence for marriage to the opposite sex. Too many things would be upset if it were possible to upturn age-old customs and practices.
"Those who argue that opposition to homosexuality amounts to a violation of universal human rights, may well need to realize that the dislike of homosexuality is not inconsistent with the observance of human rights. Nigerian homosexuals are not pilloried for being gay. They have a choice: they can marry members of the opposite sex or stay single. They only draw unfavorable attention to themselves when they threaten the safety and security of the majority," said a newspaper columnist.
Africans have a right to say "no" to a movement whose ultimate outcome will be the destruction of the family. Homosexuals are claiming that men can marry themselves. If everyone followed their example, they would have never been born.
If the Anglican Communion has foundered on the shoals of post-modern attitudes on human sexual behavior and is reaping the whirlwind of increased rates of sexually transmitted diseases, don't blame the Nigerians. They have every right to say what they say as a nation and a church. They should not roll over to Western pansexual attitudes because Changing Attitude sodomists like Colin Coward or Davis Mac-Iyalla think they should. They can go to Hell all by themselves. They should not be permitted to take others with them.
END
African Province in full communion with Anglican Church of North America (ACNA)
News Analysis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/24/2009
"As Anglican Christians we continue to be distressed by the spiritual crisis within our own family of faith in other parts of the world. Since 2003 the unilateral revisionist actions of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church Canada have torn the fabric of our common life. While the Church of Nigeria stands resolutely and uncompromisingly on the truth of the Holy Scriptures and the Lordship of Jesus Christ endless meetings and repeated communiqués have done nothing to bring restoration of our beloved communion."
With these words, the Anglican Church of Nigeria's Standing Committee and its Archbishop, Peter Akinola blasted the American Episcopal Church and its Canadian counterpart for arrogantly going against God's Word and for putting the flimsy tide of Human Rights against the proscriptions of Holy Scripture.
Pansexuality has torn the Anglican Communion asunder. What remains now, post-Alexandria, is a shell of a communion held together, not by the bonds of affection, or the creeds but the memory of what was and because there is no mechanism for formal schism.
Recently, the Nigerian General Synod, consisting of one 155 bishops, 150 clergy and 139 laity, came together to affirm the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to repeat their denunciations of North American Anglicanism that has strayed far from that faith. Also present on this occasion was Bishop Martyn Minns, CANA representative, and Bishop Robert Duncan, Common Cause Moderator and the anticipated leader of the new North American Anglican Province. Akinola and some of his fellow bishops will be at the inaugural provincial Assembly of the Church in June in Fort Worth, Texas, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, TEC presiding bishop.
On this occasion, the Nigerian province pledged its full support, saying they were in full communion with the emerging Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) praised the unanimous decision of the Church of Nigeria Standing Committee to be in full communion with the emerging Anglican province. The Church of Nigeria is the first Anglican province to formally accept the emerging province as a branch of the Anglican Communion. CANA is a founding member of the Anglican Church in North America, which includes about 700 congregations.
Lest one thinks that Nigerians are cultural and technological Neanderthals, the theme of the meeting was "The Youth of our Church" with the Standing Committee recognizing that the youth of today are living under very different conditions from older generations. "The ease of access to the global village afforded by Information Technology has a profound impact on what they believe and how they behave. We will do all that we can to secure the commitment of our youth by involving them fully in the task of nation building through the transforming mission of the church. We will challenge them, guide them, listen to them and assure them of our support. "We acknowledge the essential role of education in enabling the youth to identify and fulfill their vocation. We congratulate those States that have returned to the original owners some of the schools founded by mission organizations and then taken over by the government. We call for a full return of all schools in this category. We believe that this will help in no small measure in the crusade for national rebirth and the restoration of moral fiber and academic excellence."
The Nigerian church is at least grappling with the problem of youth in their country. Youth in The Episcopal Church are a dying breed. "We have relatively few youth involved in our churches, which poses some issues for what happens in the next 20-30 years," noted church consultant Kirk Hadaway. Indeed. With the average age of Episcopalians being in the early to mid-Sixties, there won't be much of a church in 30 years.
It is irony upon irony that revisionist Episcopal bishops continually blast African Anglican provinces because they say they are consumed by homosexuality. In point of fact, it is the Western church that is consumed by the subject and is in fact slowly strangling on it. Here is what the Nigerian HOB concluded,: "In the present global economic crisis, when serious minded nations of the world have taken urgent steps to invest their resources in other viable sectors of their economies, Nigeria continues to sell her oil but is not investing the huge profits from these sales wisely in productive sectors of our economy. It is a matter of grave concern that our political leaders have been and remain more concerned about exorbitant remuneration packages, excessive allowances, and payment for highly inflated and hardly completed contracts; this despite the unacceptable fact that more than seventy percent of our population continues to live in poverty."
While most Episcopal bishops kept silent through the Bush years of incompetence and Wall Street greed, here is what the Nigerian Anglican leaders said, "The war against corruption has become mere rhetoric. The day of reckoning may not be far away. If Nigeria is to avoid an economic catastrophe, we call on our leaders and citizenry to wake up and cultivate a new mindset of transparency and accountability. We also must chart a new economic course by developing viable non-oil sectors for sustainable wealth creation and the development of the country."
Recently, 126 TEC bishops met at Kanuga offering up a Lenten "repentance" citing "unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, rampant consumerism amplifying domestic and global economic injustice." In sermonic tomes, the bishops bewailed their manifold sins arguing that the crisis in the world is both economic and environmental, "causing us as a people to ignore the Gospel imperative of self-sacrifice and generosity, as we scramble for self-preservation in a culture of scarcity." Too little, too late. These bishops were more concerned that the Church Pension Fund made millions of dollars for their pensions in the year of plenty and now the lean years has gotten them thinking. How disingenuous can they be, and how stupid do they think we are?
ISLAM IN NIGERIA.
The bishops also addressed the religious crisis in their country. "For more than twenty years, there has been an unrelenting religious crisis in Nigeria. The Christian Church has been the target of attack and has suffered irreparable losses in many parts of the North. At different times various reasons have been advanced: unemployment, poverty, politics and sectarian tensions. However, those who have perpetrated these destructive actions have never been brought to justice, operate with impunity and appear to be motivated by the conviction that if they persist they will be able to claim entire sections of Nigeria for their faith. We reject this claim."
And how has The Episcopal Church helped this? By throwing an incendiary bomb called Gene Robinson into the mix making it possible for radical Islamists to hunt down Christians and kill them while screaming that TEC is the gay church. Why should Nigerians convert to Christianity, if he is their foremost American representative?
SEXUALITY
Akinola has been described as an uncompromising, bold and exemplary leader, by his fellow archbishops and bishops who have been fighting homosexuality, and will continue to lead the church in the course of propagation of the gospel of Christ. Indeed.
Akinola has regularly been accused of being homophobic, inciting homophobia, hatred of and responsible for the "statutory brutalization" of homosexuals by a number of liberal Anglican and non-Anglican bloggers. Some say he should be rebuked. Nothing could be further from the truth. The one person who has gone after him is Davis Mac-Iyalla, a Nigerian homosexual activist who fled Nigeria saying he was persecuted by the church for being a homosexual. It was not true then and is not true now. He is nothing more than a sexual predator who was exposed by VOL. http://tinyurl.com/dcq8j8 and here http://tinyurl.com/dhab9q
Akinola has supported anti-gay legislation in Nigeria. He has said that "Same sex marriage apart from being ungodly is also unscriptural, unnatural, unprofitable, unhealthy, uncultured, up-African and un-Nigerian. It is a perversion, a deviation and an aberration that is capable of engendering moral and social holocaust in this country. It is also capable of extincting mankind and as such should never be allowed to take root in Nigeria. Outlawing it is to ensure the continued existence of this nation. The need for doing this is urgent, compelling and imperative. The time is now."
Akinola dares to speak the truth. In Canada, he would probably be thrown in jail for saying this. He would be protected under First Amendment rights in this country, but he would be vilified for telling the truth. What health has sodomy brought in this country? HIV/AIDS is on the rise, especially among the young. It is a death sentence only protracted a few years by a cocktail of drugs. It is emptying Episcopal churches across the country. Nearly 50% of ALL Episcopal congregations, (and there are some 7,000 of them) report serious conflict over the ordination of homosexual priests/bishops. If that is not a wake-up call to the state of the church, nothing is.
To call Akinola's statement "murderous rhetoric recalling that toxic blend of imperial/nationalistic/pietism that begins with efforts to dehumanize a class of persons and ends with their systematic elimination..." as one blogger did, is to put sodomy in the same camp as anti-Semitism. This is an outrage. To put a person's personal behavior, which many psychiatrists now believe can be redirected and changed, into the same category as people who believe Jews should be incinerated would be libelous in any civilized country.
The truth is neither Christianity nor Islam condone homosexuality, long regarded as taboo in Nigeria. Because they are Nigeria's largest religions along with the Roman Catholic Church, condemning it is in complete accord with their national consciousness. It is a small, shrill, strident and vitriolic group that want it brokered in.
Where is the outrage about female genital mutilation? An estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. Why is there little or no outcry by Mrs. Jefferts Schori or the Archbishop of Canterbury on this pressing issue? Why is sodomy being allowed to destroy the Anglican Communion while our leaders are silent about this absolute horror to women's bodies.
As one columnist noted, the mere mention of homosexuality is guaranteed to drive many Nigerian Christians and Moslems up the wall in revulsion.
These issues came to the fore recently when a bill to ban same sex marriages in Nigeria was tabled before the National Assembly. An attempt to obtain public reaction to the bill turned into an occasion of high drama. A group of young people, under the lugubrious name of Queer Alliance, stormed the House of Representatives in Abuja to protest what they say is discrimination against their fundamental human rights if a bill banning same sex marriages in Nigeria was passed. They have been joined by Amnesty International, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch and some Lesbian organizations which argue that if the bill were passed, Nigeria's obligations under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights would be undermined.
Naturally, this aroused the outrage of the Very Rev. Peter Akinola and his Anglican province, the Roman Catholic Church, and Daughters of Sarah Ministry. They warned that same sex marriages would destroy the will of God for mankind as He created us male and female. They totally reject same sex marriages as ungodly, unprofitable, unhealthy and un-African.
Akinola opined that Nigerians are all too eager to copy the latest fads from the western world. Not every product from the West is good. The well-heeled homosexual lobby is one such example.
CULTURE
Africans are looking at the issue of same sex relationships from the prism of their own culture. Why shouldn't they? The Episcopal and Canadian churches are doing exactly that - seeing sodomy through the eyes of a handful of aggrieved persons who feel ostracized and unloved and who are pushing for laws that are increasingly discriminatory of people who dare oppose their behavior.
What about Western respect for African culture? The truth is more American Episcopal bishops think that African Anglicans live in the Dark Ages and most would agree with Bishop Spong's Lambeth '98 rip at them. Former Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, on more than one occasion, has said the Africans will one day catch up to the West in their understanding of homosexuality. Really. Why the hell should they?. Bishops like Griswold scoff at St. Paul. Rowan Williams believes that Old Testament attitudes towards homosexuals are Bronze Age thinking.
For the African, the idea that a man can be married to a man or a woman to a woman is anathema. The culture of marriage is predicated on the union between a man and a woman. All traditional practices and normative values regarding marriage are based on the assumption that the other member is of the opposite sex, wrote one blogger. That is still essentially true in the West, though Human Rights have triumphed over Biblical proscription.
African parents, we are told, prepare their children from birth through adolescence for marriage to the opposite sex. Too many things would be upset if it were possible to upturn age-old customs and practices.
"Those who argue that opposition to homosexuality amounts to a violation of universal human rights, may well need to realize that the dislike of homosexuality is not inconsistent with the observance of human rights. Nigerian homosexuals are not pilloried for being gay. They have a choice: they can marry members of the opposite sex or stay single. They only draw unfavorable attention to themselves when they threaten the safety and security of the majority," said a newspaper columnist.
Africans have a right to say "no" to a movement whose ultimate outcome will be the destruction of the family. Homosexuals are claiming that men can marry themselves. If everyone followed their example, they would have never been born.
If the Anglican Communion has foundered on the shoals of post-modern attitudes on human sexual behavior and is reaping the whirlwind of increased rates of sexually transmitted diseases, don't blame the Nigerians. They have every right to say what they say as a nation and a church. They should not roll over to Western pansexual attitudes because Changing Attitude sodomists like Colin Coward or Davis Mac-Iyalla think they should. They can go to Hell all by themselves. They should not be permitted to take others with them.
END
Consents Process Underway for ‘Buddhist Bishop’
From The Living Church
Posted on: March 25, 2009
After official ballots were distributed during the House of Bishops’ spring retreat in North Carolina last week, bishops began voting on whether to consent to the election of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester as Bishop of Northern Michigan.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has reported that the Rt. Rev. Gregory Rickel, Bishop of Olympia, announced in a recent email message that he has already voted not to consent to Fr. Thew Forrester’s election. He promised to share the reasoning behind his vote in a follow-up email.
The canons and constitution of the General Convention require that the bishop-elect receive consent from a majority of standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction to be consecrated. According to the church’s canons, bishops and standing committees have 120 days after the election in which to vote. Not voting is considered the same as a ‘no’ vote.
Fr. Thew Forrester’s election has sparked controversy because he underwent lay ordination as a Buddhist several years ago and was the only candidate nominated by the diocese.
Two other bishops with jurisdiction were consultants to the Northern Michigan search committee that nominated Fr. Thew Forrester. Bishops Tom Ely of Vermont and Bruce Caldwell of Wyoming have not made known how they intend to vote on consent, but they have previously issued statements indicating that they believe Fr. Thew Forrester is well qualified and that the consecration should go ahead.
Posted on: March 25, 2009
After official ballots were distributed during the House of Bishops’ spring retreat in North Carolina last week, bishops began voting on whether to consent to the election of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester as Bishop of Northern Michigan.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has reported that the Rt. Rev. Gregory Rickel, Bishop of Olympia, announced in a recent email message that he has already voted not to consent to Fr. Thew Forrester’s election. He promised to share the reasoning behind his vote in a follow-up email.
The canons and constitution of the General Convention require that the bishop-elect receive consent from a majority of standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction to be consecrated. According to the church’s canons, bishops and standing committees have 120 days after the election in which to vote. Not voting is considered the same as a ‘no’ vote.
Fr. Thew Forrester’s election has sparked controversy because he underwent lay ordination as a Buddhist several years ago and was the only candidate nominated by the diocese.
Two other bishops with jurisdiction were consultants to the Northern Michigan search committee that nominated Fr. Thew Forrester. Bishops Tom Ely of Vermont and Bruce Caldwell of Wyoming have not made known how they intend to vote on consent, but they have previously issued statements indicating that they believe Fr. Thew Forrester is well qualified and that the consecration should go ahead.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Archbishop Gomez: Covenant a Tough Sell in Divided Communion
From The Living Church:
Posted on: March 24, 2009
As the Covenant Design Group readies its handiwork for deliberation by the Anglican Consultative Council, the group’s chairman acknowledges that selling a unity document to a divided communion will be neither automatic nor easy.
Retired West Indies’ Archbishop Drexel Wellington Gomez identified current Episcopal Church attitudes as a danger to ratification of the proposed Covenant.
Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori already has said General Convention this summer should decline to take up for consideration the design group’s yet-to-be perfected recommendations for measures aimed at respecting local autonomy while providing accountability for divisive actions.
“The Episcopal Church has its own agenda,” Archbishop Gomez said in Dallas March 22, “and that agenda does not have much accommodation with the rest of the Communion.”
The archbishop spoke at the end of a week-long stay at Church of the Incarnation, where he was featured guest for the parish’s “Listening to the Anglican World” series.
The Covenant Design Group is to complete its work – essentially a statement about Anglican vocation, unity, and interdependence – just before delivering the covenant to the Anglican Consultative Council’s May meeting in Jamaica.
The ACC, which represents every Anglican province and comprises bishops, priests, and laity, is expected to send out the covenant for ratification by the Anglican Communion’s 38 provinces. Two-thirds majority approval is necessary for implementation.
Archbishop Gomez underscored the importance of the enterprise, saying, “The covenant is the only thing we have on the table at present that offers any hope of coherence within the Communion. But it is not an easy selling job.”
Americans and Canadians, he said, are likely to resist undertakings they see as tying their hands on supposedly prophetic steps and measures. The Episcopal Church’s consecration in 2003 of an actively gay bishop helped precipitate the Communion-wide clamor that led to creation of the Covenant Design Group under authority of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
The proposed covenant’s final section pledges participants to “act with diligence, care and caution,” respecting actions that might “threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission.”
Archbishop Gomez said a new fourth section of the now-three-section covenant will address the question of “how we get agreement on how we stay together and work together.” He noted that many Anglicans are “not fond of being told they are wrong.
“That’s our biggest fight, and that fight is not over,” he said. Nonetheless, he said in answer to a question, “The bigger body has to take precedence over the lesser.”
The archbishop said, absent countervailing measures, he feared the loss of the Anglican Communion’s catholicity. “That is something I will fight, and fight to the bitter end,” he said.
William Murchison
Posted on: March 24, 2009
As the Covenant Design Group readies its handiwork for deliberation by the Anglican Consultative Council, the group’s chairman acknowledges that selling a unity document to a divided communion will be neither automatic nor easy.
Retired West Indies’ Archbishop Drexel Wellington Gomez identified current Episcopal Church attitudes as a danger to ratification of the proposed Covenant.
Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori already has said General Convention this summer should decline to take up for consideration the design group’s yet-to-be perfected recommendations for measures aimed at respecting local autonomy while providing accountability for divisive actions.
“The Episcopal Church has its own agenda,” Archbishop Gomez said in Dallas March 22, “and that agenda does not have much accommodation with the rest of the Communion.”
The archbishop spoke at the end of a week-long stay at Church of the Incarnation, where he was featured guest for the parish’s “Listening to the Anglican World” series.
The Covenant Design Group is to complete its work – essentially a statement about Anglican vocation, unity, and interdependence – just before delivering the covenant to the Anglican Consultative Council’s May meeting in Jamaica.
The ACC, which represents every Anglican province and comprises bishops, priests, and laity, is expected to send out the covenant for ratification by the Anglican Communion’s 38 provinces. Two-thirds majority approval is necessary for implementation.
Archbishop Gomez underscored the importance of the enterprise, saying, “The covenant is the only thing we have on the table at present that offers any hope of coherence within the Communion. But it is not an easy selling job.”
Americans and Canadians, he said, are likely to resist undertakings they see as tying their hands on supposedly prophetic steps and measures. The Episcopal Church’s consecration in 2003 of an actively gay bishop helped precipitate the Communion-wide clamor that led to creation of the Covenant Design Group under authority of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
The proposed covenant’s final section pledges participants to “act with diligence, care and caution,” respecting actions that might “threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission.”
Archbishop Gomez said a new fourth section of the now-three-section covenant will address the question of “how we get agreement on how we stay together and work together.” He noted that many Anglicans are “not fond of being told they are wrong.
“That’s our biggest fight, and that fight is not over,” he said. Nonetheless, he said in answer to a question, “The bigger body has to take precedence over the lesser.”
The archbishop said, absent countervailing measures, he feared the loss of the Anglican Communion’s catholicity. “That is something I will fight, and fight to the bitter end,” he said.
William Murchison
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The small religious revolution
From Rod Dreher of beliefnet.com via Stand Firm:
Monday March 23, 2009
Andrew Sullivan hears from a reader. The reader went to some sort of Lenten event at the local Catholic parish, and saw something unusual. Excerpt:
The other guy was one of those healthy-looking mature men who looked and sounded typical of the gray-haired man you might see in a TV commercial -- which made it all the more striking as he spoke very simply of his extraordinary "second career" working with people at risk of becoming homeless. He then mentioned the other folks in his life to whom he has responsibilities. Among these he listed "my husband." Nobody blinked an eye, and the focus stayed on the subject at hand.
It's impossible not to be struck by the wide implications of this sort of thing.
I think this is exactly right, and so does Sullivan, though we take the opposite, or near-opposite, lesson from it. That a man can sit at a Lenten retreat at a Catholic parish and not only feel comfortable talking about his "husband," but get no negative response, or response at all, from it tells us something important. There really is a sea change in American life underway.
What this means is that in this parish, and in parishes like it, authoritative Catholic teaching on human sexuality means little or nothing. If gays and gay relationships are going to be mainstreamed into American religious life, then that will require adopting a heterodox position in churches and synagogues. That's a lot easier to do in Protestant churches, which have no Magisterium, and in Reformed synagogues, whose relationship to Scripture is by definition a lot looser than traditional Judaism's. But in Catholic churches, it wouldn't be possible if the parishioners hadn't already decided that what the Church has to teach about sexuality has no power over them.
Gay-rights supporters typically believe people like me hold to our opposition to gay marriage and so forth because of some animosity towards gays. I know that it's true for a lot of conservatives, but in my case -- and in the case of most people I know who share my views -- it's not an emotional matter. We have gay friends, are comfortable around gay people, and simply don't share that visceral reaction that used to be commonplace in American life, and (regrettably) still is in many quarters. Our position comes out of a deep concern for two things: 1) the moral and sociological importance of maintaining the traditional family as the center of society; and 2) a high view of religious authority.
That is (on the second point), we believe that you simply can't discard a teaching on which the Bible -- in both testaments -- and (for Catholics and Orthodox) authoritative church tradition could not be more clear, simply because it doesn't suit contemporary mores. Once you start doing that, where does it stop? It's a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer. Because if you accept that man as having a husband, and do not challenge it in some way, you have given up an enormous amount of ground.
Andrew Sullivan would say that's progress; I'd say that's regression. We have fundamentally different stances toward the role of religious authority. We would agree, though, that the presence of that man speaking unchallenged in his Catholic parish about his "husband" is an event of enormous cultural significance. This moment was made possible in large part, I believe, because those who ought to have been explaining and defending church teaching, especially the teachings that are hard to understand in our culture, failed to do so. I'm talking about bishops, priests, catechists and parents. You can do as much harm by failing to effectively proclaim the truth as by proclaiming a lie. Emphasis on "effectively," because clearly, different arguments are necessary for our postmodern cultural environment, in which the autonomous individual is widely considered to be the source of authority.
We traditional Christians have a very, very difficult job ahead of us, forming the consciences of our children in accord with what we know to be true, given the world we live in.
(I know that every time I post on anything related to homosexuality, these comboxes heat up. Please know that anything that gets posted here by either side that makes a serious exchange of ideas more difficult than it ought to be will be unpublished without apology or explanation. Whichever side you're on, make your case with respect for those who disagree.)
Monday March 23, 2009
Andrew Sullivan hears from a reader. The reader went to some sort of Lenten event at the local Catholic parish, and saw something unusual. Excerpt:
The other guy was one of those healthy-looking mature men who looked and sounded typical of the gray-haired man you might see in a TV commercial -- which made it all the more striking as he spoke very simply of his extraordinary "second career" working with people at risk of becoming homeless. He then mentioned the other folks in his life to whom he has responsibilities. Among these he listed "my husband." Nobody blinked an eye, and the focus stayed on the subject at hand.
It's impossible not to be struck by the wide implications of this sort of thing.
I think this is exactly right, and so does Sullivan, though we take the opposite, or near-opposite, lesson from it. That a man can sit at a Lenten retreat at a Catholic parish and not only feel comfortable talking about his "husband," but get no negative response, or response at all, from it tells us something important. There really is a sea change in American life underway.
What this means is that in this parish, and in parishes like it, authoritative Catholic teaching on human sexuality means little or nothing. If gays and gay relationships are going to be mainstreamed into American religious life, then that will require adopting a heterodox position in churches and synagogues. That's a lot easier to do in Protestant churches, which have no Magisterium, and in Reformed synagogues, whose relationship to Scripture is by definition a lot looser than traditional Judaism's. But in Catholic churches, it wouldn't be possible if the parishioners hadn't already decided that what the Church has to teach about sexuality has no power over them.
Gay-rights supporters typically believe people like me hold to our opposition to gay marriage and so forth because of some animosity towards gays. I know that it's true for a lot of conservatives, but in my case -- and in the case of most people I know who share my views -- it's not an emotional matter. We have gay friends, are comfortable around gay people, and simply don't share that visceral reaction that used to be commonplace in American life, and (regrettably) still is in many quarters. Our position comes out of a deep concern for two things: 1) the moral and sociological importance of maintaining the traditional family as the center of society; and 2) a high view of religious authority.
That is (on the second point), we believe that you simply can't discard a teaching on which the Bible -- in both testaments -- and (for Catholics and Orthodox) authoritative church tradition could not be more clear, simply because it doesn't suit contemporary mores. Once you start doing that, where does it stop? It's a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer. Because if you accept that man as having a husband, and do not challenge it in some way, you have given up an enormous amount of ground.
Andrew Sullivan would say that's progress; I'd say that's regression. We have fundamentally different stances toward the role of religious authority. We would agree, though, that the presence of that man speaking unchallenged in his Catholic parish about his "husband" is an event of enormous cultural significance. This moment was made possible in large part, I believe, because those who ought to have been explaining and defending church teaching, especially the teachings that are hard to understand in our culture, failed to do so. I'm talking about bishops, priests, catechists and parents. You can do as much harm by failing to effectively proclaim the truth as by proclaiming a lie. Emphasis on "effectively," because clearly, different arguments are necessary for our postmodern cultural environment, in which the autonomous individual is widely considered to be the source of authority.
We traditional Christians have a very, very difficult job ahead of us, forming the consciences of our children in accord with what we know to be true, given the world we live in.
(I know that every time I post on anything related to homosexuality, these comboxes heat up. Please know that anything that gets posted here by either side that makes a serious exchange of ideas more difficult than it ought to be will be unpublished without apology or explanation. Whichever side you're on, make your case with respect for those who disagree.)
ACNA continues to grow
SAN JOSE, CA: New Anglican Church Will Come under ACNA
By David W. Virtue www.virtueonline.org
3/23/2009
The first congregation in the San Francisco Bay area - St. James Anglican Church - to leave an Episcopal diocese has come directly under the newly formed Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
The initial launch team for St. James is lead by Fr. Ed McNeill, 49, rector of St. Edward's Episcopal Church for 10 years, before his congregation voted overwhelming to leave The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of El Camino Real under Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves.
In a phone call to VirtueOnline McNeill said the parting from the diocese was "gracious" with Bishop Gray-Reeves inhibiting him "with regret".
80 of the 110 members left and held their first worship Sunday March 15 in the nearby Camden Community Center. "In the 2 weeks since we left there is a tremendous feeling of freedom and promise and hope for all of us," McNeill told VOL. Their new bishop is the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh.
The decision of Fr. McNeill and other church leaders to found St. James Anglican Church marks the end of years of debate within St. Edward's about supporting the efforts of The Episcopal Church USA. While members of the Episcopal Church have always welcomed a diversity of opinion, recent theological innovations by the national leadership have made it impossible for many orthodox Christians to remain.
"The Episcopal Church has increasingly adopted policies that are unacceptable to orthodox Christians, departing from the primacy of Scripture. Church leaders have taken positions that undermine traditional teaching on the Divinity of Christ, Jesus' resurrection and His role in salvation, Biblical standards on sexuality, and many of the tenets expressed in the Nicene Creed. These changes aligned the church with today's social trends, and led the church away from its historic mission.
The result has been declining attendance, declining ordinations and the departure of many clergy members, strained relationship with the global Anglican Communion, and nationwide lawsuits."
Six of the twelve Vestry also left St. Edward's to help found St. James. The parish first joined the Anglican Communion Network in 2006. On our first Sunday 81 showed up, said McNeill. Their initial budget is $140.000.
"We walked away from everything leaving the church in a pretty healthy state. Our leaving was more about our character. We did not want to criticize anyone who stayed. The divorce was as amicable as these things ever are in these situations."
McNeill said his congregation is the first to leave the diocese in decade. The last time this occurred was in the 90's when St. Lawrence left and became Christ the King located in Campbell, Ca. under the Anglican Mission in the Americas.
St. James will unite with 700 orthodox Anglican congregations, representing roughly 100,000 Anglicans in the United States and Canada under the ACNA. Their website can be found here: www.Stjamesanca.org "We are very happy that the time of divisiveness has passed, and that healing can begin. We will miss our friends who have chosen to remain in the Episcopal Church and are committed to praying for them. We look forward to serving in the Bay Area as Anglican Christians."
McNeill said his goal is to launch both a parish and a new diocese. "NewAnglicanChurch.com is a social networking site that allows registered users to search for other registered users by zip code, city, county, and state. Our goal is to get 1000 registered users by March 1st 2010. In the San Francisco Bay Area, The Episcopal Church Average Sunday Attendance) ASA dropped around 2000 between 2003 - 2007. This includes both the Diocese of California and a large portion of the Diocese of El Camino Real.
A website has been established at www.newanglicanchurch.com, to provide a means for community-building among Anglicans in the Bay Area. Those who have left the Episcopal Church, or who have been searching for Orthodox churches in the Bay Area, will have access to news and information, as well as an opportunity to communicate with others. Sunday services will include a traditional mass at 9am and a contemporary service at 10:45 am. St. James will be meeting at the Camden Community Center at 3369 Union Ave, San Jose, CA 95124.
END
By David W. Virtue www.virtueonline.org
3/23/2009
The first congregation in the San Francisco Bay area - St. James Anglican Church - to leave an Episcopal diocese has come directly under the newly formed Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
The initial launch team for St. James is lead by Fr. Ed McNeill, 49, rector of St. Edward's Episcopal Church for 10 years, before his congregation voted overwhelming to leave The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of El Camino Real under Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves.
In a phone call to VirtueOnline McNeill said the parting from the diocese was "gracious" with Bishop Gray-Reeves inhibiting him "with regret".
80 of the 110 members left and held their first worship Sunday March 15 in the nearby Camden Community Center. "In the 2 weeks since we left there is a tremendous feeling of freedom and promise and hope for all of us," McNeill told VOL. Their new bishop is the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh.
The decision of Fr. McNeill and other church leaders to found St. James Anglican Church marks the end of years of debate within St. Edward's about supporting the efforts of The Episcopal Church USA. While members of the Episcopal Church have always welcomed a diversity of opinion, recent theological innovations by the national leadership have made it impossible for many orthodox Christians to remain.
"The Episcopal Church has increasingly adopted policies that are unacceptable to orthodox Christians, departing from the primacy of Scripture. Church leaders have taken positions that undermine traditional teaching on the Divinity of Christ, Jesus' resurrection and His role in salvation, Biblical standards on sexuality, and many of the tenets expressed in the Nicene Creed. These changes aligned the church with today's social trends, and led the church away from its historic mission.
The result has been declining attendance, declining ordinations and the departure of many clergy members, strained relationship with the global Anglican Communion, and nationwide lawsuits."
Six of the twelve Vestry also left St. Edward's to help found St. James. The parish first joined the Anglican Communion Network in 2006. On our first Sunday 81 showed up, said McNeill. Their initial budget is $140.000.
"We walked away from everything leaving the church in a pretty healthy state. Our leaving was more about our character. We did not want to criticize anyone who stayed. The divorce was as amicable as these things ever are in these situations."
McNeill said his congregation is the first to leave the diocese in decade. The last time this occurred was in the 90's when St. Lawrence left and became Christ the King located in Campbell, Ca. under the Anglican Mission in the Americas.
St. James will unite with 700 orthodox Anglican congregations, representing roughly 100,000 Anglicans in the United States and Canada under the ACNA. Their website can be found here: www.Stjamesanca.org "We are very happy that the time of divisiveness has passed, and that healing can begin. We will miss our friends who have chosen to remain in the Episcopal Church and are committed to praying for them. We look forward to serving in the Bay Area as Anglican Christians."
McNeill said his goal is to launch both a parish and a new diocese. "NewAnglicanChurch.com is a social networking site that allows registered users to search for other registered users by zip code, city, county, and state. Our goal is to get 1000 registered users by March 1st 2010. In the San Francisco Bay Area, The Episcopal Church Average Sunday Attendance) ASA dropped around 2000 between 2003 - 2007. This includes both the Diocese of California and a large portion of the Diocese of El Camino Real.
A website has been established at www.newanglicanchurch.com, to provide a means for community-building among Anglicans in the Bay Area. Those who have left the Episcopal Church, or who have been searching for Orthodox churches in the Bay Area, will have access to news and information, as well as an opportunity to communicate with others. Sunday services will include a traditional mass at 9am and a contemporary service at 10:45 am. St. James will be meeting at the Camden Community Center at 3369 Union Ave, San Jose, CA 95124.
END
Monday, March 23, 2009
Northern Michigan leadership defend their choice and process
Via VirtueOnline:
March 19, 2009
The Diocese of Northern Michigan has released a statement describing their choice of The Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester to be their next bishop and defending the process by which he was chosen. They have also released supporting letters from two bishops, the Rt. Rev.Tom Ray, retired bishop of Northern Michigan and The Rt. Rev. Rustin R. Kimsey, currently Assisting Bishop for the Diocese of Alaska. The statement from the leadership reaffirms their faith in Kevin Thew Forrester, his leadership and pastoral skill and affirming again his deep commitment to the Christian faith.
Many of you have been hearing about our recent election and about Kevin Thew Forrester, our bishop-elect. We have known, lived, and worked with Kevin in this diocese for eight years and know him to be a person of deep faith and witness to the love of God and Jesus. His deep spiritual grounding, his extensive learning, his pastoral sensitivity, and his passion for living truthfully and authentically have enriched our diocese and provided focused guidance during the years he has been among us. We are confident that Kevin will guard and defend the faith of the Church while inviting us to ever fresh expressions of that faith.
The statement also defends the process by which he was selected saying that the objections to Forrester is also about the process the Diocese undertook.
A sense of family on the congregational, regional, and diocesan level has allowed us to love, support, encourage and call forth leadership to sustain us through the difficult times we have faced. Through the grace of God, the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit we have emerged from the deep pain of sorrow and loss at the death of our beloved bishop, Jim Kelsey, nearly 22 months ago, into the excitement and renewed commitment represented by the election of our new bishop and the creation of the Episcopal Ministry Support Team.
We have confidence in the discernment team we called, aware of their diversity, giftedness and single minded devotion to the trust we placed in them. We believe the discernment process that we have followed has been open, thorough, faithful and canonical, with a greater degree of outside scrutiny and support than most traditional search processes. We believe it to have been a Spirit-led, prayerful process. Their work has been overwhelmingly affirmed by two conventions and by the vast majority of our people.
Bishop Ray wrote:
Presumably there is some E-mail concern that Kevin is not fully Christian. Well, he honors his baptism like few I know and I have known Kevin and Rise for over fifteen years. He seeks to affirm every one's baptism in this diocese and as bishop he would carry daily this conviction: "You belong to Christ, you are His light in this world." Kevin is authentically in love with Jesus and such a faith can not be fabricated or pretended. A fake is quickly discerned. I am absolutely clear that Kevin is for real and shares personally and deeply my Christian friendship.
This diocese has emerged out of Gethsemane with a vitality, a cohesiveness, and a vision that is unquestionably inspired. As an aging and ailing elder of this diocese, I smile with gratitude and satisfaction that this simple diocese is such a unique testimony to our Christian faith, our ministry and mission. Kevin is not only a gift to us in this diocese, he could be a similar gift in our House of Bishops.
Bishop Kimsey also responds to the charge that the Bishop-elect is not eligible for leadership because of his meditation practices:
It is because of my personal experience with Kevin that I am confounded by the controversy over his election by his home diocese to be their bishop. In the matter of his practice of Zen Buddhist meditation, when did the way in which we are deepened into the Presence of God become a litmus test for being a follower of Jesus Christ? Christians have employed countless ways and environments in their search for an integrated and clearer focus on the Holy One.
When I worked and lived with the Navajo and employed some of their images of their creation story in my own devotions, was I being disloyal to my Christ and to my Creator God? I think not. In the 6th century when St. Columba of Iona honored the culture that preceded him by referring to Jesus as his "druid brother", was he lessening Christ or was he honoring the Spirit of God that was in Celtic lands long before Christianity arrived? I am especially dismayed when a significant world religion, Buddhism, is subtly tainted in this matter. Kevin could not be clearer: he is a Christian who on occasion practices Zen Buddhist meditation. I would think he would be commended for such exploration into a milieu that is known for peace and healing and harmony.
Kimsey pays particular attention to an editorial in the Living Church, noting that the Bishop-elect was never a chair of the discernment committee, as stated in the editorial, and the process was approved by the convention of the diocese. He says that the discernment committee looked at "a number of people considered for the episcopal office. Serious honoring and prayerful attention were paid to these persons and, in obedience to the mandate given them by the 2007 Diocesan Convention, the discernment committee decided on one person as their nominee for Bishop of Northern Michigan and that person is Kevin Thew Forrester."
END
March 19, 2009
The Diocese of Northern Michigan has released a statement describing their choice of The Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester to be their next bishop and defending the process by which he was chosen. They have also released supporting letters from two bishops, the Rt. Rev.Tom Ray, retired bishop of Northern Michigan and The Rt. Rev. Rustin R. Kimsey, currently Assisting Bishop for the Diocese of Alaska. The statement from the leadership reaffirms their faith in Kevin Thew Forrester, his leadership and pastoral skill and affirming again his deep commitment to the Christian faith.
Many of you have been hearing about our recent election and about Kevin Thew Forrester, our bishop-elect. We have known, lived, and worked with Kevin in this diocese for eight years and know him to be a person of deep faith and witness to the love of God and Jesus. His deep spiritual grounding, his extensive learning, his pastoral sensitivity, and his passion for living truthfully and authentically have enriched our diocese and provided focused guidance during the years he has been among us. We are confident that Kevin will guard and defend the faith of the Church while inviting us to ever fresh expressions of that faith.
The statement also defends the process by which he was selected saying that the objections to Forrester is also about the process the Diocese undertook.
A sense of family on the congregational, regional, and diocesan level has allowed us to love, support, encourage and call forth leadership to sustain us through the difficult times we have faced. Through the grace of God, the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit we have emerged from the deep pain of sorrow and loss at the death of our beloved bishop, Jim Kelsey, nearly 22 months ago, into the excitement and renewed commitment represented by the election of our new bishop and the creation of the Episcopal Ministry Support Team.
We have confidence in the discernment team we called, aware of their diversity, giftedness and single minded devotion to the trust we placed in them. We believe the discernment process that we have followed has been open, thorough, faithful and canonical, with a greater degree of outside scrutiny and support than most traditional search processes. We believe it to have been a Spirit-led, prayerful process. Their work has been overwhelmingly affirmed by two conventions and by the vast majority of our people.
Bishop Ray wrote:
Presumably there is some E-mail concern that Kevin is not fully Christian. Well, he honors his baptism like few I know and I have known Kevin and Rise for over fifteen years. He seeks to affirm every one's baptism in this diocese and as bishop he would carry daily this conviction: "You belong to Christ, you are His light in this world." Kevin is authentically in love with Jesus and such a faith can not be fabricated or pretended. A fake is quickly discerned. I am absolutely clear that Kevin is for real and shares personally and deeply my Christian friendship.
This diocese has emerged out of Gethsemane with a vitality, a cohesiveness, and a vision that is unquestionably inspired. As an aging and ailing elder of this diocese, I smile with gratitude and satisfaction that this simple diocese is such a unique testimony to our Christian faith, our ministry and mission. Kevin is not only a gift to us in this diocese, he could be a similar gift in our House of Bishops.
Bishop Kimsey also responds to the charge that the Bishop-elect is not eligible for leadership because of his meditation practices:
It is because of my personal experience with Kevin that I am confounded by the controversy over his election by his home diocese to be their bishop. In the matter of his practice of Zen Buddhist meditation, when did the way in which we are deepened into the Presence of God become a litmus test for being a follower of Jesus Christ? Christians have employed countless ways and environments in their search for an integrated and clearer focus on the Holy One.
When I worked and lived with the Navajo and employed some of their images of their creation story in my own devotions, was I being disloyal to my Christ and to my Creator God? I think not. In the 6th century when St. Columba of Iona honored the culture that preceded him by referring to Jesus as his "druid brother", was he lessening Christ or was he honoring the Spirit of God that was in Celtic lands long before Christianity arrived? I am especially dismayed when a significant world religion, Buddhism, is subtly tainted in this matter. Kevin could not be clearer: he is a Christian who on occasion practices Zen Buddhist meditation. I would think he would be commended for such exploration into a milieu that is known for peace and healing and harmony.
Kimsey pays particular attention to an editorial in the Living Church, noting that the Bishop-elect was never a chair of the discernment committee, as stated in the editorial, and the process was approved by the convention of the diocese. He says that the discernment committee looked at "a number of people considered for the episcopal office. Serious honoring and prayerful attention were paid to these persons and, in obedience to the mandate given them by the 2007 Diocesan Convention, the discernment committee decided on one person as their nominee for Bishop of Northern Michigan and that person is Kevin Thew Forrester."
END
ACNA Expects at Least Five Inaugural Dioceses
From The Living Church:
Posted on: March 21, 2009
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) expects to receive at least five, and perhaps as many as eight, applications for official recognition as a diocese when it meets for its first provincial assembly in June.
A letter sent in January by the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan to members of the Common Cause Partnership encouraged the formation of dioceses.
“Consistent with all Anglican practice, congregations are a part of an Anglican province because they are part of a diocese, which in turn, is part of a group of dioceses banded together as a national (or international) church,” Bishop Duncan wrote. “This principle is critical to understanding the provisional constitution of the [ACNA], and to the steps we all need to take as we move toward our first provincial assembly.”
Bishop Duncan is Archbishop-designate of the ACNA and Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh that is now under the auspices of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone. The Rev. J. Philip Ashey, chief operating officer and chaplain for the American Anglican Council, told The Living Church that Pittsburgh is one of the five applications for recognition as an ACNA diocese that have already been received. The deadline for applications is April 15.
Earlier this month, the Rt. Rev. John H. Chapman, Bishop of Ottawa in the Anglican Church of Canada, said he would authorize a congregation under his oversight to begin performing same-sex blessings in part because “while our church struggles to honor the call for gracious restraint in blessing same-sex unions, those who are proponents of cross-border interventions have and continue to show no restraint.”
That view was echoed this week during the House of Bishops’ spring retreat by Bishop Dan Edwards of Nevada. Bishop Edwards posted a blog entry noting that a number of bishops are considering the repeal of Resolution B033 because of what they perceive as a lack of reciprocal restraint by the ACNA.
Fr. Ashey countered that it is unrealistic to expect the ACNA to postpone its efforts to organize while same-sex blessings continue to occur unofficially in a number of dioceses in both the U.S. and Canadian churches.
“[Ottawa and Nevada] have already made their decisions and are now looking for an excuse to implement them,” he said. “We have responded to the invitation from the GAFCON primates to form an orthodox Anglican province in the Americas.”
The ACNA has been welcomed “in abiding and full communion” by the standing committee of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. The March 20 announcement also noted that the standing committee recommended that the Church of Nigeria send a delegation to the provincial assembly in Bedford “to demonstrate our enduring partnership in the gospel.”
Steve Waring
Posted on: March 21, 2009
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) expects to receive at least five, and perhaps as many as eight, applications for official recognition as a diocese when it meets for its first provincial assembly in June.
A letter sent in January by the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan to members of the Common Cause Partnership encouraged the formation of dioceses.
“Consistent with all Anglican practice, congregations are a part of an Anglican province because they are part of a diocese, which in turn, is part of a group of dioceses banded together as a national (or international) church,” Bishop Duncan wrote. “This principle is critical to understanding the provisional constitution of the [ACNA], and to the steps we all need to take as we move toward our first provincial assembly.”
Bishop Duncan is Archbishop-designate of the ACNA and Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh that is now under the auspices of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone. The Rev. J. Philip Ashey, chief operating officer and chaplain for the American Anglican Council, told The Living Church that Pittsburgh is one of the five applications for recognition as an ACNA diocese that have already been received. The deadline for applications is April 15.
Earlier this month, the Rt. Rev. John H. Chapman, Bishop of Ottawa in the Anglican Church of Canada, said he would authorize a congregation under his oversight to begin performing same-sex blessings in part because “while our church struggles to honor the call for gracious restraint in blessing same-sex unions, those who are proponents of cross-border interventions have and continue to show no restraint.”
That view was echoed this week during the House of Bishops’ spring retreat by Bishop Dan Edwards of Nevada. Bishop Edwards posted a blog entry noting that a number of bishops are considering the repeal of Resolution B033 because of what they perceive as a lack of reciprocal restraint by the ACNA.
Fr. Ashey countered that it is unrealistic to expect the ACNA to postpone its efforts to organize while same-sex blessings continue to occur unofficially in a number of dioceses in both the U.S. and Canadian churches.
“[Ottawa and Nevada] have already made their decisions and are now looking for an excuse to implement them,” he said. “We have responded to the invitation from the GAFCON primates to form an orthodox Anglican province in the Americas.”
The ACNA has been welcomed “in abiding and full communion” by the standing committee of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. The March 20 announcement also noted that the standing committee recommended that the Church of Nigeria send a delegation to the provincial assembly in Bedford “to demonstrate our enduring partnership in the gospel.”
Steve Waring
Sunday, March 22, 2009
News : CENTRAL NEW YORK: Episcopalians Discuss Coordination Efforts
Posted by David Virtue at VirtueOnline on 2009/3/21:
CENTRAL NEW YORK: Churches look for better ways to help Episcopalians to discuss coordinating efforts in community
By Ray Finger, Staff Writer
http://www.stargazette.com/article/20090321/NEWS01/903210323
March 21, 2009
Local Episcopalians are coming together in Elmira on Sunday for an open discussion to strengthen the Episcopal community so it can be more effective in the 21st century.
Members of the seven churches that make up the Chemung District of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York are invited to gather from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday in the auditorium of Steele Memorial Library.
The discussion will be run by Andrea Ogunwumi, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Program Inc. Talks will focus on the strengths, challenges, next steps and goals for each church in the district, said the Rev. William Lutz, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Elmira.
"It's a conversation that needs to happen, and it needs to be an open and honest conversation," he said. "We want to keep the discussion open and continuing."
In addition to Trinity, the district is made up by Emmanuel in Elmira, Grace in Elmira, St. John's in Elmira Heights, St. Matthew's in Horseheads, Christ Church in Wellsburg and Grace Church in Waverly.
It is hoped that the gathering will help the churches catch sight of the bigger picture and encourage more coordination of efforts and cooperation among them, said the Rev. Jeff Hoffman, rector of St. Matthew's in Horseheads.
"Not that we're looking to incorporate them all into one great big church, but how can we work together to do the smartest ministry to help the most people," he said.
"A lot of denominations are talking this way," Lutz said. "This is not just the Episcopal Church." Bishop Gladstone "Skip" Adams hopes the session will help him understand the concerns of the local area, said Hoffman, who is also dean of the district and reports to the bishop.
"He was brought into the conversation very early, and he asked us to proceed with it basically because we're more aware of what's going on in this area than they are up in Syracuse," Hoffman said.
All district parishioners and clergy are asked to participate in this process to address individual and collective needs so the Episcopal community will continue to be a strong presence in the Chemung Valley, organizers said.
END
A reader at VirtueOnline comments:
Re: CENTRAL NEW YORK: Episcopalians Discuss Coordination ...
Aaah ha ha ha ha! Of course they're not discussing becoming "one great big church" oh no no! You know why? Even if they all did combine, they still wouldn't equal one great big church, just one rather medium-sized one. Take a look at their charts ( http://12.0.101.92/Charts.aspx ) Here are the numbers: (2007) Emmanuel - ASA 16, Grace, Elmira - ASA 98, St. John - ASA 18, St Matthew - ASA 98, Christ - ASA 13 and Grace, Waverly - ASA 28 people.
Another commenter adds: Trinity in Elmira claims 350 Members with ASA of 40.(??)
CENTRAL NEW YORK: Churches look for better ways to help Episcopalians to discuss coordinating efforts in community
By Ray Finger, Staff Writer
http://www.stargazette.com/article/20090321/NEWS01/903210323
March 21, 2009
Local Episcopalians are coming together in Elmira on Sunday for an open discussion to strengthen the Episcopal community so it can be more effective in the 21st century.
Members of the seven churches that make up the Chemung District of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York are invited to gather from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday in the auditorium of Steele Memorial Library.
The discussion will be run by Andrea Ogunwumi, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Program Inc. Talks will focus on the strengths, challenges, next steps and goals for each church in the district, said the Rev. William Lutz, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Elmira.
"It's a conversation that needs to happen, and it needs to be an open and honest conversation," he said. "We want to keep the discussion open and continuing."
In addition to Trinity, the district is made up by Emmanuel in Elmira, Grace in Elmira, St. John's in Elmira Heights, St. Matthew's in Horseheads, Christ Church in Wellsburg and Grace Church in Waverly.
It is hoped that the gathering will help the churches catch sight of the bigger picture and encourage more coordination of efforts and cooperation among them, said the Rev. Jeff Hoffman, rector of St. Matthew's in Horseheads.
"Not that we're looking to incorporate them all into one great big church, but how can we work together to do the smartest ministry to help the most people," he said.
"A lot of denominations are talking this way," Lutz said. "This is not just the Episcopal Church." Bishop Gladstone "Skip" Adams hopes the session will help him understand the concerns of the local area, said Hoffman, who is also dean of the district and reports to the bishop.
"He was brought into the conversation very early, and he asked us to proceed with it basically because we're more aware of what's going on in this area than they are up in Syracuse," Hoffman said.
All district parishioners and clergy are asked to participate in this process to address individual and collective needs so the Episcopal community will continue to be a strong presence in the Chemung Valley, organizers said.
END
A reader at VirtueOnline comments:
Re: CENTRAL NEW YORK: Episcopalians Discuss Coordination ...
Aaah ha ha ha ha! Of course they're not discussing becoming "one great big church" oh no no! You know why? Even if they all did combine, they still wouldn't equal one great big church, just one rather medium-sized one. Take a look at their charts ( http://12.0.101.92/Charts.aspx ) Here are the numbers: (2007) Emmanuel - ASA 16, Grace, Elmira - ASA 98, St. John - ASA 18, St Matthew - ASA 98, Christ - ASA 13 and Grace, Waverly - ASA 28 people.
Another commenter adds: Trinity in Elmira claims 350 Members with ASA of 40.(??)
ABUJA: Anglican Church in North America Recognized by Nigerian Anglican Province
News Release
March 20, 2009
The Standing Committee of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) has resolved unanimously to be "in abiding and full communion" with the emerging Anglican Church in North America. The Church of Nigeria, which counts more than a quarter of the world's Anglican Christians as members, is the first Anglican province to formally accept the Anglican Church in North America as its North American partner within the Anglican Communion.
In making their decision, the leaders of the Church of Nigeria's more than 140 dioceses also recommended that their province send a delegation to the Anglican Church in North America's inaugural Provincial Assembly, to be held June 22-25 in Bedford, TX, "to demonstrate our enduring partnership in the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."
Bishop Robert Duncan, archbishop-designate for the Anglican Church in North America, thanked the Church of Nigeria for their decision. "In this one action, leaders representing every diocese in the Church of Nigeria, which in turn count as members more than a quarter of the world's Anglicans, have declared themselves to be full partners of the Anglican Church in North America. They have stated clearly that we stand together on the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible, the historic creeds and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as our only Savior and Lord. We look forward to welcoming our Nigerian brothers and sisters to observe our inaugural assembly in Bedford this June."
"Both in Nigeria and in North America," added Bishop Duncan, "We understand our mission very similarly, that is, to reach our societies with the transforming love of Jesus Christ."
----The Anglican Church in North America unites some 700 Anglican parishes in 12 Anglican jurisdictions in North America into a single church. Jurisdictions coming together in the Anglican Church in North America are the Anglican Coalition in Canada, the dioceses of Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Quincy and San Joaquin (of the Anglican Communion Network), the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Anglican Network in Canada, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, the Reformed Episcopal Church, and the missionary initiatives of Kenya, Uganda, and South America's Southern Cone. Additionally, the American Anglican Council and Forward in Faith North America are founding organizations.
March 20, 2009
The Standing Committee of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) has resolved unanimously to be "in abiding and full communion" with the emerging Anglican Church in North America. The Church of Nigeria, which counts more than a quarter of the world's Anglican Christians as members, is the first Anglican province to formally accept the Anglican Church in North America as its North American partner within the Anglican Communion.
In making their decision, the leaders of the Church of Nigeria's more than 140 dioceses also recommended that their province send a delegation to the Anglican Church in North America's inaugural Provincial Assembly, to be held June 22-25 in Bedford, TX, "to demonstrate our enduring partnership in the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."
Bishop Robert Duncan, archbishop-designate for the Anglican Church in North America, thanked the Church of Nigeria for their decision. "In this one action, leaders representing every diocese in the Church of Nigeria, which in turn count as members more than a quarter of the world's Anglicans, have declared themselves to be full partners of the Anglican Church in North America. They have stated clearly that we stand together on the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible, the historic creeds and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as our only Savior and Lord. We look forward to welcoming our Nigerian brothers and sisters to observe our inaugural assembly in Bedford this June."
"Both in Nigeria and in North America," added Bishop Duncan, "We understand our mission very similarly, that is, to reach our societies with the transforming love of Jesus Christ."
----The Anglican Church in North America unites some 700 Anglican parishes in 12 Anglican jurisdictions in North America into a single church. Jurisdictions coming together in the Anglican Church in North America are the Anglican Coalition in Canada, the dioceses of Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Quincy and San Joaquin (of the Anglican Communion Network), the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Anglican Network in Canada, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, the Reformed Episcopal Church, and the missionary initiatives of Kenya, Uganda, and South America's Southern Cone. Additionally, the American Anglican Council and Forward in Faith North America are founding organizations.
House of Bishops Pastoral Letter Dodges Ecclesiastical Bullets
News Analysis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/21/2009
126 active and retired members of the House of Bishops, meeting recently at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina, managed to dodge serious communion breaking issues, focusing instead on the worsening financial crisis by condemning "unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, rampant consumerism amplifying domestic and global economic injustice," that has put at risk the Millennium Development Goals agenda to cut in half world poverty by 2015.
In sermonic tomes, the bishops bewailed their manifold sins arguing that the crisis in the world is both economic and environmental, "causing us as a people to ignore the Gospel imperative of self-sacrifice and generosity, as we scramble for self-preservation in a culture of scarcity."
"In this season of Lent, God calls us to repentance. We have too often been preoccupied as a Church with internal affairs and a narrow focus that has absorbed both our energy and interest and that of our Communion - to the exclusion of concern for the crisis of suffering both at home and abroad. We have often failed to speak a compelling word of commitment to economic justice. We have often failed to speak truth to power, to name the greed and consumerism that has pervaded our culture, and we have too often allowed the culture to define us instead of being formed by Gospel values."
However, when pressed about besetting issues plaguing TEC, the bishops dodged and weaved and were decidedly less forthcoming.
Some 95% of all dioceses are in decline. Only one, South Carolina, is growing. Yet, these same bishops are drawing six figure salaries. Blaming "corporate greed" in the secular world is the height of hypocrisy. They are receiving growing salaries while whole parishes are fleeing their grip. Tens of thousands of Episcopalians are walking away from liberal parishes while lawyers are racking up millions of dollars in fees suing over property issues.
None of these bishops are offering to cut their own salaries. In "a culture of scarcity", they are displaying an unparalleled fiscal arrogance. At least three bishops draw salaries of over $220,000 annually and their dioceses are in decline. Where are the howls of outrage by unemployed Episcopalians who support liberal/revisionist bishops who have no gospel to proclaim?
The average diocesan bishops' salary approaches $150,000. Within five years, a number of dioceses will be forced to "juncture" with another diocese in order to survive. "We recognize in this crisis an invitation into a deeper simplicity, a tightening of the belt, an expanded Lenten fast, and a broader generosity," the bishops wrote. Really. If each of these bishops rolled back their salaries by just 10% to compensate for their failure to make their dioceses grow, they would "belt tighten" to the tune of $1.9 million, enough to rescue the MDG program of TEC.
Bishop Tom Shaw of Massachusetts, during a post-meeting telephone briefing with members of the media, said the meeting "showed a church that has moved beyond strife and (that is) getting ready for the next phase of our mission in the world and the country." What a fiction is this.
The unspoken elephant at Kanuga is ACNA - the newly formed orthodox Anglican province that is growing by leaps and bounds even as TEC goes into decline. Mrs. Jefferts Schori says the fleers represent only a small percentage of disgruntled Episcopalians. Not true. That figure is closer to 10% and rising. ACNA claims 700 parishes, fully 10% of what 7,000 TEC owns.
During March alone, two new Anglican dioceses were formed, one in Florida the other in the Pacific Northwest. Furthermore, Bishop Shaw's notion of mission has nothing to do with The Great Commission of evangelism, discipleship and saving souls. It is the same old plankton of MDG's whose million dollar budget got axed by General Convention over the financial meltdown.
As one blogger noted, The Episcopal Church has spent six million dollars on litigation against parish churches and departing clergy. This does not begin to tell the ecclesiastical carnage that has occurred since Mrs. Jefferts Schori assumed office in 2006. During her brief two-and-a-half-year occupancy at 815 Second Avenue, there have been more bishops and clergy deposed, or involuntarily removed from the ranks of the Church, than at any other time in its four-hundred-year history.
"The Presiding Bishop has brought before the House of Bishops resolutions to depose two active bishops, and one retired bishop (who was the oldest living bishop in the Church). She has declared that a further six bishops would be deprived of all ministry in the Church after they informed her that they were transferring to other churches in the Anglican Communion, and intended to retain their episcopal status. And following her leadership, the bishops of another two dozen dioceses have deposed or removed some ninety members of the clergy during the same period," he wrote.
The most hypocritical violation of the much bally-hoed Doctrine of Inclusion has been the snubbing of former Southern Virginia Bishop David C. Bane who got railroaded into stepping down because a minority of liberal priests wanted him gone so they could pursue THEIR understanding of inclusion.
Jefferts Schori said she expressed "great sadness" when asked about the March 11 letter by Bishop Bane. "I have not seen the letter yet," she said."We discussed it in a pastoral way." That's choice. It has been all over the Internet, including VOL's website where it was posted five days ago! She can't or won't comment because she has nothing to say in the face of this monstrous abandonment of a faithful bishop.
Bishop Ed Little, the moderately orthodox Bishop of Northern Indiana, said the bishops showed respectfulness in listening to one another. "We listened profoundly to one another and to God," he said.
Well, the Primates listened to each other in Egypt recently and concluded that the Anglican Communion was irretrievably broken and will never be restored because two understandings of the faith, and two religions now exist and that each side is now fully aware that there never will be communion again. What was so different at Kanuga? Was there clarity at last that two understandings of Anglicanism cannot walk or talk together unless they agree? Apparently not.
In the bishops' pastoral letter, they called the church to repentance for failure to address the sorry state of national and international economic and environmental crises. What about the sins of revisionist bishops who are tirelessly and endlessly suing parishes for their properties and deposing godly clergy who have the power and gospel to make churches grow, which they don't?
In a response to the Primates communiqué issued in Egypt recently, Nevada Bishop Dan Edwards described the dilemma of exercising "gracious restraint" in same-sex blessings while cross-jurisdiction interventions continue, including in his own state of Nevada. "There will probably be some move to repeal the 'restraint' resolution to comply with the moratoria at General Convention this summer," he wrote.
"What to do?" Jefferts Schori and other bishops at the media briefing said the issue was not discussed at any plenary session. "We had a brief conversation, about one-half hour total, about communion-wide issues that will be in the mix at General Convention," she said.
So, what this means is that a quid pro quo arrangement will be announced. If primates stop cross border "violations", the TEC HOB might, just might (but there is no guarantee), keep the moratorium on consecrating more homogenital bishops and nix same-sex blessings. This, too, is a fiction. There will be a full scale battle to dump B033 at GC2009. It will be Louie Crew's raison d'etre for living and dying. He wants to go out knowing that the entire sodomite agenda - everything from ordinations, consecrations and marriage rites are in place before he faces his maker. When he dies, he will be remembered as the House of Deputies Great Sexual Liberator.
Bishop-elect Kevin Thew Forrester of Northern Michigan, whose February 21 election sparked controversy after published reports that he had received a Buddhist lay ordination, got a pass. Bishop Little said there were some wide-ranging questions "but no pressure in the discussion" about his election. "I am not an ordained Buddhist priest," opined Forrester, but he is a recognized "lay ordained" Buddhist who sees no contradiction between the Dharma and the Creed. He is expected to be consecrated October 17 in Marquette, Michigan.
An outcry began with an Arkansas priest making it his mission to derail the wannabe Northern Michigan bishop. Recently, the Diocese of South Carolina jumped in and declared that their diocesan bishop and deputies would not give their consent to his election. The odds are that he will obtain consents and Jefferts Schori, who has already announced she will attend his consecration, will show up in full regalia.
With four Episcopal dioceses no longer in TEC, two new Anglican dioceses aborning and more Episcopalians running helter skelter out the door, taking their money with them and some 30 parishes across the country embroiled in legal fights over property, the HOB carries on as though all the folks to blame are in Washington DC and Wall Street.
The sad truth is the 126 bishops spent tens of thousands of dollars assembling in North Carolina looking for the beam in someone else's eye without seeing the mote in their own.
END
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/21/2009
126 active and retired members of the House of Bishops, meeting recently at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina, managed to dodge serious communion breaking issues, focusing instead on the worsening financial crisis by condemning "unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, rampant consumerism amplifying domestic and global economic injustice," that has put at risk the Millennium Development Goals agenda to cut in half world poverty by 2015.
In sermonic tomes, the bishops bewailed their manifold sins arguing that the crisis in the world is both economic and environmental, "causing us as a people to ignore the Gospel imperative of self-sacrifice and generosity, as we scramble for self-preservation in a culture of scarcity."
"In this season of Lent, God calls us to repentance. We have too often been preoccupied as a Church with internal affairs and a narrow focus that has absorbed both our energy and interest and that of our Communion - to the exclusion of concern for the crisis of suffering both at home and abroad. We have often failed to speak a compelling word of commitment to economic justice. We have often failed to speak truth to power, to name the greed and consumerism that has pervaded our culture, and we have too often allowed the culture to define us instead of being formed by Gospel values."
However, when pressed about besetting issues plaguing TEC, the bishops dodged and weaved and were decidedly less forthcoming.
Some 95% of all dioceses are in decline. Only one, South Carolina, is growing. Yet, these same bishops are drawing six figure salaries. Blaming "corporate greed" in the secular world is the height of hypocrisy. They are receiving growing salaries while whole parishes are fleeing their grip. Tens of thousands of Episcopalians are walking away from liberal parishes while lawyers are racking up millions of dollars in fees suing over property issues.
None of these bishops are offering to cut their own salaries. In "a culture of scarcity", they are displaying an unparalleled fiscal arrogance. At least three bishops draw salaries of over $220,000 annually and their dioceses are in decline. Where are the howls of outrage by unemployed Episcopalians who support liberal/revisionist bishops who have no gospel to proclaim?
The average diocesan bishops' salary approaches $150,000. Within five years, a number of dioceses will be forced to "juncture" with another diocese in order to survive. "We recognize in this crisis an invitation into a deeper simplicity, a tightening of the belt, an expanded Lenten fast, and a broader generosity," the bishops wrote. Really. If each of these bishops rolled back their salaries by just 10% to compensate for their failure to make their dioceses grow, they would "belt tighten" to the tune of $1.9 million, enough to rescue the MDG program of TEC.
Bishop Tom Shaw of Massachusetts, during a post-meeting telephone briefing with members of the media, said the meeting "showed a church that has moved beyond strife and (that is) getting ready for the next phase of our mission in the world and the country." What a fiction is this.
The unspoken elephant at Kanuga is ACNA - the newly formed orthodox Anglican province that is growing by leaps and bounds even as TEC goes into decline. Mrs. Jefferts Schori says the fleers represent only a small percentage of disgruntled Episcopalians. Not true. That figure is closer to 10% and rising. ACNA claims 700 parishes, fully 10% of what 7,000 TEC owns.
During March alone, two new Anglican dioceses were formed, one in Florida the other in the Pacific Northwest. Furthermore, Bishop Shaw's notion of mission has nothing to do with The Great Commission of evangelism, discipleship and saving souls. It is the same old plankton of MDG's whose million dollar budget got axed by General Convention over the financial meltdown.
As one blogger noted, The Episcopal Church has spent six million dollars on litigation against parish churches and departing clergy. This does not begin to tell the ecclesiastical carnage that has occurred since Mrs. Jefferts Schori assumed office in 2006. During her brief two-and-a-half-year occupancy at 815 Second Avenue, there have been more bishops and clergy deposed, or involuntarily removed from the ranks of the Church, than at any other time in its four-hundred-year history.
"The Presiding Bishop has brought before the House of Bishops resolutions to depose two active bishops, and one retired bishop (who was the oldest living bishop in the Church). She has declared that a further six bishops would be deprived of all ministry in the Church after they informed her that they were transferring to other churches in the Anglican Communion, and intended to retain their episcopal status. And following her leadership, the bishops of another two dozen dioceses have deposed or removed some ninety members of the clergy during the same period," he wrote.
The most hypocritical violation of the much bally-hoed Doctrine of Inclusion has been the snubbing of former Southern Virginia Bishop David C. Bane who got railroaded into stepping down because a minority of liberal priests wanted him gone so they could pursue THEIR understanding of inclusion.
Jefferts Schori said she expressed "great sadness" when asked about the March 11 letter by Bishop Bane. "I have not seen the letter yet," she said."We discussed it in a pastoral way." That's choice. It has been all over the Internet, including VOL's website where it was posted five days ago! She can't or won't comment because she has nothing to say in the face of this monstrous abandonment of a faithful bishop.
Bishop Ed Little, the moderately orthodox Bishop of Northern Indiana, said the bishops showed respectfulness in listening to one another. "We listened profoundly to one another and to God," he said.
Well, the Primates listened to each other in Egypt recently and concluded that the Anglican Communion was irretrievably broken and will never be restored because two understandings of the faith, and two religions now exist and that each side is now fully aware that there never will be communion again. What was so different at Kanuga? Was there clarity at last that two understandings of Anglicanism cannot walk or talk together unless they agree? Apparently not.
In the bishops' pastoral letter, they called the church to repentance for failure to address the sorry state of national and international economic and environmental crises. What about the sins of revisionist bishops who are tirelessly and endlessly suing parishes for their properties and deposing godly clergy who have the power and gospel to make churches grow, which they don't?
In a response to the Primates communiqué issued in Egypt recently, Nevada Bishop Dan Edwards described the dilemma of exercising "gracious restraint" in same-sex blessings while cross-jurisdiction interventions continue, including in his own state of Nevada. "There will probably be some move to repeal the 'restraint' resolution to comply with the moratoria at General Convention this summer," he wrote.
"What to do?" Jefferts Schori and other bishops at the media briefing said the issue was not discussed at any plenary session. "We had a brief conversation, about one-half hour total, about communion-wide issues that will be in the mix at General Convention," she said.
So, what this means is that a quid pro quo arrangement will be announced. If primates stop cross border "violations", the TEC HOB might, just might (but there is no guarantee), keep the moratorium on consecrating more homogenital bishops and nix same-sex blessings. This, too, is a fiction. There will be a full scale battle to dump B033 at GC2009. It will be Louie Crew's raison d'etre for living and dying. He wants to go out knowing that the entire sodomite agenda - everything from ordinations, consecrations and marriage rites are in place before he faces his maker. When he dies, he will be remembered as the House of Deputies Great Sexual Liberator.
Bishop-elect Kevin Thew Forrester of Northern Michigan, whose February 21 election sparked controversy after published reports that he had received a Buddhist lay ordination, got a pass. Bishop Little said there were some wide-ranging questions "but no pressure in the discussion" about his election. "I am not an ordained Buddhist priest," opined Forrester, but he is a recognized "lay ordained" Buddhist who sees no contradiction between the Dharma and the Creed. He is expected to be consecrated October 17 in Marquette, Michigan.
An outcry began with an Arkansas priest making it his mission to derail the wannabe Northern Michigan bishop. Recently, the Diocese of South Carolina jumped in and declared that their diocesan bishop and deputies would not give their consent to his election. The odds are that he will obtain consents and Jefferts Schori, who has already announced she will attend his consecration, will show up in full regalia.
With four Episcopal dioceses no longer in TEC, two new Anglican dioceses aborning and more Episcopalians running helter skelter out the door, taking their money with them and some 30 parishes across the country embroiled in legal fights over property, the HOB carries on as though all the folks to blame are in Washington DC and Wall Street.
The sad truth is the 126 bishops spent tens of thousands of dollars assembling in North Carolina looking for the beam in someone else's eye without seeing the mote in their own.
END
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