First on the Sunday programme:
Meeting of the Anglican Primates
The meeting of the 38 provincial Primates of the Anglican Communion begins in Newry on Monday. It is a showdown between the majority, who are opposed to the ordination of actively gay bishops and clergy, and ECUSA, the Episcopal Church of the United States, and its supporters in Canada, who actively support and carry out such ordinations. Such is the impasse that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams asked the Communion’s chief fixer, Archbishop Robin Eames, to chair a commission to try and resolve the issue, which threatens to tear the Communion apart. It is that commission’s so called Windsor Report that is being discussed in Newry.
Listen (7m 04s)with Real Audio to interviews with Frank Griswold and Gregory Venables.
Lots of other items in today’s issue of Sunday are also of interest to Anglicans.
A piece from the Management pages of the Business section of the Observer by Simon Caulkin:
When the devil is in the details
How would you appraise a vicar’s performance? By the number, length and quality of sermons? Attendance at church? Out of wedlock births? Ratio of marriages to divorce? Doctrinal purity?
This intriguing question was raised by proposals put forward last week by the Church of England’s General Synod to make incompetent vicars easier to sack, and to subject them to the kind of performance measures that apply to other workers.
Don’t laugh: even our box may be less satirical than you think. In one study, a Norwegian hospital chaplain had performance measures that counted not only bedside visits, but also the number of last rites he performed. In fact, the church’s measurement problem illustrates with blinding clarity the tensions inherent in all performance management.
Read it all. But don’t take it too literally. The sidebar or “box” mentioned above is at the foot of the webpage. More about the real CofE proposals for ministerial review in a while.
The Sunday Times has a report by Christopher Morgan that says: Churchgoers ordered to pray for Camilla.
This refers to the wording of the BCP prayer for the Royal Family, which can be (and periodically is) altered by Royal Warrant (not by Parliament or the General Synod) to reflect births, marriages and deaths. According to Morgan the new wording will be:
“Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee to bless Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Duchess of Cornwall.”